Or we could just replace them with nuclear power, and keep our standard of living, while massively reducing pollution, and saving the huge numbers of lives currently lost in the fossil fuel industries.
The trouble with nuclear is that the fuel and waste products are so damn dangerous.
Except, they're not. Nobody has ever been hurt by waste from a commercial nuclear reactor - in 17,000 reactor years of operation. That doesn't sound dangerous to me.
If we replaced every coal power station in the world with a nuclear power station, we could have a Chernobyl disaster every week, and still have saved lives by making the change. But in fact, we have had exactly one incident with fatalities in over sixty years (Chernobyl). At Fukushima, an outdated and inherently less safe reactor design was hit by the largest tsunami ever recorded - and the total casualties from radiation exposure were two minor injuries, and zero deaths. Fukushima and Three Mile Island are both household names despite having killed nobody. What counts as a 'disaster' in the nuclear industry is far safer than business as usual in most heavy industries - a death here or there doesn't even make the news. Union Carbide killed between 4,000 and 16,000 people (and injured over
half a million), at Bhopal in 1984 - a FAR worse disaster than Chernobyl - and yet most people today have never heard of Bhopal, and they certainly don't bring Bhopal up every time anyone proposes to build a chemical plant anywhere in the world.
People keep
saying nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are dangerous. But all the evidence says otherwise.
Even thorium/liquid salt reactors, which I think could be made safer (and definitely far more fuel efficient) than current designs,
Certainly they can be made more efficient. It would be very hard to make them safer - how do you get fewer than zero casualties?
cannot be made proof against the largest disasters nature can throw at them- and human error is always a factor in increasing their riskiness.
And yet it appears they have been made safe against exactly that. How could Fukushima Daiichi have been safer? Well, it could have performed as well as the somewhat newer Fukushima Daini, next door, which was ready to start generating electricity again within a day of the Tsunami.
Had Daiichi been replaced with a newer design when it was first planned to be, the world would never have heard of Fukushima. Of course, it wasn't - because anti-nuclear groups blocked its replacement. Well done guys.
Of course, the world really shouldn't have heard of Fukushima anyway - there was no disaster there - the real disaster was all along the coast, where petrochemical and agrichemical plants dumped tonnes of carcinogens into the ocean and air; and tens of thousands were killed by a huge tsunami. Zero deaths does not qualify for the name 'disaster' in my book.
That has to be factored in to the relative expense.
I consider the environmental damage being done by CO2 to be about as dangerous as nuclear, in the long run.
How can you possibly reach that conclusion? CO
2 has the potential to kill millions, and to make life miserable for billions. Nuclear power provides a net saving in lives. By replacing coal, nuclear power saves around 8,400 lives every year. (
source)
In fact I think we need to start planning global scale mitigation strategies; solar panels in orbit shading the poles may be worth looking into, if we can figure out how to safely beam to power generated down to the surface.
In the long run, I think that solar (both space and surface based), wind, and geothermal are where we should be putting our money. Keep up research on everything else, certainly- better batteries and high-temperature superconductors especially.
Why? Nuclear power can do most of the job of reducing CO
2 emissions. Both France and Sweden have demonstrated that electricity generation can be made almost CO
2 emission free in around a decade, by the use of nuclear power. Germany and Denmark have demonstrated that wind and solar cannot achieve that objective. Geothermal is OK, but it's a niche technology - only really viable in geologically active locations like New Zealand or Hawaii.
The statement "The trouble with nuclear is that the fuel and waste products are so damn dangerous" is one of those things everyone knows, like "Jesus loves me" or "What goes up must come down" or "Nature abhors a vacuum" - it's widely known, it's commonly accepted to be true, and it's completely at odds with reality.
Any source of energy is dangerous if uncontained. Nuclear energy is no exception. But nuclear energy is demonstrably something we know how to contain - or, where containment fails, how to mitigate any risks. If you were exposed to the contents of a nuclear spent fuel dry cask, you would die. But the same is true if you were exposed to the contents of a blast furnace (or to the combustion chamber of a coal or gas power station; or for that matter if you were to
fall off a wind turbine tower). The only important difference is that lots of people have been killed by blast furnace accidents, a fair few by
falling from wind turbines, and none have ever been hurt at all by spent nuclear fuel.
Nuclear power as practiced by the Soviet Union (the folks who brought us Chernobyl) is rather safer than coal power as practiced in the developed world. Nuclear power as practised today is vastly safer than that. In fact, no other sizable industry in history has a safety record as good as that of nuclear power. Commercial nuclear power makes commercial aviation look positively lethal.
