[photon]

Originally Posted by ken0042

Replace nuclear with hydro, and I will agree with you. deGrasse Tyson's point was that the sun produces more than enough power to provide for our electricity needs; even if those needs increased 100 fold. (Which is possible if we switch from gas heat to electric.)

Sure but gathering that power isn't that simple, and solar just doesn't cut it as baseload electricity, you have to either have something to pick up the slack while the variable sources vary, or a massive energy storage system (which means you need many times the variable production as well, if you get solar for 8 hours you need 3 times as much solar plus storage to provide 24 hours worth).

Solar takes a lot more materials, a while back I'd mentioned a study where as India develops and gets electricity to their people (which is a huge health issue for them, burning wood or whatever to cook food causes huge repository issues for people, especially kids) they need to bring on a certain amount of electricity generation (and they're running out of coal as well). Comparing doing that generation in Nuclear vs Solar, solar will tie up the entire world's steel industry for a decade or more, and a significant portion of the world's concrete. Never mind China.

If it's photovoltaic solar then making the panels creates toxic waste that has to be managed, and the creation process is energy intensive and "repaying" the energy used to make the cell (i.e. the amount of time it takes for a solar cell to generate more electricity than it took to make it) is measured in years (though it used to be decades so this is improving).

Originally Posted by ken0042

I just don't see why nuclear has to be one of the options. It's a messy solution when cleaner solutions are also available.

All solutions are messy in different ways, including solar (10 times more people die from solar than from nuclear per unit of energy generated, 170,000 died from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China). Nuclear should be one of the options because we need the capacity now, we can't wait for an unknown period of time for solar to become viable baseload generation. And it's safer than everything else.

In the long term nuclear will hopefully just be a stepping stone to more pervasive solar and/or fusion, but we can't wait for an indeterminate amount of time, we have to use what we have.

Originally Posted by ken0042

Then comes the political aspect. Do we allow North Korea, Iran, etc to have nuclear power? Outside of the odd James Bond movie, I've never heard of a terrorist using hydro or solar as a weapon of mass destruction.

Or let them continue to burn oil or natural gas, the idea is to reduce human output enough to stop further damage, not to reduce it to zero. Or come up with one of a thousand other possible solutions.

There's no such thing as a perfect solution, just better ones and worse ones.