Reply to When will we go back to nuclear power for clean energy?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It seems power is getting more expensive. Wind farms do so much damage to the bird populations, solar does to plus it takes up so much land. The waste from solar is going to be a huge problem when the panels reach their end of life.

I hope we will get out of collective heads about how clean nuclear truly is.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/mI6IzPCmIW8[/youtube]

This Ted talk really addresses the topic and I agree whole heartedly.[/quote]

Here is a free e-book written by David MacKay, a British physicist (recently deceased), who assesses whether solar, wind and tidal energy can supply the UK's and Europe's energy needs:

[url] https://www.withouthotair.com/ [/url]

One of his key conclusions is as follows:

[quote]Let’s be realistic. Just like Britain, Europe can’t live on its own renewables. So if the aim is to get off fossil fuels, Europe needs nuclear power, or solar power in other people’s deserts (as discussed on p179), or both.[/quote]

Solar and wind are unlikely to be sufficient because massive areas of land would be required to generate our high per capita energy needs  -- so much land is needed, in fact, that it would compete with the areas we need for farming and for our homes. This leads him to nuclear power which, while not a renewable resource, has the potential to last for a much longer period than fossil fuels.

With respect to the safety of nuclear power, he presents convincing evidence that nuclear power had led to far fewer deaths per kilowatt hour of energy produced than have fossil fuels. He also deals with the issue of nuclear waste, and points out that if we were to satisfy all of our energy needs using nuclear power, the amount of waste generated, per capita, across the lifetime of a human, could fit inside of a milk bottle, and that the aggregate annual amount of waste for an entire country could fit into a relatively small area. Lastly, he points out that while we need to store this waste for a long time, the radioactivity associated with the waste rapidly declines during its first few decades of storage.

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