on top of everything else, nuclear power plants have to have insurance to cover an accident/leak/meltdown/accident/whatever
but no-one will insure them, too much of a risk, so the government has to cover it
and the plants cost more to decommission than they cost to build... government foots that bill instead
better to dump however many billion into renewables and storage tbh
Almost precisely what I was thinking. Renewable energy technology is getting better all of the time. Prices should continue to drop and efficiency increase over the next few years at least. What we need is a reliable and cheap large scale storage option.
Its not really. The wind does not always blow & the sun does not always shine.
THe best renewable we can have is to make use of the tides.
That depends, sometimes you don't need the electric all of the time, demand isn't constant. The common example is when a TV break comes on and there is peak demand as people put kettles and similar on. For that you need energy that is available quickly over a short time, just a few minutes. You could store energy from the grid during programs in huge capacitor banks and release it when the demand happens. It would be expensive to construct but once built energy supply would be considerably more efficient.
The second problem is when the renewables can't provide, such as solar panels at night and wind farms on calm days. For that you could use tidal power but that has problems too, there are times when the tide won't provide energy. The tide changes direction and for a short time no power will be generated.
The trans Atlantic Gulf Stream can provide a huge amount of constant power, if we can get the tech to work. We need to store power when it's available for times when it is needed. That means new batteries or very low loss capacitors. This is a problem with many present energy sources, including nuclear. It can take many hours or even days to get full production going at a nuclear power plant, and then you want it running at full power all the time for efficiency.
This is interesting, it's just a prototype, and as such has quite a few issues still, but eventually there should be no problem in storing whatever spare electric is available for when it's actually needed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34669405