Perhaps i should leave this alone....
But this is something I feel pretty strongly about. And it looks like I'm not alone.
I'm going to choose to both agree, and disagree with Neil. Energy conservation could reduce total demand by huge amounts.
That being said, the capitol costs of Solar, and wind are orders of magnitude higher then nuclear per w/hr. The costs for a single watt of installed capacity of solar power is roughly $10 / watt (installed residential systems, distributed power production). The panels are actually less then half the cost. Then you need inverters, and big batteries. Now figure that at best case, you can depend on an insolation value of around 6 hours. Basically, that 1 watt rating is based on the optimum solar conditions, that only exist for a single instant of a day when the sun is at its peak. However, in excellent conditions, i believe you can get the equivalent of 6 hours of peak sunlight a day. So you would have to install 4 watts of panels to produce the equivalent of 1 watt for a day. We're already up to $40 / watt for baseload capacity. According to this US government site [
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electri...a/epates.html], there is roughly 100,000 MW of capacity installed, and available for summer use. At $40 / watt, solar power would cost $400,000,000,000,000,000. That's 400 quadrillion. There actually isn't that much money in the world i don't think.
Solar isn't cheap. Anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg. Consider this:
1 kw/hr of power costs $.10 here in nuclear powered Ontario. And that includes a $.033 Ontario hydro debt retirement charge and transmission fees. If you installed a kw of solar panels, expect it to cost $10,000. For that modest fee, in the sunniest places in the world (which Ontario is definitely NOT) that earns you the right to roughly $.60 of power a day. That puts the payback period of your solar system at 45 years. Good luck with that. I'd like to be alive to break even.
Wind power is a different monster. Where it is reasonably windy, a good tower can have a payback period in terms less then 10 years, and will probably last 20 with proper maintenance. Local wind generation is feasible, and cost competitive with grid purchased power (if you have wind resource). I do think there is a place for wind generation in our future power mix, and I encourage it's development.
And nuclear power. Nuclear power is a beast. It is poorly understood, and poorly implemented at best. Mostly poorly implemented because of the political ramifications of having reprocessing and enrichment plants. I find it amusing that Canada could take spent fuel rods from American nuclear waste, and it would be a rich fuel source for our CANDU reactor! To bad it's rather nasty stuff to handle. Someone said earlier that there is not that much more concrete in a nuclear plant then a coal plant. You sir, are very mistaken. There is a very large, very thick, very strong containment building that surrounds the reactor. Like... withstand a bombing large.
I think if we were to build fast breeder reactors, and reprocess spent fuel, nuclear waste storage wouldn't be that much of a problem. Up here in Canada, the game plan is basically to drop it into a cavern in the Great Canadian Shield. It's a huge bedrock formation and it would allow very good containment over geologic time periods.
As for the future, I recommend fusion. Right now they are building the first fusion power plant capable of producing more power then it consumes (named ITER). Yes it's going to be fricken expensive. Yes it's only 500 MW. Yes it's only going to run in bursts no longer then a few minutes. But.. it'll be producing power from deuterium and tritium. (and helium!). And this is only the first step. Future reactor designs will hopefully be able to do deuterium - deuterium fusion. There is enough deuterium in the world to use for 10's of thousands of years. And eventually. The holy grail: Hydrogen - Hydrogen fusion.