Just one of the reactors at Diablo Canyon put out more juice than all the windpower worldwide combined.
Nuclear power, from a purely technical standpoint is ideal for the generation of electricity for this type of purpose, as well as being (groan) “carbon neutral.”
It is amazing to me how many people think there will be some magic bullet to solve all of our energy needs and pollution issues. It's going to take a lot of different things - solar, wind and biofuels, where they're practical, won't come close to replacing fossil fuels, but they're a piece of the puzzle.
If electric and hydrogen cars make zero difference in overal pollution, they can at least move it around -- getting automotive emissions out of crowded cities where they cause smog. And as cleaner technologies become available, they only have to be rolled out to thousands of power plants instead of to millions of vehicles.
With the current state of electric car technology, they're only practical for some uses, and not cost-competitive with internal-combustion cars for most drivers. But when was the last time you saw any new technology that didn't become more efficient and less expensive as it became more widespread?
Hydrogen proponents love to point out that we can get hydrogen from water, never mind that the Laws of Thermodynamics say we won't get as much energy out of recombining it into water than we put into splitting the H2O in the first place.
Any means of fueling a car has inefficiencies. Electricity from the grid is inefficient because there aren't any zero-resistance transmission lines. One thread a month or two ago highlighted a guy in England who powers his house with a small turbine he put in a backyard stream, without significantly changing the flow of the stream. Small, decentralized solutions like that won't make the grid obsolete, but they'll reduce the demand on the grid and cut the amount of power lost to long-distance transmission.
Imagine solar cells on every rooftop in America. It's just a matter of making them cheap and durable enough to replace conventional shingles. They're not terribly efficient, but if they're inexpensive enough, it doesn't matter -- it's something for nothing.
The advantage of H2 from water is that the infrastructure is already in place to deliver electricity and water to pretty much every home and business in the country. It's not dissimilar to the reason we make ethanol from corn -- it's something we already have tons and tons of. Over the next couple of decades, I expect we'll experiment with a lot of energy alternatives, some will be practical for limited use and others not even that, before we spend billions on a new infrastructure.
Simply put, whether now for environmental reasons or later when we eventually run out of fossil fuels (however long that may take) we will need to find a replacement for the vast amount of energy that we currently get from them.
I don't think it's inevitable that we'll run out of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, so part of any comprehensive energy strategy has to include using them more cleanly and efficiently, as well as cutting use to stretch out the supply. I'd rather not picture a future with no fossil fuel use, because I don't like cooking on an electric stove. Besides which, we're still creating fossil fuels -- there are landfills in every municipality producing methane as we speak.
Solar and wind power just aren't reliable enough to replace fossil fuels, and the mere suggestion of building a dam is almost unspeakable in 1st world Western countries today.
At least as far as I see it, the biggest problem in the US isn't the environmental objections to new hydroelectric dams, the problem is that most of the best sites for them already have a dam. There isn't really a spot to put another dam on the Colorado, and damming the Mississippi would create a serious transportation problem.
The problem with solar, wind and tidal energy is, as you rightly point out, a lack of reliability -- they're intermittent. So the challenge there is storage. That doesn't necessarily mean batteries; there are many ways to store energy. The classic, low-tech example is a water tower -- pump water up into the cistern when energy is cheap and abundant, and when energy is scarce and expensive, you can turn off (or down) the pumps and let gravity do the work.
Simply put, only nuclear power can do for us what fossil fuels do now.
More use of nuclear fission is certainly a big part, likely the biggest part, of the puzzle. But even if we bash trough a lot of the bureaucratic blockage, nuclear plants are huge and expensive, and take a long time to build. We ought to be moving on that, but it would be a mistake to jump in with both feet, building nuclear plants that will be obsolete while others of the same design are still being built.
Science and engineering are pretty well-refined in this country, but there's still a lot of trial and error, and each generation of power plants should be looked at as a test-bed for the next, with an eye to make each new plant more effective, reliable and efficient than the one that came before.
It's almost comical to watch the environmentalists fight among themselves over that point- with some having realized the necessity of developing nuclear power whilst other still go into conniptions at the mere suggestion of using more nuclear power because nuclear=evil is dogma for them.
"Environmentalists" aren't a monolithic force. I doubt that any Freepers think we should all live off the grid in a yurt, but I also suspect that few want to see a Wal-Mart built on the edge of the Grand Casanyon.
Some are, indeed, dogmatic in opposition to anything nuclear. Others have legitimate concerns about the disposal of nuclear waste, while others have overblown fears of an American Chernobyl. The debate going on among environmentalists now -- and the internal debate for many individual environmentalists -- is which is the greater threat, air pollution or spent fuel rods. In the last 10-20 years, a lot of folks have altered their thinking. Picture a graph with the nuclear waste curve flat or curving down, and the atmospheric emissions curve trending upward.
I'm not getting into the "global warming" debate, because frankly it's not all that relevant. Whether human activity is changing the atmosphere or not, reducing fossil fuel consumption is a good idea on many levels -- for starters, it reduces the reliance of our economy on crazy people in unstable parts of the world. Second, it makes our economy more self-reliant and efficient at the most fundamental level.
And finally -- this is not the pre-eminent concern, but it counts for something -- it'd just make life more pleasant. No one likes eye-burning smog during rush hour. Am I willing to tank the economy to ensure pretty skies? Of course not. But if I can spend the same, or a little bit more, to do something in a way that's more enjoyable, i often do. That's the same calculation everyone makes when ordering a meal, buying a car or choosing which hotel to stay in.
Where I part company with the Al Gore and Leo diCaprio school of environmental thought is that I don't think that wise public policy comes from an atmosphere of panic. We should be, and are, taking measured and rational steps to expand our energy base and use more alternatives. That will certainly include nuclear, but there won't be a single magic bullet.
For a precedent, I like to look back to acid rain -- haven't heard that phrase in a while, have you? It was a legitimate, measurable phenomenon, with clear and observable effects. Without shutting down the economy, we fixed it. Better scrubbing technology reduced sulphur emissions (the collapse of Rust Belt heavy manufacturing certainly contributed, too) without a mass closure of coal-burning factories and power plants.
In the case of acid rain, we saw a problem and fixed it. We oughtn't blow off environmental concerns, but we also don't need to go Chicken Little about it. We have goals that must be balanced -- jobs, a thriving economy, environmental protection. Flipping your s--t makes good theater, but bad policy. Moving forward in smart ways to balance those goals is less dramatic, but it by-God works better.