Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager
"With the total cost of such reactors you can build a huge amount of renewable stuff + the storage required."
"Without the hot air" is about 15 years old now (withouthotair.com , look it up!!), but all of the points made in it are still valid and more importantly, the basic numbers haven't changed much. "huge amount of renewable stuff" - enough to replace the energy generated by fossil fuels without using nuclear - means covering pretty much every single square km of undeveloped land in the UK* with solar panels, windmills or growing feedstock for biofuels. It's not that it's not possible, it's that it's not a solution that society (least of all most environmentalists) are willing to accept.
There are, broadly speaking, 4 basic options available to humanity:
1) continue burning fossil fuels and accelerate the climate catastrophe
2) switch as quickly as possible to pure renewables (environmentally disastrous, massively costly, still would have intermittency problems)
3) switch to pure renewables and significantly scale back energy consumption (even scaling back consumption by half, which would be a gigantic drop in economic output and quality of living, would still require so much land use as to be environmentally disastrous, and costs would still be massive in the face of economic collapse)
4) switch as much of fossil fuel power to nuclear as quickly as we can to have baseload nuclear, and build as many renewables as is practical to support given the intermittency.
4) is the only solution that can preserve both the environment and our quality of life, at least until (if) breakthroughs in geothermal or fusion power allows us to truly have power that is both reliable and clean.
*pretty much the same holds true of most other countries
Biting the hand that feeds IT
