@roses1: I gave you a link to information about trucks for building solar ... you respond with an assertion about trucks required for uranium with no reference. And you won't find a reference for the simple reason that the tonnages concerned are trivial in comparison to the tonnages of material required to build solar farms. Here's a link to a great post from Ben Heard about the shipping of uranium. If it weren't for anti-nukes we could be shipping a satchel of uranium to one or two reactors to power Adelaide instead of 7000 tonnes of coal ... EVERY DAY.

http://decarbonisesa.com/energy-density-explained-using-a-satchel/

And biomass? Are you serious? Presumably wood based? If so then please think about it. Forestry is always near the top of any "dangerous industries" list. Big machines, big saws, carcinogenic dust (yes, wood dust is a class 1 carcinogen, but really its other impacts are far worse) as are the products of combustion and its impact on wildlife is literally deadly. And again, lots of really big trucks. Biomass is just renewable coal, but worse.

Geoff - Please be rigorous and honest in this debate - it is you who should have researched and provided links to the tonnages trucked to build and fuel the nuclear reactors. You would then have a valid comparison. It's certainly not going to be measured in satchels!

Similarly, lets' include uranium in the cancer comparisons - a little homework for you to look at the carcinogenicity of the thousands of tonnes of N waste still stored on or near reactor sites in populated areas, with no solution as to deal with it. Stats on cancer deaths from sawdust vs deaths from exposure to radioactivity? It's not sufficient to just support your argument with stats and not look at those for the contra-argument.

Biomass - yes I am serious. There are several bagasse-fired power stations in Qld and another example is a 50 MW woodchip fired plant in Vermont that I inspected just last week. It is located within the city of Burlington and the chimney emissions cause no problems. It has scrubbers to remove particulates and wood does not have the sulphur problem that coal has. WA could grow enough biomass on 10% of its agricultural land to generate >40% of its electricity (though I'm not advocating using it all for that).

Pericles - Yes you are right the real issue of this debate is how to provide energy for India, which I'll address in my next post.

Ben Rose

India - population 1.26 billion - 55 times Australia's population in a smaller land area. Australia's CO2e emissions per head - 17 tonnes vs 1.7 tonnes for India. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
There is also a 10 fold difference in per capita energy use .
Can all of the people in India ever be as energy/ emissions intensive as Australians? I'd say the answer is no, so we in the developed world have to first look at the biggest and cleanest source - negawatts - energy efficiency. Most of us can easily cut our energy use and emissions in half without reducing our quality of life.
(see my website www.ghgenergycalc.com.au).

Let's say India could raise their standard of living for all by trebling energy use; it wouldn't require 10 times more as the energy stats suggest.

Most of us seem to agree that to use coal to achieve this would be disastrous. So the question to be asked is 'what is the best energy mix for that country?' There is no simple answer. I accept that nuclear may need to part of the solution, particularly in densely populated nations like India. But solar CST, solar PV, wind and biomass will definitely play the major role. Nuclear has problems both real (in terms of waste disposal) and political (nobody wants to live near one). The Renewable energy sources do not have anywhere near the same problems. I bet that it would be possible to provide for India using renewables alone. The challenge would not be 55 times that in Australia, but about 18 times. It would mean lots of wind turbines, solar farms and biomass energy plantations dispersed throughout the landscape, visible to all; PV on the majority of rooftops. A vision that would take some getting used to. It will take time, a lot on money and an industrial revolution to transform energy.

Once a group of qualified people sit down and produce a plan (BZE and SEN have done this in Australia), we see it's possible. First the plan and then the political battle.

Ben Rose

Ben, you still didn't provide that link on your assertion about trucks associated with uranium transport. You made the claim, not me. I assumed it was obviously small. You can see visit WNA and look at the
process:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Mining-of-Uranium/Uranium-Mining-Overview/

But here's the short form ... mines produce ore which is milled on site and the net result is yellowcake which is shipped in trucks ... Australia's entire production of yellow cake is about 7500 tonnes ... about 187 B-Double loads of 40 tonnes. That's enough to produce ALL of our electricity ... but we export it and burn 120 Million tonnes of coal instead. You can thank the anti-nuclear movement for that. The Moree Solar Farm http://www.moreesolarfarm.com.au/Project.htm is one small solar farm and it needs 7200 B-Double truck loads of stuff. Just ONE! You can find the info in the EIS, just as I provided the EIS link to the US Desert Sunlight Project. So compare ... 187 truckloads for our entire electricity supply or 7200 to build just one small solar farm. N.B. The Moree Project has been halved since the original EIS.

P.S. Scrubbers don't remove a whole heap of pollutants, whether it's coal or biomass, the smoke is toxic in many ways, if it was clean you could just pipe it into houses as heating :). It isn't. Why worry about nuclear waste but ignore biomass waste and just piss it up into the air?

And building a nuke power station does not require thousands of tons of concrete?
I am sure the builders of all the Nukes so far would be wondering why they paid for so much.

@RobertLePage: Different comparisons yield different answers, but here's a reasonable one: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/12/06/tcase7/
Compared to a nuke, solar with storage uses 15 times more concrete, 75 times more steel and bucketloads more land ... not to mention the glass/silicon cables, smart grid, money, etc.