I am highly encouraged by the degree of openness to nuclear being a big part of the future mix here in this thread.
I've said it a million times before on the forum, but there are reactor technologies safer than existing plants that will produce electricity at costs lower than coal fired plants. The key resides in having liquid fuel, and salt coolant.
I am working on a project that is developing and commercializing one such design here in Canada. Check it out:
http://www.terrestrialenergy.com
Being a proponent of geothermal is being a proponent of nuclear fission. Over 70% of the heat generated by our planet is done so through naturally occurring fission of uranium and thorium in the mantle.
TerraPower's traveling wave reactor will never get off paper, even they as a company are looking into molten salt variants to keep their options open and team together. Transatomic is another molten salt group gaining momentum, focusing on using waste nuclear fuel as their fuel (all MSRs can do this), they've recently received investment from Peter Theil's founders fund. China is seriously developing several variations and could probably deploy multiple styles as they continue their growth. To me these reactors are an ideal bridge technology to the very high temperature gas cooled designs (material science needs time to advance further first). Ideal because MSRs will work very well with existing grids, industrial processes, and create a blue ocean growth opportunity for the nuclear industry.
A reduction in reliance on hydrocarbon is going to have to be a very gradual one as a huge amount of people on the planet lift themselves (rightfully so) out of abject poverty. It will take decades for the mix to substantially change, and I don't think renewables will ever have more of a place than in extremely specific and limited scenarios.
As for fusion, well the details of Lockheed's work have been circulating in scientific circles for quite some time, to no big fanfare. Lawrence Livermore had a significant step as well producing net positive power, but the problem with fusion will always come down to repeating the process over and over again in a fashion that makes it useful. It is still VERY far away in it's current incarnation. Again, material and controls limitations. I am not sure why the Lockheed stuff is coming to the media now and with so little detail. It's weird.
Anyways my points stand. Renewables have proven themselves to be ineffectivat reducing emissions in practice and they do not add useful capacity to the grid in any scale. It's not a fit in practice and any northern hemisphere developed economy that is experiencing it the hard way. I suspect Ontario will be doing whatever they can to get out of the renewable projections they forecast as part of their 2013 long term energy plan after the population revolted over the forward price curves.
Yes, traditionally coal and oil interests have major stakes in being anti-nuclear and supporting anti-nuclear activities. It has been shown several times that hydrocarbon lobby will use back channels to support solar PR as a "safe and realistic" clean tech to keep misinformation high and support for nuclear low in the general population. Some oil companies are legitimate energy businesses though, and do have interests in nuclear engineering, development, generation, etc as well so it's not as black and white as one might think.
The reality is that until some major advancements can be made, we will need all of the sources we can get to maintain fair standards and access to high quality of life for everyone on earth while doing what we can to not accelerate our impact on the climate. We are already in a position where relocation, adaptation and reclamation costs are going to be huge for a massive piece of our population - likely within the next 100 years. We might as well do what we can to innovate, soften the blow, and maybe even get ahead of it by accelerating plans to colonize extraterrestrial outposts. Keep pushing the frontiers of physics and who knows what can happen in another 100 years, we do need to start to think and act more aggressively to ensure survival of our species and planet.
So yeah, electric cars. Woo!
How clean are electric cars
