In addition, the environmental impact of fossil fuels is much greater in the immediate term, which we have to survive before we start worrying about the next ten thousand years. And that's ignoring any issues about fossil fuels becoming an increasingly depleted resource.
There are two important things you're forgetting here.
The first is that to create nuclear power requires the depletion of fossil fuels. Diesel-fuelled digging machinery digs, diesel-powered trucks cart the ore away, coal-fired plants mill the ore, gas-fired stations provide the electricity for the gas centrifuges doing the enrichment, etc. It may be objected that in future we could have hydrogen-fuel-celled machinery, and nuclear power stations for the enrichment, etc; but currently we don't have these things. It's prudent to base your plans on what has been proven to be technically possible, not on what may or may not happen. No-one is proposing that we set up vast hydrogen-generation plants powered by nuclear reactors, etc. They're only proposing more nuclear reactors.
So, generating nuclear power burns fossil fuels. Generating energy also consumes energy, and this energy has to come from somewhere.
The second point is that uranium, like coal, gas and oil, is a finite resource. We often see grand numbers tossed around of the amount of uranium available, giving amounts available in the sea, too. But while there are large amounts available, the useful amounts are considerably smaller.
Again, getting this uranium consumes energy. Now, uranium is an ore like any other. Sometimes you'll find a seam of the ore where 5% of it is uranium; sometimes only 0.0001%. So from one mine, for every 100 tonnes of ore you process, you'll get 5 tonnes of uranium, but from another mine, only a couple of kilogrammes of uranium. To process 100 tonnes of ore takes the same amount of energy whether you get 5 tonnes or 2 kg of actual uranium out of it. Of course the enrichment takes less energy, but the mining and milling takes the same energy.
So, if you have this 5% ore, getting 5 tonnes of uranium out of that 100 tonnes of ore, that's great, you'll get lots more energy from the uranium than you consumed mining it. But when you come to that 0.002% ore, with 2kg out of 100 tonnes, then the energy balance doesn't look so good.
What that means is that only ores of a certain grade are useful for energy. This has nothing to do with money - it's a physical process to dig the stuff up and mill it. It's energy. So what you can do is to calculate how much energy the stuff can generate, and then calculate how much energy it takes to mine it and mill it, and then you'll find the ore grade below which it's not useful to mine for energy.
When you go through and do all the calculations, it turns out that below ore grades of 0.02% - less than 20kg of available uranium per 100 tonnes of ore - you spend more energy processing it than you'll get out of it in a nuclear reactor.
So, only uranium ores of above 0.02% grade are useful for energy. This cuts out a lot of the uranium which actually exists in the world. When you divide the total energy this uranium can get by the current electricity production of the world - that is, suppose that all the electricity gets generated by nuclear - you get about seven years' supply.
Some people answer that "fast breeder" reactors will solve this problem. Now, in uranium, there are two main isotopes - U-238, and U-235. U-235 is the one we want for nuclear power, because it's radioactive, breaks down; but it only makes up 0.7% of the natural ore. A "fast breeder" reactor is designed to turn some of the U-238 into Pu-239 (plutonium) and U-235, so that in principle instead of using 0.7% of the uranium, we'd use 100% of it; instead of 7 years, then we'd have 1,000 years. However, in practice the best performance attained by any fast breeder reactor has been to create another 0.2% of U-235 and Pu-239, and the best performance hoped for in theoretical designs is to create 0.5%. That would mean that you'd put (say) 2kg of U-235 in, and when that was consumed, you'd then have 1.6kg of U-235 and Pu-239 left.
So the best we can hope for from fast breeder reactors is that they'll increase the effective supply by 80%; so we get 12 years of world electricity supply instead of 7 years.
You can fiddle with the figures a bit and get much more pessimistic or optimistic results, but you can't reasonably hope for more than 20 years' electricity supply, with any foreseeable technology.
That's the energy balance. Let's imagine a perfect nuclear world.
- nuclear power and waste disposal becomes perfectly safe.
- we develop a method for decommissioning power plants and rendering the area they were on usable - not one single power plant in the world has ever been completely decommissioned, usually they just put up a fence - but let's imagine we actually do it.
- the other problem of fast breeder reactors is that they produce weapons-grade plutonium. Imagine every country in the world with weapons-grade plutonium. Iran, Libya, Botswana, Chile - all of those countries with the means to make nuclear weapons.
- for the world to produce nuclear energy entirely, we'd be talking about one new nuclear power station being built somewhere every month for the next forty years.
- so that means nuclear energy not only for Australia and Canada and the like, but for Ghana and Zimbabwe and El Salvador. Will they be as safe as us?
Let's imagine that Perfect Nuclear World, that all these problems are magically solved.
That still leaves less than twenty years' energy supply from nuclear power - at
best.
Then what? Then the uranium runs out, and... we're back to where we are now, wondering about renewable energy.
Wouldn't it be simpler to not bother, and just go straight to the renewable energy? Think of it this way - you learn that you're going to be fired from your job. You're not sure when you'll be jobless, and lose your money supply. Could be a month from now, could be a year. But you know your time is limited, it's finite. And they're also going to halve your wages at some point along the way. When do you start looking for a new job? Now? Or do you wait until you're actually fired?
So, we know that the fossil fuels, and the uranium, are going to run out. Maybe fifty years, maybe twenty, who knows. Before they completely run out, at some point world demand will exceed world supply. What happens when demand of a vital resource exceeds supply? War, social chaos, famine. So when should we start looking at resources which
do not run out, ever?
We can continue using resources which will run out - coal, oil, gas, uranium - or we can use resources which are infinite - wind, solar, tidal, geothermal. Use finite resources, or infinite? Wow, difficult question!
So I oppose nuclear power for the simple reason that it's stupid to use a finite resource when we have an infinite one at our disposal.
Certainly there are technical difficulties involved in establishing renewable energy networks. Likewise, there are technical difficulties with nuclear power. The technical difficulties with renewable energy do not involve relying on every tin-pot little country in the world being able to deal with radioactive materials safely, and relying on them never to be tempted to develop nuclear weapons.
Seems like an easy question to me.
Also factor in then environmental costs of burning even 'clean' coal and the greenhouse emission it produces, compared to the fact a nuke plant produced ZERO greenhouse gas.
The plant itself produces none, but as I explained, the mining, milling, refining, etc, produces greenhouse gases. It's rather like the fact that the tomatoes I get from the supermarket actually absorbed greenhouse gases while growing, but to fertilise, pesticide, harvest and transport them hundred of kilometres to the market produced several times more greenhouse gases than they consumed while growing.
Lastly, the french, for god's sake, use nuclear power on a massive scale and do do safely and effectively. If they can do it then surely other countries can as well.
The French also have nuclear weapons. Do you fancy Botswana, Libya, Ghana, and Chile with nuclear weapons? Do you think those countries can build, operate and maintain nuclear reactors as efficiently and safely as the French? Perhaps you're too young to remember the nervousness of the world when the Soviet Union had a coup d'etat, and later Pakistan. We got lucky, and the nukes were safe. Are we willing to trust to luck again? The current world pressure on Iran seems to suggest we're not willing to trust to luck, and the good judgment of those countries...
Use a finite resource, or an infinite resource. You're a citizen in a democracy, so it's up to you.