Keep fossil fuels and wood for the things solar & wind will have trouble covering: airplanes, ocean shipping, winter heating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yNj1zEh-nM
You only need the first 15 minutes of this talk to see why current renewables won't scale. The world needs something like 15 terawatts. When this talk was recorded, solar electricity produced something like .001 TW. We're now closing in on .03 --- and there are huge parts of the world that still haven't industrialized yet. We'd apparently need to be printing and distributing and deploying solar cells the way we do newspapers to have any hope of using photovoltaic to offset our total energy demand.
Nuclear doesn't scale either, but the notion that we're all just holding back on renewables out of greed because all it takes is wind and solar... well, it's easily refuted.
Yes. Here's the tank farm.[1]
It could probably be let out into the ocean without much harm, if not done all at once. But there's opposition to that. Meanwhile, it decays with a half-life of 12 years, so eventually it will be harmless. Frustratingly, the concentration of tritium is too low for commercial extraction.
[1] http://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/fukushimatanks_...
Yes, I used to think it can be made safe, but we are just hoping that we will be able to handle the waste later. Then if there will be a 100.000 year accident every 10-15 years, it will be a rather depressing future...
I think that solar must be the way to do it. If we can't make do with solar, we won't be able to sustain the current population size.
The jammed AVR pebble bed reactor in Germany is contained, but there's no way to dismantle and dispose of it. Current plans are to wait 60 years and then try to figure out something.
Fukushima’s mess will also take decades. The site generated huge amounts of contaminated water, and there's now a processing plant to take most radioactive contaminants out of the water. The water still has tritium after processing. The half-life of tritium is 12 years, so that will cool off in a few decades. Meanwhile, huge farms of water tanks store the stuff. Lots of radioactive dirt has been dug up and buried deeper somewhere else. There's a refrigerated "ice wall" to try to stop leakage into the ocean. Not much has been done with the reactor vessels themselves. As today's story reports, they can't even get a robot close to the reactor vessel.
This makes one very discouraged about nuclear power.