Nuclear power isn't some counter-cultural fad. It's the top recommendation and consensus among climate scientists. This messianic fantasy that solar and wind will save us, to which every anti-nuclear technologist clings, is not only wrong, but dangerous.

Global warming is no longer a theoretical issue. It is here. Now. Within 20 years people will begin abandoning the Persian Gulf, sending a wave of refugees across Europe that will make current migration look like a trickle.

We are facing an existential threat to global civilization. There's no longer time to bet on a solar moonshot. We're discussing geoengineering for god's sake. We need proven technology, and we need it now.

And within 20 years, how many of those reactors will actually be built? Especially within the Persian Gulf, where nuclear weapons proliferation is a big issue. How many decades did Iran spend under sanctions while building a reactor?

The solution can't be first-world-only, and local solar is a much better bet in equatorial but poor and politically unstable parts of the world.

Unfortunately, nuclear has one big issue in addition to the issues already described (long time to build a plant; geo-political concerns on the link between plants and atomic weapons): when it goes bad, it can go spectacularly wrong. No other power source has produced a singular disaster like Chernobyl where about 2500 square km of land is basically uninhabitable for a few hundred years+. Coal fires are the only thing that come close.

For that reason, the NIMBY forces / politics against nuclear are much stronger than average (both in building the plant and storing the waste). Never mind that, on average, nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels. People fear the spectacular more than the mundane. Take terrorism vs. car crashes, in the Western world you're more likely to die in a car crash by far, but it's terrorism that stirs up the fears.

As far as global warming is concerned, power generation is only part of the puzzle anyways. Such contributors as transportation and deforestation are also important. Honestly, solar and wind are pretty competitive right now... except for one angle. The main problem with solar / wind / etc. energy generation right now is variability, so the real "moonshot" for this technology is energy storage. (Which is the same real issue with electric transport as well).

And, what might be little known outside of Germany, we still suffer from the Chernobyl incident, as it is still not entirely safe to eat wild mushrooms (and certain game) from southern Germany forests due to radioactive contamination. And that won't change in my lifetime.

Nuclear reactors aren't economical, don't scale well, can't be deployed everywhere and it takes forever to build them.

Even if everyone would agree to convert everything to nuclear reactors now it would probably take a decade before the first goes online and several decades until enough of them are online. That's far too long.

In that same period you can easily get far more energy quicker with decentralized renewables.

Nuclear power have all types of problems for competing on the energy market. From its several sizes available: from incredibly big to absolutely huge, to its bad PR problem and NIMBY, to expensive waste treatment, to any company that runs them getting bankrupt sooner of later.

Solar and wind are are here now. And they get in all form-factors, including single-home sized. Besides, photovoltaics are way behind in the Moore's law, and still have a lot to improve.

Today, pushing nuclear energy is almost guaranteed to get you no result, while solar will probably get you the biggest improvement you can get.

The problem isn't price. The problem is consistency. Nuclear is a complete (day & night) power solution. Solar/wind isn't.

Energy storage solves that problem. The technology exists, the only potential trouble is cost, so it comes back to price again. Storage costs are also dropping rapidly. A proper comparison of nuclear to wind/solar needs to account for the cost of storage as well, but even if you add that in I suspect it's approaching parity.

"Energy storage solves that problem"

Yes, but we don't have that solution.

I'm puzzled as to why you quote part of my comment and then act like I didn't think of the point you're making, when I made the exact opposite point just one sentence later.

Batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and many other technologies exist. They just need to become cheap enough. Thus, the problem is once again price.

It's not just price. None of the technologies you mention scale to anywhere near the levels of a nuclear powerplant. It's a huge engineering issue that, while most likely solvable, simply hasn't been solved yet.

How so? Pretty much any building you can point at has enough space for batteries to sustain its power needs overnight. The only reason we haven't all run out and done it is because, first, it's not necessary with the grid as it is now, and second, it costs a whole lot.

The engineering issues are in getting this stuff to be sufficiently cost effective that we can afford to put them into wide use.

How many batteries can we build? How do we build them on such a large scale? Do we mine enough raw materials for so many batteries? Are there enough materials for so many batteries? How do we cool them? How do we replace the faulty ones? How long do they last? How many people do we need to maintain them? How do we train them? How do we dispose of the batteries?

Not all of these questions have have hard or problematic answers (e.g. especially the last one is probably much worse for nuclear), but they do need to be answered, at all. We've been answering these questions for nuclear for the past 50 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery solves all of these problems.

Flow batteries are amazing for home use, but for industrial scale? I don't know... Also, IIRC, don't they have a fairly limited temperature range?

They are currently being used in Africa and South America primarily for industry use (telecommunications mostly).

No, you won't run an aluminium smelter with them, but for load balancing during those (pretty rare!) times when you don't have either solar or wind they are fine.

I don't know about the temperature problem. I know they are used here in Australia at 40C+ and in Africa in similar climates.

I think that they are actually better for industrial use than home use. They aren't silent, and they need to be cycled. The noise isn't an issue in industry, and in home use I know the power cycling can sometimes be a problem because it is hard to find somewhere to dump the power (currently the solution is to dump it to heat, which isn't great - or alert the homeowner and get them to run a pool pump or something).

RedFlow (one manufacture) is in the same building as me, and they have an interesting report: http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Diesel-Runtime...

We do actually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery are cheap to produce, have decent power density and are solving this exact problem now in Africa and South America.

Production levels are just starting to ramp up now.

Was reading about this the other day. As far back as three years ago they predicted that Solar would undercut Nuclear. there's many articles out there, this is one of them:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-16/new-wind-s...

Indeed, it is amazing how quickly things are changing. If we solve intermittency, there won't be any reason to be pro-nuclear.

If. Meanwhile as long as we are burning any amount of coal, we should be building nuclear plants as fast as possible, and we should have been doing that for the last 30 years. The fact that so-called "environmentalists" made that impossible due to their incessant FUD is why I hold them much more responsible for our current situation than Exxon.