Are you optimistic about Nuclear energy?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html
This article points to the great things about nuclear and talk about how clean it is. They had this to say about waste.
" . . . For one thing, in coming decades we might devise better disposal methods, such as corrosion-proof containers that can withstand millennia of heat and moisture." Cool!
"For another, used nuclear fuel can be recycled as a source for the production of more energy." Even Cooler!
"Either way, it's clear that the whole waste disposal problem has been misconstrued. . . " Yeah! Wait no . . .
This is where they loose me . . . they want to bet that one day someone might build super containers, or methods to recycle radioactive waste. Until one of the two methods described above is actually invented we are left with large amounts of dangerous material that will stay dangerous for a very long time.
BUT
It is cleaner then some methods of generating power, and it does generate LOTS of power quickly.
Are the benefits enough to outway the risks in your opinion?
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M$4 Answers
I've worked in the nuclear industry, I know what's done to safeguard it, and compared to the economic damage possible from climate change, the risks are trivial.
Even if you had a few more Chernobyls and Three Mile Islands, the damage they'd do would be a fraction of a percent compared to the damage of enough CO2 from fossil fuel combustion getting into the atmosphere to push the greenhouse effect high enough to break the 2-degrees celcius barrier required for the warming to break away into a viscious feedback cycle of heating, caused by melted polar caps changing the reflective colour of snow-and-ice to the absorbtive colour of blue water, leading to the tundras melting into the swamps they are, enabling them to bubble off the millions of tonnes of swamp gas, aka methane (14 times more retentive of infra-red than CO2) currently trapped there and adding itself to the mix of atmospheric greenhouse gasses, and with that... the world enters a new ecological era.
Currently, because of habitat devastation by humans, extinction rates are being compared to those at the end of the Cenozoic era, but if global warming breaks into a positive feedback cycle, they're going to be comparing it to the Permian Extinction.
But power generation from nuclear fission doesn't produce CO2 as a byproduct, nor does it release CO2 into the atmosphere.
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M$As fas as waste disposal goes, if there was a financial gain involved, someone will find a the answer. That is the benefit of our free market system.
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M$Yes, nuclear energy is a great short-term source of energy (for all the reasons the op and others list), but, ultimately, it is still a non-renewable finite resource that, even though you can reuse some "spent" fuel, is still... non-renewable and finite! We will eventually run out, so it's not a permanent, long-term solution. I think it is also fair to add in the cost (in dollars, environmental damage and human life) of mining uranium.
On the other hand, I think it's also fair to add in the cost (in dollars, environmental damage and human life) of mining coal, so I guess I'd still say "yes" to interim use of nuclear energy over fossil fuels and a definitely "yes" to continued use of nuclear energy as one piece of the larger energy policy equation, which, of course, also includes thing like conservation and efficiency. Long-term, it's not workable, but as a part of the larger picture, nuclear energy is definitely important.
Too bad half of the "energy policy" debate in the USA involves one side idiotically chanting "No nuclear energy!" and the other side even more idiotically chanting "Dig, baby, dig!" or we might have something here!
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M$
Very true. I think if you do real risk analysis on it, you also find that the real damage/death that coal currently causes (including people simply dying earlier from breathing the pollution) is far greater than even worst-case scenario nuclear. Not to say that fear of nuclear energy is entirely irrational and the Chernobyl incident is probably the scariest industrial accident ever to occur on the planet. It gives me creeps just thinking about the footage we saw with the helicopter pilots running in load after load of concrete in to the core, knowing for certain they were going to die from radiation in the most gruesome and painful way possible in a few days. I guess the best we can say is that nuclear isn't any worse than coal as far as death and danger is concerned, which isn't really saying much I suppose!
"nuclear battery" concepts are very interesting. Check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
as an example.
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M$