If you look at German power generation at this very moment you will see that they have huge wind and solar capacity, but the energy right now is mainly coming from coal. I'm not sure if I should prefer nuclear or coal to step in in these wind still winter days. Of course more energy storage would be even better.

Germany has some problems building the high voltage interconnects between north and south. Once these finally get built, their power grid will be more flexible, which will help.

Of course, those dreaded winter dips in both sunshine and wind are a nightmare...

Wind and solar are still growing in Germany. Wind turbines are a relatively common sight, but pretty sparse. Building nuclear plants even in an ideal fantasy world would be hugely expensive and slow.

Yes, building them would be. However, not shutting the existing once down because we learned that tsunamis can threaten nuclear power plants on the coast is a different story. Don't get me wrong I honestly don't know if nuclear is better than coal, but think it's a viable discussion.

> nuclear is very expensive

If you disagree, and have an argument, why are you not providing it?

> nuclear has a waste and risk problem

Yes, and?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...

> Thus, Alfvén identified two fundamental prerequisites for effective management of high-level radioactive waste: (1) stable geological formations, and (2) stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years. As Alfvén suggests, no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period.

In other words, we have no, zero, ZILCH real solutions, and just hand-wave it away. Future generations might come up with something. They may not. But hey, let's not be a "scaremonger", let's not be like great minds of the 20th century who paid attention. Let's be shitty consumers with the attention span of a goldfish. Fuck that so much.

> wind and solar are price competitive and very environment friendly

And don't forget they're not using up resources we have a a.) limited supply of and b.) could use for more interesting things than burning them, but instead using energy that the sun pelts us with anyway. That's kind of a fundamental difference. It's the elephant on the couch, I'd say.

it's so bizarre that you think _ph_ disagrees with these arguments. their parent comment likes nuclear but says it unfortunately always loses in HN discussions, and_ph_ summarizes why it loses.

I clicked your HN profile which says " Defend yourself. Your mindless, entitled pouting makes me aggressive. As it should."

HN is a place to be civil. it's in the rules. That's why it's better than other places. Please, improve your attitude here and don't have that profile text. If you do, you'll (rightly) be shadow banned for those toxic "contributions" and then you won't derail threads with gratuitous negativity.

Rather than lash out against someone who you completely agree with, you could have just written your comment to read "To elaborate on these points..." and then given your helpful information.

then you would have been upvoted. In the future please be more constructive :). and welcome to HN.

It doesn't solve the problem globally, but in Finland, there's been a decision of the method and location of the final disposal of the waste. Once the disposal is finished 50 years after end of waste production, the repository will be sealed in a way that makes the waste inaccessible.

Posiva is the company, owned by the NPP operators, trusted with the task: http://posiva.fi/en/final_disposal

Compared to the blood on the hands of people who don't seriously think about what they defend, I'll take offending people by asking them for arguments. You can prove you have a mind beyond a goldfish. If you just downvote and say nothing, I'll stick with "called it", kthxbai.

Wind kills lots of birds.

http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-...

Add 100x the current number and we'll have a big problem.

Downvoted to hell because "We don't like what you're saying".

Wind has a negative. it's just a fact, not an opinion.

According to the US Fish & Wildlife service, wind turbine deaths are tiny compared with many other human causes.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds....

Currently there aren't that many wind turbines. I imagine the proposal is to have at least 100x the number to replace all of the fossil fuels. Imagine the planet covered with wind turbines.

If you look at the chart in the link, 100x-ing wind turbines, if it was linear, would still be a tiny number of bird deaths compared to other sources.

Well, we are trying to reduce the other numbers. 10 million in the US is still a big number. We are 4% of the world population. As per capita energy use increases throughout the world, we're going to generate a lot more clean energy.

http://world.bymap.org/ElectricityProduction.html

Is there a reason we need to kill tens of millions of additional birds every year so we can have "clean" energy?

10 million in the US is not a big number, relative to other sources of bird deaths. As long as it's insignificant, you'll have a hard time convincing people that it's significant, and should stand in the way of saving the planet.

This is akin to complaining that your cancer treatment causes your hair to fall out. Yes it's unfortunate, but it's also a crucial part of the only realistic solution we have to far more urgent problems.

Adding 100x will still have wind turbines 100 times more innocuous than cats [0].

[0] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/north-america-win...

1. It's a made up fact. http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

2. Cat's killing birds doesn't make it acceptable for humans to kill birds by the tens of millions.

Both fair points, but your link states that cats' killing statistics are perhaps exaggerated, not completely false, and we don't know by how much.

My (seemingly incorrect) assumption would imply that even if we remove all wind turbines we would only make a dent of about 1/10k. It is still a reasonable observation unless we find out the cat kill stats are off by four orders of magnitude.