Why would there be a should if there is a can?
"Countries" is pushing it for them and low industrial capacity ones at that. But yes Hydro electricity is a grand thing, aside from the occasional drought it is basically as constant as fossil fuel.
At this point of development it will mean going dark in the middle of the day. And there is no point in time when all nuclear plants will be switched off, whereas there are plenty when solar and wind simultaneously failYeah, that was my point, you need another reactor to start up a nuclear reactor and noone would rely on solar or wind alone since that might mean going dark throughout the entire night.
Water reserves for a dam, that is definitely a new one.As for batteries, of course you'd bring up the ones with chemical poisons, but there are more ways to store energy:
https://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/...power-station/
http://www.bine.info/en/publications...age-speichern/
http://inhabitat.com/scientists-unve...e-power-plant/
There are also ideas to store heat energy in sand, which can then be used at night to keep up the power and probably to restart the solar plant in the morning, at which point the storages would also be refilled again.
Just like nuclear, you may also want to keep biofuel plants around in case of actual shortages. The CO 2 output would still be nowhere near the one of coal power plants and cars.
You don't shut down a nuclear plant, you throttle the output, some are capable of raising or lowering output by 15% within the span of a minute.http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/ima....27/hourly.png
So you'd just turn 30-40GW of NPPs off during the night and restart them the next morning? Keep in mind that shutting one off and starting it again takes several days or even weeks...
NPPs are used for the base load while more flexible ones like coal or gas are used to deal with the peak loads. Renewables can use excess power to load up storages and in the long term there can also be more intelligent grids where renewables can be turned off when not needed, it's certainly faster to turn some mirrors away from the sun than to shut down an NPP.
To say it is not a risk at all is of course foolish but the risk as it stands is minimal, nuclear power plant construction since Chernobyl has been focused on safety far beyond the point of paranoia. The storage of such materials is a problem but one that is potentially solvable and currently containable.Whatever you do with it, it is risky and will stay so for hundreds of thousands of years while, as SFTS said, accidents are still a possibility even with all the safety measures.
Yes it would be best if we could provide all our power without risk or waste but currently we cannot; hydroelectric dams are limited by limited water availability and excessive if not outright obscene land usage and all other forms of green energy production are woefully unreliable and inefficient in terms of cost to output.
The best course of action with the technology currently available is to do what we can with hydroelectric but also accept that we will still have to use fuel based electricity and cover the remainder of our energy needs for a long time to come. The logical choice is to the one that produces the most amount of energy for least amount of fuel and waste that is simultaneously the easiest to contain: nuclear.
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