Chernobyl

[Husar]

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 fail

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.

The question is whether an NPP is still profitable if it runs on 50% capacity for half a day.

As for solar and wind being unreliable, first off that should be less of a problem if you have enough over a wide area and secondly it's why you'd get plenty of storage to take over during a lull. Of course the investment costs are huge, but the running costs not so much.

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.

http://www.dw.com/en/german-city-of-...ant/a-19021423

I wouldn't be so sure, the US even lost a few nuclear bombs, so to trust humans to always be on their best behavior with something very dangerous is maybe not the best idea.

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.

Of course we cannot do it currently, I was talking more about what we should invest in for the future and not about shutting everything down right now. As for the cost to output, you have exactly zero fuel costs for solar, water and wind as nature provides the fuel to you for free.

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.

Then keep the nuclear reactors running and slowly replace everything else with renewables until you can begin replacing the NPPs as well, shouldn't be so hard, or? Funding a project such as desertec might go a long way towards that as I can see how solar is not so useful for half the year around the north pole.