It is heartening to see intelligent discussion about nuclear power and its options. I too forsook the potential for rational discussion on these issues almost 30 years ago, deciding that the market, economic forces, would eventually force our unwieldy society to reign in legal opportunists used by sometimes naive, sometimes political Luddites, who wish to throttle progress.
Once a solar idealist, I did a graduate project to evaluate the potential for solar thermal electric, and learned, in a nutshell, that, among other liabilities, it is too dangerous (industrial accident statistics are not in question about the number of accidents as a function of height, time of day, weather), too expensive, and, in spite of my intuition, there is not nearly enough suitable land to cover with collectors of any type for solar to be more of a fringe supplier to the electrical grid.
Solar has already caused many orders of magnitude more deaths and injuries than commercial nuclear power! How many people died or were injured at Three Mile Island, our worst nuclear accident? None! Chernobyl, while characterized by some as a “commercial” reactor, was created by a noncommercial society, without the containment structures required by all reactors in Western countries, and still resulted in something like 50 lives lost. The numbers of people killed and injured falling off of roofs while working on residential solar installations each year is close to 1000.
I wouldn’t expect people to understand the solar energy flux, or the effect on insolation of water vapor. I do think most understand that the sun sets each day, and that if you start with .8 Kilowatts/sq meter on a perfect clear day at the equator, what you end up with after conversion, storage, transmission, is much much less. The potential for snake oil, and the elasticity of the US economy makes boondoggles certain until the market straightens things out.
I would rather see nuclear fuel used to generate electricity than fossil fuels, but have seen no convincing argument that CO2 has anything to do with warming; to the contrary, the inconvenient truth is that the record shows that warming preceded the increase in CO2 by from 100 to 800 years, perhaps suggesting that the release of C02 from oceans as the earth moves through a cyclic warming trend drives CO2 to follow warming.
Keep up the thoughtful discussion, all of you.