Obviously building solar panels or wind turbines leaves a big carbon footprint, not to mention building wind turbines uses a precious rare metal neodymium which the earth does not have a lot of. Nobody is denying that. But so does building an oil refinery. Nuclear is a whole different story. It doesn't just build tons of carbon footprint, it produces nuclear waste for which we need to build rockets to throw them into space, which leaves even more carbon footprint.
So how many times have they used rockets to dump actual nuclear waste into space? Zero, they still dig it into the bedrock where it's completely harmless (takes about a meter of bedrock or concrete to insulte it completely from the outside world) unless someone digs it out with the purpose of using it for something harmful. If they ever get breeder reactors going commerical they'd be digging it out again and re-using it. When it comes to carbon footprint per tWh (which is what really matters) over the whole lifespan of a plant, there is nothing "greener" than nuclear power.
iBug2 said:
I'm not even going into the fact that wind and solar power are practically endless where gasoline is.
Yes, endless until neodium, which you brought up, runs out or we don't have the oil to replace the panels and windmills when they reach the end of their lifespan. The damn things don't run forever and no amount of research is going to fix the fact that they're expensive to build (specially in relation to the output), unreliable (no wind or middle of the night == no power) and low output. If it wasn't for the radioactive waste people wouldn't even be considering wind or solar power on a large scale.
iBug2 said:
Is that the reason Germany is decommissioning all nuclear power plants
No, it was a populist move by the German government after Fukushima (which isn't even possible in Germany as they don't get earthquakes measuring 8 on the richter scale, tsunami's and specially not both at the same time) and energy prices have been going up significantly as a result of it. To compensate they've increased the production of power by coal as well as the import of nuclear power from eastern europe (you know, where Chernobyl happened). As for the solar power news we've been hearing about lately, that's because they've put billions and billions into subsidizing the damn things (think it was literally thousands of euros for evey man, woman and child).
There's a reason why China's currently building almost a dozen of them, Rosatom is more profitable than ever, thorium salt reactors are back from the dead in India, Areva is building the world's most efficient reactor in Finland and nuclear powerplant development in the U.S is no longer in hibernation.
This is really what I hate about ecomentalists like yourself... You go on a touch-feely basis and when you get confronted with problems in your reasoning, you just talk about how some other people ought to do research to fix the problems rather than reconsidering your stance. Arguing like you is a whole lot like arguing with someone who's really religious and no matter what you say, their personal interpretation of the absolute truth and not up for argument.
