The key is that high level waste is a very small percentage of the total waste. It takes very little space to store it. The only problem with storage in the US is that we are prevented from doing it sanely by both ridiculous standards (no leakage for 10,000 years), NIMBY’s which include people not wanting the waste transported near them and people who don’t want it stored anywhere nearby, and environmentalists who just want to obstruct nuclear.

As for terrorist attacks — no system that has a lot of energy in it is immune to that. Your PG&E example simply shows that your state government is dysfunctional in two ways: (1) oversight of PG&E, which they control through licensing, and (2) obstruction of forest thinning and other measures to reduce forest fire danger.

Solutions for storage are simply not plentiful, at least not if they are to be economic and environmentally friendly. Pumped hydro is probably the best but it still has significant cost. You need a two places to put a large amount of water — because you pump it to the upper, and let it flow to the lower.

As for TMI — it may have had bad engineering, but it also was nothing but a financial disaster as a consequence. All power systems are subject to that. Fukushima was another engineering mistake. We learn from our mistakes.

Both of those suggest that inherently safe reactors may be the best solution, even if they are less efficient. Multiple designs exist for these — reactors which rely on no active system for cooling, or reactors with a negative temperature coefficient so if they get hot, the reaction is quenched (the exact opposite of the weapons plutonium breeder design of Chernobyl (one of several design issues which contributed to the disaster when they ran a dangerous experiment).

The nuclear power industry has a very good safety record, in the US and worldwide (outside the former USSR). The number of deaths and injuries are miniscule compared to that for wind or for residential solar. But in the US, the industry is inefficient, since the more capital you spend, the more money you make when you are a regulated monopoly utility. Plus, most of our reactors were custom built, which is just plain dumb.

Don’t allow that. That’s one of the reasons for modular reactors — you have one design, and you build one after another. Canada did that and so did France. France gets 70% of its power from nuclear, stores the waste just fine in that geographically small country.

As for land under windmills being useful for other things. Have you spent much time driving the midwest? I’m a storm chaser and have done a lot of it. Those giant (30 story tall) skyscrapers that hold the windmills are all over the place. A wind farm has a fine network of roads, which is hardly environmentally friendly, but necessary for construction and subsequent maintenance. It has a large amount of material. Sometimes it catches fire, or blades fall off, or it gets hit by a tornado. The land is pretty useless because of all this. Also, the huge rotating blades make the land uninhabitable, due to both the sound (mostly subsonic) and the visual disturbance from the shadows. People have a lot of trouble with this.

Also, wind farms are incredibly ugly, unless you get up close. There is no way environmentalist or a lover of nature would allow these huge steel, concrete and fiberglass monstrosities anywhere near where *they* live (look at Massachusetts offshore controversies), if it weren’t for a religious belief in their wonderfulness.

And, the true cost of wind and solar is hidden, because wind farms (for example) are both subsidized, and don’t pay for the grid stability problems they create. They are not required to pay for the backup power that overall lets the grid handle its needs when the wind is not generating. As a result, in Texas for example, reliable plants are shutting down because they cannot compete with the subsidized and very low marginal cost power from wind farms. Because of subsidies and lack of capacity requirements (i.e. reliable power), in Texas it is not unusual for wind farms to pay the grid to *take* their power — in other words, their marginal costs are negative — an economic impossibility in a sane system. But when they cannot generate, you need those other plants. Wind and solar do not deliver dispatchable energy, and grids cannot work reliably without a high percentage of dispatchable energy.

Germany, which stupidly shut down its nuclear plants, has had to build coal plants to provide backup — which is laughably ironic. They also spent more than $1 trillion dollars equivalent to build necessary new transmission lines for the unreliable energy. As a result, they have the highest electric power costs in the developed world.

So, as you note, storage or alternate generation capacity is needed. But the costs of those do not appear in the LCOE, the metric people use to show the low cost of solar and wind.

Again, pumped hydro is interesting. Maybe it can be done cost effectively, but if so, it isn’t going to be by creating lakes. There isn’t the land for that, and environmentalists *will* prevent building enough to make any difference at all.

So you have to find some other way to do it. One way that is in use in Europe is underground reservoirs, but that is quite expensive. It has the advantage of not requiring a lot of land use, it isn’t ugly, it doesn’t harm the environment, and it doesn’t require canyons and rivers.

But how much are we willing to pay for this? And in our quest to de-carbonize, how will we keep the developing world from building more coal plants, or for that matter, the dictatorships that don’t give a damn. China is the largest country on earth, it is run by a sociopathic dictatorship, and it is building a vast number of coal plants. It is also looking seriously at modular nuclear plants, something very difficult in democracies because people just won’t let us do it efficiently.

To me, the largest problems are that decarbonization has to be worldwide or it is silly — it just drives electrical usage to places that don’t care, at the economic expense of the people of places that do. Also, it harms poor people a lot, fatally in fourth world countries, because it is so expensive, and to a lot of populations, and increase in energy costs will lead to more deaths.