Quite a few factoids here; let me focus on one. If the world can get 12% of its energy from windpower by 2020, where will the other 88% come from?

The most important "fact" to concentrate upon is the total quantity of energy required by 6.5 billion human beings to provide for anything like adequate lifestyles for all.
If production of energy to that extent should ever be achieved, for how long can it be maintained?
Can society's economic system be changed from the present one of predominantly using energy to predate upon the environment upon which we depend - to using it in a manner that maintains the resource?
Can Homo sapiens show that it can use its one real speciality - a large, complex brain, to step off the treadmill of rabbit-like reproduction, continuously expanding numbers of its own kind?

Steve Shallhorn puts up a powerful argument about the costs of nuclear power, the fact that the taxpayer subsidises these, and especially the huge costs of dealing with nuclear wastes.
Especially important here is the diversion of attention, of policy, and of funding directed towards truly environmentally sustainable technologies. Yes – a pity that our Prime Minister sycophantically follows those now very unpopular and not trusted world figures - Bush and Blair, rather than learning from the experience and initiatives of Denmark and Sweden.

My only worry about this excellent article is that it has not addressed the looming worry that Mr Howard and his backers will want to start an Australian industry of taking everybody else’s nuclear wastes. By making a promise to do this, Australia could sell heaps more uranium.
No doubt big bucks could be gained, from countries desperate to get rid of their otherwise insolvable problem. As Howard took us into the quagmire of the Iraq invasion, will Australia let him lead us into the expansion of uranium mining and the storage of international wastes?
Christina Macpherson
www.antinuclearaustralia.com

The two questions are: what particular problems will it solve? is it economic?

Then we can expect and explantion how it is to do so. Nothing is self evident.
I assume it is not simply for us unselfishly to sell more uranium.

The author wrote: "What is the net present cost of safe storage of thousands of barrels of nuclear waste for unknown thousands of years? Not only are the costs unimaginable, future generations would be the ones to pay for a few years of electricity for us."

If storage of some amount of waste wil cost $1 per year, for ever, and I can get 2% real interest per year on a bank deposit, then the net present cost of that storage is $50. That is, if I put the $50 in the bank, then I will get $1 per year in interest, for ever, to pay for the storage.

So these costs are far from being unimaginable, and should not be seen as a debt legacy for future generations.

The same sorts of reasoning applies to future decommissioning of the power plant.

If the author is going to bandy around expressions like "net present cost" it would help if he understood what they meant. Perhaps this lack of understanding explains why so many proponents of alternatives like wind power fail to understand how much they really cost.

Sylvia

I agree with Steve - what sane person wouldn't? But Sylvia raises an interesting point, but sadly overlooks some simple truths.

Actinides will leach from any container. Even Cynrok. Actinides may have criticality events (things that go BANG! in the night) even when ceramics employ neutron absorbtion material. Uranium Hexaflorine will leak from metal containers. How long can you keep a 44 gallon drum for anyway?

But Sylvia says the initial investment will pay for the 400,000 years or so that most of this stuff needs to be kept away from the environment. Ummm, yeah right! There is no such thing as a safe level of radioactivity. It damages living things and all the costs are in maintaining safety.

If you remove the safety costs and value humans (and other species) as zero then perhaps nuclear will become cost efficient. Then thousands can die handling waste and old reactor bits by hand and no one will care (or pay).