If only humanity had discovered an energy source which was safer and cleaner than everything that came before, and produced no GHGs. Oh, and that we hadn't spent the last 60 years irrationally demonizing it.
Nuclear power in theory (like communism in theory) may be great, but as practiced and paid for, I'm not impressed.
But as I've harped on, it'll be great for employment long after the plants are defunct.
Deaths from coal mining: http://www.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp
So please stop reducing this to the old: "people is just hysterical and nuclear is perfectly safe". It isn't and is getting tiresome. We have solid reasons to be upset of the blatant incompetence of the nuclear sector. No amount of propaganda will cover the reality that Prypiat is a ghost town.
Despite being very gifted people with almost unlimited resources unreachable for the common guy, nobody had find a realistic solution for the nuclear waste in 50 years and nobody knows still how to decontaminate a nuclear wasteland in a safe and fast way. Finding those holy grail will make them multibillonaries in two months so is not a problem of lack of motivation.
If you prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you can convert plutonium in a purring harmless kitten all politicians in the world will be at your feet droling and thinking about how to associate his/her name with the big success and what to do with the extra money now that expensive nuclear cemeteries payed with taxes are not needed anymore.
As a rule, I try not to blame other people for my own incompetence.
Coal mining is a strawman. The comparison you want to be making is to solar, wind, hydro, and biomass.
All of which compare well with, if not better than nuclear. And which don't suddenly consecrate 300-1,000 year human-exclusion wildlife parks, and threaten continent-wide areas with toxic poison which cannot be sensed directly.
http://i.imgur.com/KqOOYai.png
From: "Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/
The problem with nuclear power is that, with little warning, things can go very, very wrong. From good neighbor to continent-contaminating, centuries-long nature-preserve (no humans allowed) creation. The uncertainty and disputes over nuclear accident consequences (Chernobyl deaths: a few dozen, hundreds, thousands, millions? Over what time? When do you close the books? What happens if containment around the sarcophogus fails some time into the future?).
The worst power plant accident of time, not a nuclear power plant failure, but a hydro station in China, Banqiao Dam. It's instructive several ways:
Any number of fairly simple methods would have hugely alleviated the impact of the disaster. Much as with major nuclear disasters, it was a cascade of failures, starting with poor management and a dysfunctional culture, amplified through poor design, adverse conditions, poor communications, delayed or absent warnings, and little or no disaster response (many of the deaths were attributed to starvation and disease, not drowning or other physical impacts).
A useful thing to keep in mind, though, is that after a dam break is done being a a massive disaster area, which typically resolves in a few hours to a few weeks, the land is no longer a glowing radioactive mess. It can be re-settled and populated as structures and infrasctructure are rebuilt. Zhumadian City, the region surrounding Banqiao, has a present population of over 7 million.
Or look up the story of the Johnstown Flood, worst dam break in US history (by deaths), which saw the emergence of the Red Cross, of national response to disasters, and changes in liability laws.
(Excepting Johnstown and Banqiao, dam failure mortality falls off rapidly, with another 8 disasters of 1,000+ lives. Wikipedia gives some 908 notable dams, and 137 hydroelectric facilities of 1GW+ net capcity.)
There are other questions, notably whether or not "deaths per GWh generation" is the most appropriate measure of risk. Particularly for a technology whose risk tail spans not years, decades, or even centuries, but millennia. Or longer.
Last I checked, there were few human institutions with lifespans of similar scale. Technical or otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2awjj2/thought...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/283sz1/key_fac...?
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-clima...
It changes too quickly - faster than most other electricity production sources can cope.
If you have hydro or something that can ramp up and down production as quickly as wind does - and the grid stability to be able to do so - wind could be great.
But if you don't, it's not so great. And unfortunately far too often wind gets put in places that don't have that ability for political reasons.
Grid-scale energy storage would be great - if we actually had it in any meaningful amount.
Bigger grids, lots more wind turbines geographically distributed, pumped hydro, demand management, smart grids.
These are all being rolled out right now in various places and we've not exploited these to anywhere near their full potential so we'd be best to do so before calling a halt to expanding wind (or solar, which has similar issues and solutions).
In the short term gas burning plants that we only turn on when we actually need to is a stop gap measure that isn't perfect, but is better than just running them (or worse coal) all the time.
With AC power, bigger grids can create instabilities. Look at the 2005 Java–Bali blackout, for instance. Cascading failure. Or the Northeast blackout. Cascading failure. Etc.(With DC power, you have the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Among other things, you need less failsafes for DC than with AC, and it's easier to bootstrap the grid.) You can avoid this by... making grids less interdependent. Which you cannot do if you're tying them together for purposes of keeping them running. (And smart grids mean that things go wrong more badly when they do go bad.)
Lots of wind turbines geographically distributed would be great - except, of course, that wind power isn't available everywhere. Remember, the power carried by wind scales roughly as the cube of the windspeed. There's a relatively small window of "enough, but not too much" where wind power makes sense.
Ditto - pumped hydro I talked about, but again, you have to have a watershed with enough capacity. Which isn't the case everywhere.
Demand management... Good luck with that. That's politics, as much as anything. We have come to expect reliable power, and trying to convince people otherwise is an uphill battle, as it is very much a regression.
And as for small-scale gas-burning plants... Two things. First, by the time you've added up the wind turbines (again, wind turbines are hideous for the environment to make!), the additional infrastructure required to be able to inject power safely at distributed points, the additional infrastructure for a smart grid, and the gas-burning plants, things look much less obvious. And secondly, gas-burning plants are either inefficient or don't scale fast enough to be worth it.
Oh, and they are expensive. It may be better to sink the absurd amounts of money that is required for wind (especially when you realize that gas-burning plants are really expensive for their energy output) elsewhere.
The first person to suggest building the electrical grids we already have would have seemed a bit of a visionary, because they are truly epic bits of engineering but lots of problems have been solved along the way and continue to need solved as thing evolve.
Throwing your hands up at the first hint of potential problems is basically a variant on the FUD we know so well in computing, as is claiming wind turbines are "hideous" for the environment. People love that old switcheroo, "electric cars are worse for the environment than ICE cars", "Solar panels use more carbon than they will ever save" etc. except when you look at the serious studies done by actual experts you find these questions were dealt with thoroughly years before, and the people who keep repeating them aren't interested in facts.
Wind turbines aren't magic fairy dust, they're technology. They can be used well, they can be used badly, they can get better. One of the big changes is that larger turbines can be deployed successfully in lots more places and take advantage of slower average windspeeds. That's not revolutionary, but that and thousands of other improvements are making wind and solar cheaper every day. The problems that remain are far more solvable, and cost-efficient to deal with, than dealing with the consequences of continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere.
Many nations are already building/converting gas generators just to avoid using coal, an on balance this is a good thing from a pollution and carbon perspective. Making use of stuff that already exists to plug gaps as we go forward really isn't that radical a suggestion.
But again you're missing what I was saying with my original comment - namely that wind turbines seem to be far too often built where it makes political sense, not necessarily where it actually makes sense.
As is far too often the case for renewable energy, it seems.
I don't see anything about wind power that makes it particularly susceptible to politics, in fact the decentralized nature of wind and solar seems to make it a bit less likely for one entity to be given monopoloy rights and therefore be able to kickback large sums to politicians and lobbyists.
"It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Whatever has happened in the past, this calls for all possible steps to be taken ASAP.
That sort of thinking has never led to irreversible disaster! ;)