For example, while there is a passive safety design has been demonstrated to shut down the reactor with no operator or computer control, these types have had trouble getting adopted

There are multiple passive safety designs out there although they aren't very common nor do they need to be since multiple active safety systems and a containment structure is quite enough.

bbk:

and most of the ones that do have passive safety features can only go for a number of days, as little as 3, before the reaction accelerates out of control. I can think of a number of reasons why a reactor should have more than 3 days' safety margin.

You have a source for that?

Whilst 3 days safety before you need human intervention is actually pretty good (since it gives a few days to plan how best to deal with a situation rather than having to do something right away) I highly doubt it to be possible since a reactor that is shut down will drop to zero power in a few seconds and stay that way (provided the control rods don't have graphite at the bottom, we've learnt from that mistake).

Another interesting thing I came across is that there is only one factory in the world capable of producing containment vessel for a modern reactor, and this factory is only capable of producing 4 of them a year.

Then we build another factory (and another one after that). It should only take a couple of years to ramp up production capacity to the point at which we can have tens of reactors under construction at a time.

Besides, there are reactors that don't need Japan Steel Works to be built, such as the CANDU (that does require heavy water production though).

bbk:

Let's say that a single new plant can produce a good 1,000MW per year, then this is still only 4,000MW per year to replace coal. This seriously forces the question of just how available safe nuclear technology really is.

Then we start out with 4 1 GW units (or maybe those 1.6 GW EPRs) a year and then as production increases we can go to 8 or more as other factories come online.

This is an issue but it's not a show stopper like the lack of decent energy storage technology is for wind and ground based solar.

What will be needed to ensure that the production capacity appears is a perception that we'll need to use nuclear (and therefore that building nuclear power plant parts is profitable).

bbk:

These vessels are the main feature that you cited as the big difference between Chernobyl and a good reactor design.

Yes, but there are other reactor designs that use different containment structures that also do the job that is required to stop the release of radioactives that occurred at Chernobyl.

bbk:

Yes, they're planning to double their capacity sometime this year, but this doesn't fall into the "presently available" category any more than solar power was a few years ago.

It means that we will be able to bring more 10 GW of reliable carbon neutral power online each year (accounting for many reactors being more than 1 GW) and there is still the CANDU design (assuming whoever ends up buying AECL keeps it if the Canadian government does that).

It'll take a few decades to switch over from fossil fuels pretty much no matter what we switch to (that's about how long it took France) so a few years to build new factories isn't that big a deal (even if it does take half a decade). The important thing is to pick a technology that can do the job.

bbk:

I haven't been able to google the total figures, but I believe the world capacity to add more solar already exceeds our ability to add more safe nuclear. It seems like we might be able to add 4,000MW+ in manufacturing capacity per year, let alone the total output of the cells themselves. That's just solar. In 2007, world wind capacity increased by 20,000MW. And that's with manufacturing bottlenecks in their own industry, too.

Solar seems to be around the 2 GW capacity per year (which if it were in space would be great) while that figure for wind would be about 4 GW of actual power when you take the capacity factor into account.

All industries can add production capacity if they need to, it's a question of whether they should.

Nuclear could probably get about another 4 GW just by modifying existing reactors to be able to produce more power (which is quite commonly done and doesn't seem to be drawing much opposition either).

bbk:

Seems to me that nuclear won't be able to do it alone, no matter what.

That's what worries me because it looks like it'll have to anyway.

For example, while there is a passive safety design has been demonstrated to shut down the reactor with no operator or computer control, these types have had trouble getting adopted and most of the ones that do have passive safety features can only go for a number of days, as little as 3, before the reaction accelerates out of control. I can think of a number of reasons why a reactor should have more than 3 days' safety margin.

Another interesting thing I came across is that there is only one factory in the world capable of producing containment vessel for a modern reactor, and this factory is only capable of producing 4 of them a year. Let's say that a single new plant can produce a good 1,000MW per year, then this is still only 4,000MW per year to replace coal. This seriously forces the question of just how available safe nuclear technology really is. These vessels are the main feature that you cited as the big difference between Chernobyl and a good reactor design. Yes, they're planning to double their capacity sometime this year, but this doesn't fall into the "presently available" category any more than solar power was a few years ago.

I haven't been able to google the total figures, but I believe the world capacity to add more solar already exceeds our ability to add more safe nuclear. It seems like we might be able to add 4,000MW+ in manufacturing capacity per year, let alone the total output of the cells themselves. That's just solar. In 2007, world wind capacity increased by 20,000MW. And that's with manufacturing bottlenecks in their own industry, too.

Seems to me that nuclear won't be able to do it alone, no matter what.

That's because, for one, solar and wind is just getting started. But for another matter, France has one of the best functioning governments in the world. As I've said numerous times, it's not properly regulated nuclear that has me worried but the governments that are regulating it.

If solar and wind are just getting started then they aren't proven technologies that we know can scale to running an entire countries electricity grid (and wind seems to have already hit its limit in some places).

As for proper regulation, whilst it is necessary for nuclear power it is also necessary for everything else out there so if there's a problem with regulation of nuclear then you probably have a lot of other problems to worry about as well, likely far worse (and even the US has been able to do pretty well with nuclear).

The most important regulation for nuclear power is to ensure that good containment structures exist which they do everywhere except the former Soviet Union (inherently safe reactors (such as TRIGA) might be able to get away without a containment).

bbk:

I am wondering if your solution to global warming is to immediately invest trillions of dollars into nuclear infrastructure?

I'd start with billions right now and then increase it as fast as the production capacity and training of competent nuclear engineers can proceed.

bbk:

There's actually no point in talking about base loads today. Whether coal gets replaced by nuclear or green energy, it will take decades before enough of it gets replaced to be considered a base load.

Nuclear or green makes no sense, nuclear is green (and may be the only green power source we have right now).

But anyway, what we need to do over the long term is to replace fossil fuel baseload and peak power and we have to start sometime so why not now?

bbk:

If viable storage solutions are still decades away, then that still doesn't matter to us today.

Completely true, if they are decades away then we can just ignore them until they appear, sure they'd be great but technology that doesn't yet exist can't solve our problems until it does and it just so happens that we shouldn't be waiting.

bbk:

Solar and wind have the potential of reversing the entire concept of base loads and peak loads.

<sarcasm&gt I'm sure god exists too.&lt/sarcasm&gt

bbk:

What you're offering us is the idea that we should continue to use insanely expensive gas-turbine peak-load units during the day because solar energy can't be stored cost efficiently for use at the time when electricity prices are cheapest.

No, actually if we can't find a better peak source I'd be quite happy to use nuclear for peak load even though it doesn't fit the economics of nuclear very well.

Decent energy storage would make a good peak source regardless of what else you use provided you can keep it charged up.

bbk:

Solar has the promise of actually lowering daytime electric costs, while raising night-time costs.

Whilst nuclear has very low off-peak rates (i.e. at night).

Of course space based solar will have the same cost structure as nuclear since the sun is still shining 36 Mm above the Earth whenever there isn't an equinox.

bbk:

And for all the talk about unavailable technology, how long has it taken since the advent of nuclear power for a viable means of waste storage to come on-line?

You have some kind of problem with just stacking it up at the plant?

For a start we are only using less than a percent of the energy in the Uranium we dig out of the ground so what comes out of a current reactor is not waste but a valuable future resource and it needs to be treated as such (i.e. kept easily accessible). The longest lived of isotopes in nuclear 'waste' are the transuranics which are still able to give us energy so running all the fuel through reprocessing and into breeders would significantly reduce the amount of waste at the end of the cycle.

Even today without using breeders nuclear 'waste' becomes less radioactive than the ore it came from in about a thousand years which is actually pretty damn good when you consider that the waste products from solar PV aren't going to decay and will remain dangerous forever.

What about the waste problem of fossil fuels? Substituting a lesser problem for a bigger one isn't that bad a thing to do, especially when you can't avoid it.

bbk:

Nuclear has certainly proceeded in the past without good design, without storage solutions, without much of anything. The technology was deployed prematurely.

If we took that attitude we'd never get anything done and that is the ultimate risk, far more risky than doing something.

bbk:

A nuclear reactor that produces 1 terawatt at 80% capacity is the same as solar panel that produces 1 terawatt at 50% capacity.

Except for the minor fact that the nuclear reactor will have produced three fifths more energy than the solar panel over a period of time.

Over one year 1 TW of nuclear at 80% capacity will produce 7008 TWh of energy while 1 TW solar at 50% capacity will produce 4380 TWh energy which is not an insignificant difference in anyway (I've assumed a day has 24 hours and a year 365 days).

bbk:

I'm sure nuclear power has its own reasons for calculating the optimum capacity.

Nuclear power is very capital intensive but has low operating costs which means that the cost of running the plant on a day to day basis has almost no relation to whether that power plant is generating electricity or just sitting idle so the way to make the most profit is to just run at full power as much of the time as you can. France has reached the stage at which they've been load following with nuclear reactors and nuclear navies don't have a choice in the matter but it isn't the most economical way to run a reactor.

bbk:

This measurement is largely meaningless to solar, anyway. If you want to price the thing, you plug it in for a few days and see how much power it generates on average. Then you say it's got a capacity factor of 100% of this average.

Which is a good way to do things but it happens to require that you already have solar power making it not such a good method for those considering whether to use ground based solar.

It also does not address supplying power during the night.

bbk:

The last point that I want to make here is the difference between truly green energy and dirty energy. If we build more nuclear, we add more risk. If we build more coal, we add more pollution. If we build too many solar panels, it will do nothing more than create more jobs.

Solar panels are semiconductors and the semiconductor industry isn't exactly the most eco-friendly one on the planet.

Besides, we shouldn't be wasting jobs on energy generation when we could have those people doing other things, creating jobs isn't necessarily a good thing if those jobs aren't doing anything.

bbk:

Besides being safer,

The most dangerous form of energy is a lack of energy (and the safety statistics for wind I've seen do not look good at all).

bbk:

green energy is more labor intensive and less resource intensive.

Nuclear fits the less resource intensive criterion, I mean it isn't using up lots of hyper-pure silicon and Uranium is a very concentrated energy source, not to mention not stealing the wind.

Labour intensive just means more people not doing something else they could be doing which would be more productive.

bbk:

That means that, quite literally, less of our money goes up in smoke.

We'll see.

bbk:

Therein lies another hidden benefit of the "green economy." It actually strengthens the economy with more local jobs, a stronger middle class, and more money available to people to invest in the future.

Which when one considers that the people who work at a nuclear plant tend to be local and highly paid is also a good argument for nuclear power as well.

bbk:

Once you really consider this, then on a societal scale, there is no excuse left not to go with it.

Except for the risk of it not actually being useful.

Wind and ground based solar when used on a large scale can actually be pretty damn bad for the environment themselves due simply to the land use they require.

What is really interesting is that France has reached about 80% nuclear and is doing just fine while no one has managed to even come close to 50% for wind or ground based solar.

That's because, for one, solar and wind is just getting started. But for another matter, France has one of the best functioning governments in the world. As I've said numerous times, it's not properly regulated nuclear that has me worried but the governments that are regulating it.

Maybe in a few decades we'll have the energy storage system(s) we need to backup wind and ground based solar properly but if we are to avoid the risks of further CO2 emissions we have to act now with what we have.

I am wondering if your solution to global warming is to immediately invest trillions of dollars into nuclear infrastructure?

There's actually no point in talking about base loads today. Whether coal gets replaced by nuclear or green energy, it will take decades before enough of it gets replaced to be considered a base load. If viable storage solutions are still decades away, then that still doesn't matter to us today. It will just work itself out, and in the long run the right technologies will be chosen to ensure a stable base load. It's not a part of the problem at hand.

Anyway, there's so much apples and oranges in these comparisons that it's really not funny. Solar and wind have the potential of reversing the entire concept of base loads and peak loads. It can, in fact, be used for both of what we consider base loads and peak loads in the current day and age. You can then take your peak-load units and just use them for low-wind, low-hydro, night-time generation.

What you're offering us is the idea that we should continue to use insanely expensive gas-turbine peak-load units during the day because solar energy can't be stored cost efficiently for use at the time when electricity prices are cheapest. Solar has the promise of actually lowering daytime electric costs, while raising night-time costs. So essentially, even if no electricity is being stored, it would <i.

And for all the talk about unavailable technology, how long has it taken since the advent of nuclear power for a viable means of waste storage to come on-line? So far, indefinitely. Now, don't try to put forth another ultimatum between nuclear and coal on the basis that one particular technology isn't there yet. Nuclear has certainly proceeded in the past without good design, without storage solutions, without much of anything. The technology was deployed prematurely.

Of course you have to weight it with the capacity factor which is typically around 80-90% for nuclear and less than 50% for solar which means that to replace a terawatt of nuclear with a terawatt of ground based solar you would need to have more than two terawatts worth of solar panels plus significant energy storage infrastructure.

I just want to point out that this is gibberish. A terawatt is a terawatt is a terawatt. A nuclear reactor that produces 1 terawatt at 80% capacity is the same as solar panel that produces 1 terawatt at 50% capacity. This only makes a difference when calculating the cost of the technology, which, by the way, is typically set at a conservative 30% for solar panels when calculating their cost. When this measurement is used to choose the right parameters for coal power because a coal power plant is most efficient when running at a certain capacity. Running it at a higher or lower capacity wastes resources and causes undue pollution. I'm sure nuclear power has its own reasons for calculating the optimum capacity.

This measurement is largely meaningless to solar, anyway. If you want to price the thing, you plug it in for a few days and see how much power it generates on average. Then you say it's got a capacity factor of 100% of this average. Unless you plan on saving money by blocking out the sun once in a while, you have absolutely no need to consider what the optimal operating capacity of a solar panel as anything other than 100% of what it generates on average. And since this is already part of the cost calculations of solar, and all other energy for that matter, we can simply ignore it and just compare cost per terawatt. The main difference that we're left having to adjust for on our own are, in fact, transmission costs.

The last point that I want to make here is the difference between truly green energy and dirty energy. If we build more nuclear, we add more risk. If we build more coal, we add more pollution. If we build too many solar panels, it will do nothing more than create more jobs. Besides being safer, green energy is more labor intensive and less resource intensive. That means that, quite literally, less of our money goes up in smoke. Therein lies another hidden benefit of the "green economy." It actually strengthens the economy with more local jobs, a stronger middle class, and more money available to people to invest in the future. Once you really consider this, then on a societal scale, there is no excuse left not to go with it.

We already do have the alternative technology, and it is in fact being adopted very quickly. Wind and solar capacity in the USA is growing at what... 20%+ per year. In countries that are actually serious about sustainable energy, let's say Germany, solar power alone has grown 150%+ last year alone.

Germany is a country that is planning to shut down all its nuclear reactors and replace them with fossil fuel power plants (and I think that is something we can both agree to be a bad decision), doesn't sound like they're very serious about sustainable energy, even if you think there is something better than nuclear and that nuclear should be replaced, it should be replaced after fossil fuels and be a stopgap if needed between fossil fuels and whatever it is you think should replace nuclear, not the other way around.

20% per year when you don't have much isn't very impressive, nuclear has been known to increase in energy produced more than wind without even needing new reactors (i.e. by improving operation of the current ones).

bbk:

The biggest failure of the energy industry is that they didn't see this coming.

It's a bandwagon market, don't expect it to last.

bbk:

Companies like GE have exceeded their manufacturing capacity for wind turbines and it's causing a huge bottleneck - the price of turbines has doubled recently because of supply shortages.

To think GE probably also sold a gas plant.

bbk:

And this is just the beginning - new transmission (as in mechanical) technologies are promising to make wind turbines nearly twice as efficient and longer lasting, lower maintenance, etc.

Which does nothing about the unreliability of the wind. No matter how well you build a wind turbine, if the wind ain't blowing, it won't spin (you could run it as a motor but that is frown upon).

The problem with wind is not in any way the efficiency, I would not consider 100% efficient wind turbines to be any more useful than what is being used now, the problem is that you just can't rely on the wind.

This means that the costs of wind power must include the costs of other power sources or energy storage and the needed overcapacity to charge it, whilst that doesn't a priori rule out wind it does make wind dependent upon how good your backup is and right now the backup is usually fossil fuels (though hydro and nuclear have been used as well).

bbk:

New solar manufacturing facilities that are coming on-line as we speak are promising to double the current level of world solar output, per year, each, and do it at prices that are cost competitive with coal.

Whilst ground based solar is a usable intermediate power source and good way of using some waste silicon from the IC industry, it suffers from the same problems of wind when used as baseload (though space based solar is great at baseload and one of the two technologies I'm expecting to be superior to fission).

bbk:

You also have to admit that there is a difference between a terawatt generated on local rooftops and a terawatt that has to be transmitted over hundreds of miles from a nuclear facility.

Yes, like that terawatt being available at night from the nuclear plant.

Once you factor in batteries and inverters you'll probably find that the loss they introduce is about equivalent to what you'd lose in transmission from hundreds of kilometres away anyway. Then there's what that terawatt rating means, is it average power produced or rated power? Because if it's rated power then the nuclear power plant will have produced more than twice as much due to its higher capacity factor.

bbk:

Local generation has a distinct advantage in efficiency that for fair comparison, you'd have to price much more than a terawatt of nuclear for each terawatt of solar.

Of course you have to weight it with the capacity factor which is typically around 80-90% for nuclear and less than 50% for solar which means that to replace a terawatt of nuclear with a terawatt of ground based solar you would need to have more than two terawatts worth of solar panels plus significant energy storage infrastructure.

bbk:

The fact is that solar is actually quite competitive as it is, but it is hindered by regulatory stonewalling and massive subsidies given out to dirty technologies.

With massive subsidies yes.

How about we just put all power sources under the same regulatory structure, expect all of them to offer a maximum level of risk (not zero, then we wouldn't get anything done), set a maximum for CO2 life cycle emissions, remove all subsidies and let the free market figure it all out, then we might see whether ground based solar really is competitive.

bbk:

Nuclear accounts for 14-15% of the world's generating capacity, while alternative sources account for 1%, maybe.

Pretty much (though hydro has a decent amount it really doesn't have much of a future due to limited site selection).

What is really interesting is that France has reached about 80% nuclear and is doing just fine while no one has managed to even come close to 50% for wind or ground based solar. This provides significant confidence that nuclear can be relied upon for what we need while such confidence is lacking for wind and ground based solar since we don't have any examples of them running most of a countries grid and I am not willing to take the risk that they can't (since I have very good reasons for suspecting that those sources can not run the majority of a countries grid without improvements in energy storage).

bbk:

But, at 20%+ growth per year, I don't think this poses a problem even this "late" in the game. Pretty soon, solar and wind will in fact surpass nuclear as an energy source. You really can't argue with the economics here.

Depends on whether that growth is sustainable and how long it takes people to figure out that they need to include the cost (including environmental effects) of backup power in their estimates for wind and ground based solar.

bbk:

It's not even reasonable to compare the two sectors and conclude that solar isn't a viable - if it received as much funding as nuclear research has had over the years, we'd be in tip top shape.

The reason I don't think ground based solar is a viable baseload source doesn't have to do with the engineering of the panels but with Earth's diurnal cycle and the lack of a decent large scale energy storage medium.

If a lot more money had been spent on space solar power (using lunar or asteroidal resources would probably be needed to make it competitive) or good energy storage technologies then maybe solar would be able to be the answer but we didn't and it's not.

Maybe in a few decades we'll have the energy storage system(s) we need to backup wind and ground based solar properly but if we are to avoid the risks of further CO2 emissions we have to act now with what we have.

If you want to convince me that there is something better (whether it be a single technology or combination of technologies working together) than nuclear then you are going to have to convince me that that "something better" can provide reliable power when it is needed without regard for how strong the wind or is whether the sun is up because I (and probably most of the population) am not willing to take the risk that comes with option 4 (rolling blackouts).

From an environmental point of view it would also be much preferable not to be taking energy away from the wind or changing the albedo of the Earth.

But, I'll try to indulge you with some of my views on possible solutions. The first thing I'll say is that I would agree, if it were still 1950, that nuclear energy was at that time our best hope for a sound energy solution. But alas, it is 2008 and this is no longer the case.

We already do have the alternative technology, and it is in fact being adopted very quickly. Wind and solar capacity in the USA is growing at what... 20%+ per year. In countries that are actually serious about sustainable energy, let's say Germany, solar power alone has grown 150%+ last year alone. The biggest failure of the energy industry is that they didn't see this coming. Companies like GE have exceeded their manufacturing capacity for wind turbines and it's causing a huge bottleneck - the price of turbines has doubled recently because of supply shortages. And this is just the beginning - new transmission (as in mechanical) technologies are promising to make wind turbines nearly twice as efficient and longer lasting, lower maintenance, etc. New solar manufacturing facilities that are coming on-line as we speak are promising to double the current level of world solar output, per year, each, and do it at prices that are cost competitive with coal.

You also have to admit that there is a difference between a terawatt generated on local rooftops and a terawatt that has to be transmitted over hundreds of miles from a nuclear facility. Local generation has a distinct advantage in efficiency that for fair comparison, you'd have to price much more than a terawatt of nuclear for each terawatt of solar. The fact is that solar is actually quite competitive as it is, but it is hindered by regulatory stonewalling and massive subsidies given out to dirty technologies.

Nuclear accounts for 14-15% of the world's generating capacity, while alternative sources account for 1%, maybe. But, at 20%+ growth per year, I don't think this poses a problem even this "late" in the game. Pretty soon, solar and wind will in fact surpass nuclear as an energy source. You really can't argue with the economics here. Nuclear has had its chance, and it certainly has had a much better chance than wind or solar has ever been given until the last few years. For every dollar that was ever given to solar or wind, thousands must have gone towards solar. It's not even reasonable to compare the two sectors and conclude that solar isn't a viable - if it received as much funding as nuclear research has had over the years, we'd be in tip top shape. But now that various European countries have decided to actually create a market setting for clean energy to enter, the private sector for these industries has taken off with unprecedented growth. So in sum, I don't think there are any economic roadblocks left for clean energy to steadily take over. In fact, the insane fluctuations in traditional energy sources caused by climate change, political instability, skyrocketing demand, and supply shortages are all conspiring to push clean energy to the forefront, with or without government help.

For instance, a quote from the Wiki page you linked to:

However, studies have found that in developed countries the rebound effect is usually small, and that improvements in efficiency usually reduce resource use. [Extra emphasis mine]

Usually the rebound effect is pretty small and usually energy efficiency does reduce resource usage but you can not count on that and you may end up creating a new use for energy you didn't expect.

What you appear to have done is read "usually" and then gone on to argue as though it said "always". Energy efficiency might be able to reduce our demand but there is the chance that it may backfire terribly and we end up with increased demand as happened when Watt invented the steam engine. Now if we have clean energy that isn't going to be an environmental problem (it'll just mean we have to build more power plants) so energy efficiency whilst desirable from an economic and aesthetic viewpoint is pretty much a red herring when solving global warming.

bbk:

you really have no choice but to accept that increasing efficiency is ultimately in our best interest, global warming or not.

To a degree it is, it just isn't much of a solution to global warming (and many proponents of it exaggerate how much it'll help) and is too risky given the possibility of it making new activities previously uneconomic, economic.

Any power source that could provide us with enough power for everyone on the planet to reach the energy consumption at which lifespan no longer increases as energy demand does and do so reliably and everywhere for the foreseeable future would be scalable to the point at which it could handle even our current 'wasteful' energy consumption patterns.

bbk:

Another sleight of hand? You seem to be saying that you're not presenting a dichotomy here because instead of 2 choices, there are 4 (not that your opponent agrees with this selection of choices).

There are even more, just that only one of the others (I hope) is taken seriously as an option (that option being wait for the rapture and let Jesus fix it all up which I think we'll both agree is a really bad idea).

bbk:

And then right below that, you conclude that you can choose either 1 and 2, or 3 and 4. 1 and 2 naturally boils down to just 1, since 2 isn't actually a choice. 3 and 4 are just two sides of the same choice.

Actually just doing nothing is a choice, it would be a bad one (a coal miner might not agree with me) but it is still an option that needs consideration. Choosing 3 alone would basically be not choosing 4 but making do with fossil fuels until 3 produces something.

bbk:

It's still just two choices - choose nuclear, or choose to get screwed.

It's still a dichotomy, and still false.

If the real world is such that not choosing nuclear means choosing to get screwed there's nothing I can do about other than to choose nuclear (I should note that there are many people who would not consider the non-nuclear options I've presented as getting screwed).

We do have plenty of choices of what to do it's just that we're going to end up being forced into nuclear eventually, I'd rather we not waste time before doing it (we've wasted enough already). I suspect though that we'll end up paying for electricity generating equipment thrice, to provide wind, to backup that wind with fossil fuels and then to finally buy a reactor when it becomes obvious that wind power is really 80% methane and having a worse global warming problem than we otherwise would (i.e. we'll end up picking option 3 and using option 2 and then switching to option 1).

You still haven't shown that the reliability problems with the alternatives can be overcome without fossil fuels or nuclear backing them up.

There are hundreds of alternative sources and thousands of ways

Really?

Our energy sources fall into a few classes
1) Fossil fuels, which can provide large scale reliable energy, but which will run out in decades to centuries & create environmental problems
2) Sources like hydroelectric & geothermal which are great if you have a good dam site or near surface hot rock, but much of the world doesn't, or doesn't have enough.
3) Sources like solar*, wind & nuclear fusion, which have yet to demonstrate that they can reliably produce power on the scale needed to run an industrial civilization at a reasonable price.
4) Nuclear fission, which can & does produce power cheaply & cleanly on such a scale. If use reactors that convert U238 to Pu239 or Th232 to U233, it can do so for millions or even billions of years.

*I'll note that solar for low temperature heat like water heating is & has been economically viable for decades, but solar electricity is still only for niche markets where not much more than a kilowatt is needed & a grid connection is difficult.

There are some promising technologies that I think deserve the R&D money to build a few prototypes.

This one could make high altitude wind a viable energy source
http://www.skywindpower.com/ww/index.htm

While this one could make almost everything else obsolete
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

This one is an big improvement on fission reactors. I think it's closest to being a sure thing.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/

Any one of these 3 would be sustainable in the sense that they could provide a few kilowatts per person to a population of billions & do so for millions or billions of years.

Well there are actually four choices.
1. Use nuclear power
2. Continue with fossil fuels (and token clean sources)
3. Wait for a technological breakthrough to give us another source
4. Suffer rolling blackouts and inadequate energy while also preventing the rise of living standards in the third world

I think we should be doing 1 now and allowing 3 to make more options available, 2 and 4 are just not moral options.

Another sleight of hand? You seem to be saying that you're not presenting a dichotomy here because instead of 2 choices, there are 4 (not that your opponent agrees with this selection of choices). And then right below that, you conclude that you can choose either 1 and 2, or 3 and 4. 1 and 2 naturally boils down to just 1, since 2 isn't actually a choice. 3 and 4 are just two sides of the same choice. It's still just two choices - choose nuclear, or choose to get screwed.

It's still a dichotomy, and still false.

Actually I don't because it's not true.

Though you have to acknowledge that the Rebound effect exists and that Jevons paradox is real, once you do that you'll develop a much lower opinion on the usefulness of energy efficiency for saving the planet.

I already know that you don't consider those things, that's exactly what I just said. That's your problem.

The Jevons paradox isn't exactly a central tenet of economic theory. It's absolutely nothing more than an observation of "we are at this point on the marginal demand curve regarding our energy resources." As such, it is an observation that cannot possibly hold true forever, in all circumstances. The way you seem to hold Jevons in such high regard is similar to the way Republicans hold onto trickle down theory. The idea there being that economies are continually in a state where cutting tax rates increases economic output, which in turn raises tax revenue. Both theories have a fatal flaw - they depend on forever being on one side of an economic curve.

You haven't considered some extremely fundamental facts from reality. Like I said, the EU uses about half the energy that we do to create roughly the same amount of GDP. What does Jevons say about that? Nothing. It's not equipped to deal with the tools to deal with larger economic questions, it's just a simple rule of thumb created using an 1860's understanding of economic theory. Modern studies of these effects have limited their applicability. For instance, a quote from the Wiki page you linked to:

However, studies have found that in developed countries the rebound effect is usually small, and that improvements in efficiency usually reduce resource use.

On their own, these effects don't tell you about price elasticity (marginal demand). The way that you and other proponents of nuclear silver bullet solutions use these economic rules of thumb is to assume that we are still energy starved, the way nations were during the industrial revolution 200 years ago. If you were to apply these rules of thumb the way you do and carry them out to their logical conclusion in the USA, you'd have to conclude that doubling energy efficiency in the USA would double our GDP, since that's what the comparison with the EU seems to tell us. So even though you're wrong, you really have no choice but to accept that increasing efficiency is ultimately in our best interest, global warming or not.

You're over using this term and it's greatly taking away from your argument. This is nothing but petty name calling and the term is absolutely meaningless.

You're trying to treat nuclear different from other forms of energy when there is no reason to do so.

bbk:

I don't believe that you are serious about solving global warming.

Well I don't believe that you are serious about it since you don't seem to be willing to do what it will take to actually solve the problem and have not been able to provide an alternative to nuclear that the public will be able to live with.

bbk:

You're simply a proponent of nuclear because you feel that it is a silver bullet solution. You've dismissed every other technology as not worth pursuing, for one thing.

I'm a proponent of nuclear because it is the only energy source we have available right now that can do the job we need. I've dismissed most of the others as not worth much investment because they aren't worth pursuing (hydro doesn't have many sites left, geothermal only works in limited locations, wind is too unreliable to be useful, ground based solar would work as an intermediate source but is too unreliable for baseload, truly clean coal looks to have marginal economics and won't do anything about coal mine deaths, biofuels bring up nasty food supply issues we really shouldn't be going anywhere near, energy efficiency may cause things to get worse and that should be the main alternatives). Now in a few decades we will probably have fusion and once we get a decent space infrastructure we'll be able to put solar panels in orbit where it is sunny almost all the time and beam the power down and both of those I'm expecting to be better than fission at least for new builds but we don't have them yet and if we are to solve the problem we must start with what we have right now.

bbk:

You'd also have to acknowledge that the biggest problem for global warming isn't that we don't have enough clean energy, but that we waste the vast majority of it.

Actually I don't because it's not true.

Though you have to acknowledge that the Rebound effect exists and that Jevons paradox is real, once you do that you'll develop a much lower opinion on the usefulness of energy efficiency for saving the planet.

Besides, if we have a clean source of energy it won't matter how much we waste but if we don't have a clean source of energy then no matter how efficient we manage to become we'll still destroy the environment and if a clean source of energy can't handle our current needs, how are we to be sure if it can handle the minimum energy needs of a much larger population (energy usage will grow as the third world catches up with us and there isn't a damn thing you can do to stop it)?

Ironically enough it was in part increased energy efficiency that got us into this mess in the first place (though for the most part energy efficiency does reduce energy consumption it is not guaranteed and it is therefore foolish to rely on it).

bbk:

Consider that the USA uses just about twice as much energy per dollar of GDP as does Europe. I'm not talking about dirty vs clean energy or money spent on energy, I'm talking about the raw energy it takes for either economy to generate a dollar.

So what? With 100% clean energy all that would indicate is that the US has an inefficient economy at worst (it could also be due to environmental differences requiring higher energy usage or the presence of energy intensive industries).

bbk:

I think that the ultimate conclusion of your argument is that the value of preserving a wasteful way of life is worth the risk of nuclear energy.

Which is about as close to non-existent as you can get for a real world technology.

Besides, who are you to say our way of life is wasteful?

bbk:

Please find a single person who is concerned about the environment but is against nuclear energy because they feel that coal, the absolute dirtiest source of fuel on this planet, is a better choice.

There is such a thing as clean coal, for the most part it is just PR crap to try to keep the coal industry alive a little bit longer but the proposed type of clean coal I refer to as truly clean coal actually would be pretty clean (the other type would be an improvement on current coal but is only slightly cleaner coal although it seems to be what the coal industry would prefer to build), clean enough that if it worked it would be able to solve our global warming problem.

bbk:

For there to be any such thing as nuclear exceptionalism here, there can only exist two choices - nuclear energy and dirty, destructive alternatives. This is a false dichotomy of your own creation.

Well there are actually four choices.
1. Use nuclear power
2. Continue with fossil fuels (and token clean sources)
3. Wait for a technological breakthrough to give us another source
4. Suffer rolling blackouts and inadequate energy while also preventing the rise of living standards in the third world

I think we should be doing 1 now and allowing 3 to make more options available, 2 and 4 are just not moral options.

bbk:

There are hundreds of alternative sources and thousands of ways to use energy more efficiently. You're simply denying that they exist.

No, I'm simply stating that they won't be able to solve our current problem.

bbk:

One funny thing about your line of arguments is that you believe that nuclear technology can be managed perfectly through the use of good design and technology,

Nothing can be managed perfectly but nuclear does have a better record than pretty much everything else (this is not a theoretical argument but an empirical fact).

bbk:

but that there is absolutely no other way for good design and technology to generate and make use of energy in a more appropriate fashion.

Who are you to decide what use of energy is appropriate?

People who drive fuel efficient cars tend to drive more than those who drive gas guzzlers which cancels out some of the gain in efficiency reducing the effectiveness of increased energy efficiency (and it happens with a lot of other things too), in rare cases what happened when James Watt developed his more efficient steam engine might occur.

Ultimately most people are not environmentalists first nor are they ideological environmentalists but whatever solution we come up with for global warming must be acceptable to them or it won't get implemented which pretty much automatically rules out the idea of large scale changes in lifestyle (the boom in hybrid sales was not because of environmental concerns but economic concerns). A lot of people in the environmental movement don't seem to be able to fully accept that not everyone views the environment in the same way they do.

There are hundreds of alternative sources

Really?

For our energy sources we have:
1) Fossil fuels, which will run out in at most centuries & have great environmental problems.
2) Sources like hydroelectric & geothermal. which are great if you have a good site nearby, but much of the world doesn't have enough of those.
3) Sources such as wind ,solar & nuclear fusion which have yet to demonstrate that they can reliably produce power on the scale needed to run an industrial civilization.
4) Nuclear fission, which can produce power on the needed scale & if we our reactors use U238 (converting to Pu239) or Th232 (converting to U233) it can continue to do so for millions or billions of years. Note: I particularly like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor see this website http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/ & the connected discussion forum.

I'll note a quibble that can be made about 3), solar for low temperature heat like water heating is a demonstrated & economic technology, while solar electricity is still only for niche markets where you don't need much more than a kilowatt & a grid connection is difficult.

I'll also note that some technologies that I think deserve the R&D money to see if they can produce power reliably on a large scale eg: http://www.skywindpower.com/ww/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
& the liquid fluoride reactor I noted above, which I think is closest to being a sure thing.