[colinshark]

The problem of radioactive waste...

Let's put it this way:

In exchange for clean, constant, domestically sourced, almost unlimited energy for an entire year, each person must dispose of or store their waste, which is the size of...

A pill of aspirin.

You could just put it in a little lead jar. That's all the waste. The alternative is fossil fuel waste, which would be...

10 tons of CO2 (volume = 5 American houses) which floats into the atmosphere, plus 2 tons of coal ash.

Of course, everyone can just pool their resources and put all the radioactive waste together. I don't consider it to be a very serious or unsolvable problem.

[juandopazo]

> The alternative is fossil fuel waste

You make it sounds as if there were no other alternative.

[mpyne]

For baseload power? There effectively isn't. Renewable energy generation requires a substantial investment in energy storage systems if you don't have thermal power generation (such as nuclear or fossil-fueled plants), as having rolling blackouts just because the wind unexpectedly isn't blowing as hard is not good for business.

[Pxtl]

The thing is that nuclear isn't really good at this. Nuclear plants don't have much in the way of a throttle - they're just "on" or "complete shut-down and it will take substantial measures to start it up again". Fossil fuels or some sort of capacitive system (even just using the peak surpluses to pump water into a reservoir above a turbine) would do that task better.

The panicky nay-sayers of nuclear power are too obsessed with the risks of radiation, but there are a lot of other legitimate reasons that it might not have a place in our future. Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.

[TeMPOraL]

> Nuclear plants don't have much in the way of a throttle - they're just "on" or "complete shut-down and it will take substantial measures to start it up again".

Well, this is exactly what we need. Power demand is fluctuating, but mostly averages out to something constant. It's easier to throw in a little buffering to compensate demand fluctuations than to wake up with half the power in the grid because it suddenly got cloudy. You'd have to store very large amounts of power, which is this "substantial investment in energy storage systems" GP was writing about.

> Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.

Here you are wrong.

http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_162.shtml

[mpyne]

> The thing is that nuclear isn't really good at this. Nuclear plants don't have much in the way of a throttle - they're just "on" or "complete shut-down and it will take substantial measures to start it up again".

Nuclear can certainly be designed to ramp power output up or down in response to demand. After all there are many applications of nuclear technology in fields that require rapid and immediate changes in power output.

Nuclear power generation plants are not typically designed to do this, but it's not because nuclear can't, it's because nuclear doesn't have to. The plants are built by the utility companies to act as baseload power generation and can normally afford to take hours to change power output if they wish. But if utility plants wanted a nuke plant that would change power output quicker, that could be arranged as well.

[sentenza]

It's likely that baseload and renewables will meet half way. Supposedly, adding a small amount of battery capacity to wind turbines dramatically increases their power output predictability.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514331/wind-turbines-ba...

[TeMPOraL]

Not to mention the fact that the power grid would fry under such variable power supply conditions.