Chernobyl

[Greyblades]

Unfortunately, this isn't a perfect world.

Depends what you mean by perfect but lets leave the semantics to the pedants. When it works, which is 99.999999999% of the time, it doesn't release anything into the atmosphere which is more than can be said for combustion based power production.

Even before Chernobyl influenced reforms it took either a huge series of screw ups or an act of god to make nuclear plants fail in any way that affects the world outside a plant.

[Strike For The South]

You gentleman are familiar with the concept of scale, right? One accident endangers millions of lives (the born and the not) for and untold number of years. Putting complete trust in safety features and assuming no human error is usually how bad things happen.

What is the benefit of nuclear energy as opposed solar or wind? Is it even really less harmful to than environment that coal?

[Fragony]

It's just the best right now

[Greyblades]

The benefit is scale: solar and wind production units are individually inefficient;you need huge farms of them to get close to the power output of a single nuclear plant and the production is not reliant on inconsistent sun and wind exposure.

As for enviroment it is rather a non issue; normal operation is clean, it's waste easily contained and stored. When it sufferes failures it can be highly damaging to the operating staff but radiation rarely reach beyond the walls of the plant. When it has a catastrophic meltdown, of which we only have one example: Chernobyl, you make an Exclusion zone about this big and radioactive material is scattered continent wide, though to a fraction of an degree of a nuclear weapon; we wont accidentally cause a nuclear winter through reactor explosions.

When it happened there was a threat that the nuclear material would melt through the ground and reach groundwater, but it didnt reach that and a Sarcophagus, a multilayered shield, was built around the core post explosion to make sure and IIRC a similar construct is now mandatory in power plants today.

The effects on Human usage is enormous, but the enviroment on the other hand, to be frank, doesnt seem to give two shits. Chernobyl is overgrown and filled with wildlife to the point that poachers are a problem in the "dead zone". If the Ukraine wasnt dirt poor they probably could reclaim most of it for human use.

[Fragony]

On top of that, you should be AGAINST wind and solar energy if it's the enviroment is your major issue with nuclear-plants. They do more harm than good.

[Greyblades]

Well they do kill quite a lot of pigeons and make a lot of noise, but I don't think they are that detrimental. Just keep them away from residential areas and don't stick them near any nesting grounds and they'll be fine.

[Fragony]

The sound of windmills literally makes people sick, I got a girlfriend where I sometimes spend the night with near these, there is that low sound-resonation that just never gets away. A lot of people there are really desperate about it they simply can't sleep. In coastal area's it arent photo-models that wash up but utterly confused sea-mammals, it disorientates them. It isn't any good. Solar panels need a lot of mining, so that isn't any good either. All envireromental reasons not to go for nuclear energy is simply bullshit. You never said they weren't, just saying they are

[Greyblades]

Solar panels need a lot of mining, so that isn't any good either. All envireromental reasons not to go for nuclear energy is simply bullshit.

Nuclear power require a significant amount of mining as well.

The issue is that the bang for the buck, as it were, is magnitudes greater with nuclear power than solar or wind and that is not going to change for a long time.
Nuclear energy is a clean, strategically viable and relatively plentiful power source capable of providing for the high energy demands of the modern era and it is the logical choice to keep the world running until renewable energy is developed enough to be a real feasible alternative.

[Kralizec]

The sound of windmills literally makes people sick, I got a girlfriend where I sometimes spend the night with near these, there is that low sound-resonation that just never gets away. A lot of people there are really desperate about it they simply can't sleep. In coastal area's it arent photo-models that wash up but utterly confused sea-mammals, it disorientates them. It isn't any good. Solar panels need a lot of mining, so that isn't any good either. All envireromental reasons not to go for nuclear energy is simply bullshit. You never said they weren't, just saying they are

A lot of this reminds me of that old "power lines cause cancer" trope.

[Husar]

it's waste easily contained and stored.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/madres1/

Nuclear reactors produce high level radioactive wastes which present a variety of problems that must be considered for safe disposal. [4] Some waste products will generate considerable heat as they decay while others will remain intensely radioactive for very long time periods. Because of these hazards, disposal regulations require isolation of the wastes from the public and the environment for tens of thousands of years. Some of the most concerning byproducts from spent fuel are Plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years), Technetium-99 (half-life 220,000 years), and Iodine-129 (half-life 15.7 million years). [4] Without a permanently safe location for these byproducts, society will have to carry the burden of storing and guarding nuclear wastes for many centuries. This turns the nuclear energy process into a moral issue involving sustainability and the fact that the power consumed today will leave radioactive garbage for future generations. [5] While the nuclear fuel cycle hardly exacerbates global warming, nuclear power still poses globally significant risks. Two that dominate the discussion are the vulnerability of spent nuclear fuel in storage pools to terrorist attack and leakage from geologic repositories that are designed to isolate high level waste from the natural environment. [3] The biggest problem is how to keep radioactive waste in storage when there is nothing that could be built that would be definitively safe until the waste becomes benign after hundreds of thousands of years. A final high level waste deposit must be absolutely reliable, because the quantities of poison are tremendous, and it must be permanently guarded which requires a society with stability that has not yet been demonstrated by humankind. [5]

By the way, there is solar power and then there is solar power, some of it requires a power unit and the mining required to make mirrors.

Check out Desertec: http://www.desertec.org

It requires a huge initial investment to build the necessary infrastructure that noone wants to pay for and then one may have qualms about not all countries in North Africa being good partners for this, but then again we heat many of our homes with Russian gas anyway, so...

The technology is certainly less harmful than burying material below our drinking water that is stored in containers that last a few thousand years but stays poisonous for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Not that I need to care, but do you like people who poison (their) children?

[Greyblades]

I said contain and store. I said dick about dispose. All we need to do is keep it out of the hands of lunatics until space travel becomes cheap and we can chuck it all in the sun. Methinks the containment can survive that long.

As for an african solar cell, good luck keeping the damn things working. Maintaining delecate electronics in a desert is a nightmare. You'd have to replace half of them within a year.

[Husar]

I said contain and store. I said dick about dispose. All we need to do is keep it out of the hands of lunatics until space travel becomes cheap and we can chuck it all in the sun. Methinks the containment can survive that long.

As for an african solar cell, good luck keeping the damn things working. Maintaining delecate electronics in a desert is a nightmare. You'd have to replace half of them within a year.

What delicate electronics? As I said there is solar power and then there is solar power. I don't think anyone proposed to put photovoltaic cells into the African desert. Too expensive, not enough power. There are better, more low-tech solutions to use on such a grand scale.
So unless a mirror counts as delicate electronics, I assume it will work just fine.

All one needs to do is to go to the desertec site and click on "The Concept" in the menu structure to see the three proposed methods:
- Parabolic trough
- Fresnel collector
- Solar tower

None of them use photovoltaic units.

[Greyblades]

I did visit that website, it is not made for phones as I could barely make it out, it's marketing indeed implying sticking solar panels in the desert.

Regardless, it is currently a pipe dream and the project died in 2009 because of it. Currently the world's highest capacity concentrated solar thermal power station is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Nevada desert, It's gross capacity is 392 megawatts which is on the low end of capacity for a single Nuclear core, of which most stations have multiple.

It is under performing, producing in 2014 around half of the power it is specc'd for, which the owners say is down to "clouds, jet contrails and weather" It has improved since then but it is still risking decommission which may be down to the fact that it needs to burn 46,084 metric tons of carbon (in the form of natural gas) a year just getting it thing working each morning.

A nuclear plant doesn't need a kick start, it isn't affected by the weather, save for natural disasters that would absolutely demolish a solar plant, and a single high end core can produce 4 times the electricity of a solar plant at a constant rate, 24/7 365 days a year.

Nuclear also has a competitive start up cost: Ivanpah cost $2.2 billion, the Sizewell B Core in Suffolk that produces 3 times the energy at $5.3 billion. It is also profitable, whereas Ivanpah recently asked for a government grant of half a billion dollars to pay off it's start up loan.