The biggest road block to nuclear generation in the US is cost and ROI on the investment. You can get a gas fired plant up and running producing revenue in a fraction of the time it would take to get a N-plant going.
The ROI on residential solar is about 7 years, and in an Economic Depression no one is going to pay 20-30k more for a savings of $50 a month or so, unless they are stupid. Americans move on avg every 7 years and more so with the depression so solar doesn't make sense right now. Put them on top on big box stores and that makes sense. When nanosolar comes out sign me up. Roll up panels and you have something. Not to mention in Colorado, or TX where there are gnarly hail storms that would be quite $$$ to insure those panels. I am for nuclear in my backyard and natural gas too. The difference is though, I want it do right with the highest safety standards not the BS Haliburton methods used in deep water drilling and the like where companies skimp on safety to save a nickel.
Ive been saying this for awhile now the problem is not nuclear power the problem is nuclear waste. We have been sitting on our hands as it pertains to the spent fuel rods. Most countries, including the US, keeps them in pools of waters for many many years even though they are meant to be "temporary" storage facilities. Germany is one leg up as they keep theirs in cement casts however it is a costly venture. Finland has made the most progress with their building of Onkalo 5km deep in a rock mountain which will supposedly last 100,000 years. I trully feel the problem at Fukushima would not have been one tenth as bad if there were no spent fuel rod pools outisde the reactor. If we solve that problem then I feel nuclear is a great alternative to fossil fuels.
david666, Spent nuclear fuel must be kept in tanks with circulating water for some period (I think something like 2-3 years) after being removed from a reactor to allow it to cool off. During this time highly radioactive fission products are greatly reduced by natural radioactive decay. After that time it can be stored in dry casks and disposed of by whatever means is deemed best. Dealing with the dry casks is more of a political issue than an engineering issue. It certainly seems that the spent fuel tanks were a major problem at Fukushima, not only in their own right but because of the high gamma radiation from exposed fuel rods that made any work near the reactors difficult and dangerous. There are going to be a lot of questions asked about Fukushima and one will surely be - Is it wise to have spent fuel pools so close to the reactors?
I understand that, but they are still putting off radiation. The half life can be in the tens of thousands of years. The real problem I foresee is storing this all in one place say under a mountain and then one day in the distant future someone finds the covering drills down into it and releases the radiation. Sure it would be much lower but at the same time youd have hundreds of thousands of tonnes.
Well Yucca Mountain has been an ongoing battle in itself for decades. When it comes to dealing with nuclear waste it will always come down to a not in my backyard attitude of opposition from which ever state a site is proposed. reid/obama have killed yucca mountain for now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/...dpossessions/nevada/yucca-mountain/index.html http://reid.senate.gov/issues/yucca.cfm We have no fuckin energy policy in this country. It is a complete joke. A sad joke. SOlar, Nuclear, Natural Gas, etc we have no fuckin idea what to do and if we did we wouldn't be able to get it done any how.
Pretty bold statement considering that i already stated my connections to the industry. What "way" was I saying that electricity works? And what numbers were way off? Seems that maybe you are assuming that I was making certain points that I was never making and subsequently rushed to try to prove your intellectual dominance. I wasn't arguing the point of on-demand power at all. In fact, I was demonstrating why solar is NOT currently viable as a primary energy source.
Actually it is almost the opposite. Box stores consume too much energy for solar to offset it. Simply not enough on-site space. New construction residential is most feasible right now with current tax incentives. If included in cost of build, it is net zero cost each month. IOW, you get the solar for free.
I think solar thermal plants will become much more prevalent in the future. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations http://www.esolar.com/ Nuclear is great for the energy companies. They can produce at .03 and sell for 4x that. But when something goes wrong everyone pays.