What is the smartest choice: Nuclear or Renewable Energy?

These two TED talks will shed some light onto the nuances of the realities we face:

1. Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy?
2. Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

The French have been successfully recycling much of Europe’s nuclear waste for some time. If they can do it, I don’t see why we cannot. The biggest problem here is getting the anti nuke people to let the spent fuel rods to be shipped.

None of these choices in energy will ever matter if people don’t change their mindset of usage of electrical power. We are adding more and more rechargeable this and that gadgets with remote control and standby power demands every year. We will never be able to keep up with these increasing demands while attempting to integrate alternative energy sources. Nuclear will be the only option as it stands again unless people and businesses start cutting back on power consumption…PERIOD!

I am a life-long environmentalist, I bike and take the train more than I drive. I have chosen small cars all my life to reduce energy consumption and pollution, I was recycling before other people even heard of it.

But about ten years ago it became evident to me that nuclear is the least bad of our options for large-scale energy production.

Nuclear can produce A LOT more energy than wind & solar. Only fossil fuels and nuclear can provide the steady flow in the quantities we use.

Nuclear waste is much easier to deal with than global warming.

@timtrueman Those are super links. I truly wish everyone would take the time to watch those video clips. Bill Gates’ talk was incredibly interesting.

As Gates pointed out, we need to get to Zero CO2 emission by 2050. That is going to be an enormous challenge, since the world population is growing, and the developing world is moving toward a lifestyle more and more like that in the USA. This implies is that the only way to get to zero emission is to find an energy source that will deliver all the Earth’s needs by 2050 and produce Zero CO2 in doing so.

Nuclear energy will almost certainly have to be part of that equation. We have sustainable technology including spent-fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors right now.

Gates is working on the development of traveling Wave Reactor Technology which will actually use all the energy in Uranium 238 and can even be used to burn up the existing spent-fuel wastes littering our lands today.

We need a miraculous leap ahead. The total footprint for wind and solar make them impractical large-scale solutions. On top of that, neither sunlight nor wind are continuously “on”. To provide continuous energy from a discontinuous source, you need battery storage. All the batteries in the world today (and all the pollution that producing them and disposing of failed ones creates) will only store a few hours worth of the energy the USA uses each year. If we went completely to renewable, we would need more like 6 months worth of storage, not 6 hours. That means we either turn half the Earth into a giant battery using today’s technology or invent an all new electrical storage mechanism that is tens of thousands of times more efficient than anything currently known.

We should certainly build win farms and solar where it makes sense, but it seems foolish to suggest it is the solution to zero emissions in 2050.