| > I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear from 200km. Impressive, but those grids aren't cheap, and their maintenance is only getting more expensive with modern safety standards and labour costs. > Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils. Anything but coal is progress, sure. But hydro is still damaging enough that it's well worth replacing. > Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly. The fuel density of fissiles is so high that that's not really an issue though - the amount of fuel mining needed is tiny. > And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation. Solar-thermal has potential, but it still has some time/storage issues (yes it doesn't go to zero immediately at dusk, but it's not entirely aligned with demand either, and e.g. seasons are a big issue further from the equator) and location issues. Ultimately while conventional renewables will be part of the mix - maybe a big part - it's hard to imagine we won't have cases where we need reliable, consistent power in a specific arbitrary location, and nuclear is really the only viable clean power source that can offer that. Maybe storage tech will improve to the point where that's no longer the case, but we can't rely on that - at least, not the extent of closing off nuclear research. The cost of the likes of ITER is a drop in the bucket compared to the world's total energy expenditure. |