Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy

[tggzzz]

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

[djos]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

[Someone]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

Exactly, its already economically profitable but the energy companies are getting a better faster return from open cycle gas power plants so they go with that instead and complain about the running costs.

For a balanced discussion of the alternatives, see http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

Who say it is balanced? All the environmental lobby. All big energy. Just about everybody elsel

Except I've linked above where there are legitimate questions about the presentation of fatality rates from Nuclear power. Its a great reference for quick figures but not perfect.

The reference I gave just prevents facts for all of the alternatives, plus very explicit plausible extrapolations. As the author correctly stated, he is disinterested in the choice that society makes - but very interested to see that the arithmetic adds up. "Numbers, not adjectives".

That's why it is so highly regarded by all the players.

Its well referenced and very good, but not all of it has the same level of rigour. The specific example I'm calling out is whats being discussed in this thread.

There is a case to argue that coal, oil and gas fired generation kill more people per unit of electricity produced than nuclear:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161125154327/http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

Nice cigarette equivalency map, but the numbers on fatalities per unit of energy are very rubbery and open to interpretation from different sources:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/deaths-and-energy-technologies/blog/34275/
I'd suggest nuclear power is higher than most renewables for fatalities caused just on the basis of lifetime/fleet/cumulative energy generated of all nuclear plants and the "true" estimates of total fatalities caused by Chernobyl. Pick your own figure for total deaths caused from the nuclear industry (just the figures for Chernobyl are very rough and in dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impact) and divide it by approximately 100,000 TWh (world bank dataset) then compare to the promoted figures:
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
http://www.nuceng.ca/refer/risk/risk.htm
They're all on the lowest possible end of the estimates before you add in deaths from uranium mining and fuel processing/disposal.

Nuclear power is a great option but its easy to get caught up in the hype and happy statistics promoted by the industry.

So come up with some other references if you'd like to discuss it, but the fatality rates quoted to say how great nuclear is for society ignores the impacts from Chernobyl (or possibly only includes the low estimate for Chernobyl and ignores all other deaths from the incremental use of Nuclear power).

[amspire]

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

That is the problem. If this is the biggest energy need on the planet, why are we waiting for just one person to solve the problem? Recyclable energy cannot work for base load without storage. It just cannot.

Can't rely on Big Energy to solve this as they only want Big Energy solutions - they definitely do not want individuals to become the base load wholesalers.

As long as we are burning carbon or as long as we are using nuclear without a working waste solution, we are in a disastrous situation. Remember with nuclear, it has only been in use for half a century and already there have been some major accidents. How many more accidents will there be in the next 1000 years?

[djos]

So come up with some other references if you'd like to discuss it, but the fatality rates quoted to say how great nuclear is for society ignores the impacts from Chernobyl (or possibly only includes the low estimate for Chernobyl and ignores all other deaths from the incremental use of Nuclear power).

Fair suck of the sav mate, what's next adding in deaths from NMRI machine use? 

[amspire]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

[djos]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

and yet there are a number of Pumped Hydro facilities in operation or being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

[amspire]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

and yet there are a number of Pumped Hydro facilities in operation or being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

But this discussion is long term energy storage. These solutions are inefficient short term energy. Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

As I pointed out, the space requirements for long term energy storage (10 years) even at a home is not a huge problem. It just the how that we need to discover, and as long as all the money goes into inefficient stop-gap big energy solutions, we are never going to find good long term storage solutions.

[ez24]

Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

But you have gravity
http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

The first video is just blah blah blah

but the second one is more interesting.  The idea is to use rail cars.

[Someone]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

and yet there are a number of Pumped Hydro facilities in operation or being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

But this discussion is long term energy storage. These solutions are inefficient short term energy. Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

As I pointed out, the space requirements for long term energy storage (10 years) even at a home is not a huge problem. It just the how that we need to discover, and as long as all the money goes into inefficient stop-gap big energy solutions, we are never going to find good long term storage solutions.

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

[amspire]

Particularly in Australia, we don't have much in the way of mountains or water to start with.

But you have gravity
http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

The first video is just blah blah blah

but the second one is more interesting.  The idea is to use rail cars.

These are all solutions to smooth out the generator vs load mismatch during a day. We are talking about maybe 5 hours of storage. The hydro solutions can possibly go up to 50 days storage. None of these are solutions for years of storage, and of course they are all big energy solutions so that even if we generate our own solar power, we can be ripped off in winter, overcast days and at night. They can pay us pitiful money for any excess power we generate.

[amspire]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

[Someone]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

Pumped hydro storage in Australia is already very profitable, the daily swings in price have enormous room for arbitrage:
https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard
It doesnt matter where the power comes from, whats important is that demand for it is wildly fluctuating across the day in predictable cycles.

Its economics, you could build in seasonal or multiyear storage, or you could oversize the generation and accept that it will be wasted/dumped/burnt off at some times of the year. Sizing renewables to provide 100% of the power all the time with five 9's reliability is a crazy solution, just as putting in the bare minimum of generation and trying to store energy for long periods is crazy. Somewhere in the middle the optimal point it found, and that optimal point will move with time, but you can start adding hydro storage and renewable generation right now at a profit.

[amspire]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

Its economics, you could build in seasonal or multiyear storage, or you could oversize the generation and accept that it will be wasted/dumped/burnt off at some times of the year. Sizing renewables to provide 100% of the power all the time with five 9's reliability is a crazy solution, just as putting in the bare minimum of generation and trying to store energy for long periods is crazy. Somewhere in the middle the optimal point it found, and that optimal point will move with time, but you can start adding hydro storage and renewable generation right now at a profit.

It definite is economics. First I cannot help get the feeling that you are thinking of storage in terms of batteries - twice the storage = twice the cost. That is wrong. Think of it as fuel + a generator type box with a power rating. You pay for the power rating and you can then store as much fuel as you have space for. If the fuel did turn out to be solid aluminium metal (as I suggested) and you had a system that could somehow turn Aluminium Oxide into Aluminium, you should be easily be able to fit a 10 year supply in a basement. How much you spend on the generator/converter box depends on how much power you want to be able to consume or sell. Two different economic decisions. I am only mentioning aluminium as it is a simple reaction and big lump of aluminium is not going to burst into flames and burn the block down. I would expect there are far better fuels.

You will want an economic system that encourages storage, and it is not just the power you generate - while the wholesale price is low, you can buy up cheap electricity that you can sell when the price is high. If individuals are not encouraged to store, then the utility companies will have to come up with some kind of ugly mega-storage facility, and there will be a lot of extra energy transport costs. The utilites will really make you pay for their mega-storage utilities.

I love the way people want to shy away from the reality of no coal and possibly no fission. If you want to plan to eliminate them totally, you have to have storage and you definitely need much more then one years storage as there is absolutely no other reserve. One big volcanic eruption that darkens the sky for a year or two and you are sunk if you do not have stored fuel.

[Someone]

Grid scale storage is not about years, the longest timescales typically discussed are seasonal (sub annual). But the immediate need is for daily to several day storage which pumped hydro is both ideal for and profitable. But thats a very long thread of the same naysayers we're seeing pop up here again:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/tidal-lagoon-energy-from-the-ocean-uk-gov-is-putting-money-in-it/?all
Australia has significant untapped pumped hydro storage capacity:
http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/research/energy-systems/energy-storage-liquid-air-and-pumped-hydro/research/opportunities-for-pumped-hydro-energy-storage-in-australia2

The reason they don't need years in Australia is that most of the power comes from coal. You need more power - you dig up more coal. We are using reserves in stockpiles and the ground for storage.

If you stop burning coal totally, the only reserves you have is the energy stored in storage devices and hydro. The Hydro in Australia would run out very quickly on its own.

Also if a home owner or farmer wants to make money, you will want storage so you can sell when the price is high and not sell when it is low. If you only have enough storage to get through winter, then in summer, you have to give away excess electricity way below wholesale price. You cannot save anything more then your limited storage can provide, and you cannot afford to sell too much base load electricity (24 hours a day power).

Its economics, you could build in seasonal or multiyear storage, or you could oversize the generation and accept that it will be wasted/dumped/burnt off at some times of the year. Sizing renewables to provide 100% of the power all the time with five 9's reliability is a crazy solution, just as putting in the bare minimum of generation and trying to store energy for long periods is crazy. Somewhere in the middle the optimal point it found, and that optimal point will move with time, but you can start adding hydro storage and renewable generation right now at a profit.

It definite is economics. First I cannot help get the feeling that you are thinking of storage in terms of batteries - twice the storage = twice the cost. That is wrong. Think of it as fuel + a generator type box with a power rating. You pay for the power rating and you can then store as much fuel as you have space for. If the fuel did turn out to be solid aluminium metal (as I suggested) and you had a system that could somehow turn Aluminium Oxide into Aluminium, you should be easily be able to fit a 10 year supply in a basement. How much you spend on the generator/converter box depends on how much power you want to be able to consume or sell. Two different economic decisions. I am only mentioning aluminium as it is a simple reaction and big lump of aluminium is not going to burst into flames and burn the block down. I would expect there are far better fuels.

You will want an economic system that encourages storage, and it is not just the power you generate - while the wholesale price is low, you can buy up cheap electricity that you can sell when the price is high. If individuals are not encouraged to store, then the utility companies will have to come up with some kind of ugly mega-storage facility, and there will be a lot of extra energy transport costs. The utilites will really make you pay for their mega-storage utilities.

I love the way people want to shy away from the reality of no coal and possibly no fission. If you want to plan to eliminate them totally, you have to have storage and you definitely need much more then one years storage as there is absolutely no other reserve. One big volcanic eruption that darkens the sky for a year or two and you are sunk if you do not have stored fuel.

You're off in lala land, pumped hydro is an effective storage solution for hours or days. Its profitable in Australia and even without any further mountains with easy rain/snow fed hydro options we still have enormous quantities of untapped pumped hydro resources. Here is where you started:

The idea with widely distributed generation is that storage needs will be minimised by the averaging of so many fluctuating sources,

Yes, that's the idea.

Shame about reality, though. The problem is you need excessively large areas for that to work. Certainly the entire UK wind generation can and does reduce to <3% of peak output for several days in succession. The meteorological condition is known as a "blocking high", and occurs frequently enough for it to be a problem.

This is why you need cheap long term energy storage at the generator sites. If the storage is separate from the generator sites, then to make recyclable energy work, you would need a power transport system that can manage several times the peak load demands.

Energy storage should be the No 1 research priority - definitely should have more money then military, nuclear, etc.

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...

http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

A pretty useless solution. Very inefficient, but also useless for long term storage. It is only a solution for smoothing out peaks in base load demand.

And now you distance yourself from that with a ridiculously specific example of infinite term storage for the purposes of eliminating most of the generation capacity. No one but you is suggesting such a wild end point or possibility, we're talking about slowly transitioning to renewables being a substantial proportion of the grid with days of storage to ride out their production variations, proven commercially viable techniques, right now with todays technology.

[amspire]

I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?

[AG6QR]

The "environmentalists" are not one single group of people who think alike.

I'm proud to call myself an environmentalist.  I want my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, to inherit a world that is at least as clean and healthy as the one my generation inherited.

But I honestly don't know the best way to achieve that.  I'm a practical person, with a taste for engineering by the numbers, and I find it all too easy to find fault with the popular alternatives.  If we could get everyone to politically agree to reduce our use of fossil fuels over the next few decades, (I'm not sure the world can agree on that, but let's pretend for the sake of argument that we could), I still wouldn't know what route to best take to get us to that net reduction with minimal harm to the environment.

Nuclear has a reasonable safety record, but a problem with waste storage, and a potential for rare but devastating accidents.  Fossil fuels are unsustainable, and are slowly but surely causing serious problems.  Solar, wind, hydro, and other renewables aren't without their own environmental problems, as well.  Because the energy they harvest is dispersed, they require large areas, and large amounts of resources to build the facilities to harvest the energy.  Hydro reservoirs, either for pumped hydro storage, or for conventional capture of naturally flowing water, cause serious environmental problems.  Yes, energy storage is needed, at least for short term, to match uneven supply to demand.  Furthermore, transportation requires high energy density, in order to minimize the weight of energy storage which is carried around.  Fossil fuels are particularly energy dense -- it's hard to imagine a way of powering an intercontinental jet transport with anything other than liquid hydrocarbons, due to the energy density issues (though the liquid hydrocarbons don't necessarily need to come from fossil sources).

The unfortunate conclusion I come to is that there is no such thing as "green energy", only varying shades of brown. 

The one thing that I'm sure is "green" is conservation.  But even that isn't a panacea.  Consider the lighting paradox:  More efficient light sources make lighting cheaper and can cause us to use more lighting, ultimately increasing our energy consumption.  https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20082015/lighting-paradox-cheaper-efficient-led-save-energy-use-rises  I can imagine similar things happening as we get more efficient, better, public transit, people may start living even further from their workplaces, and could ultimately end up spending more energy commuting back and forth.

One particularly disturbing fact:  Fossil fuel use is now at an all-time high, despite the fact that renewable energy use is also growing.  The widespread use of renewables isn't actually causing a net decrease in our appetite for fossil fuels.  It's probably causing fossil fuel use to increase a bit more slowly than it otherwise would, but somehow or another we eventually need to lower the consumption of non sustainable energy sources.

I don't know what the ultimate solution is -- I wish there were a silver bullet, but I suspect it's not one thing, but a combination of various types of renewable energy sources, including wind, hydro, solar, and biomass, with a heap of conservation thrown in there, as well.

[Someone]

I am simply saying that the only way to go to 100% renewables is to have long term storage. You cannot go to 100% renewables with 50 day hydro buffers - even if we did have the water in Australia to do so.

The hydro storage solutions are only needed if you stick to coal generation. If you plan for renewables + long term storage, you don't need hydro.

Your argument is that even if long term storage is technically possible, you are in lala land if you talk about it.

Ok. Over to you. How can we stop using coal? If you are responsible for engineering a solution for the future, how would you do it?

Right off the bat you've stuck to your corner, 100% renewable generation does not require long term storage. We can generate enough power year round to only require short term storage. Hydro is one of the cheapest forms of grid scale energy storage and Australia has plenty of it available, so its a natural choice to solve the intermittency problem of renewables.

Right now adding solar generation capacity to the Australian grid is profitable (wind is less certain based on rebates and government kickbacks as far as I know), its also profitable to build new pumped storage. So you can keep incrementally adding those alone until you reach 100% renewable generation, with todays technology. It will need a massively upgraded distribution network unless the storage and generation are co-sited and then you need more of both, tradeoffs for the market to analyse case by case. Equally the exact mix of generation to storage to demand is not exactly known yet but as the price fluctuates storage becomes more profitable, while as the price is steady intermittent renewable generation becomes more profitable so they are self balancing in the market place.

At a rough guess you would end up with between 2 and 4 times the peak power requirement in installed capacity of wind and solar (both run around 25% capacity factor in Australian grid scale projects), and around 2 times peak power in pumped power, with storage to ride out between 2 and 6 days of zero generation. Thats a guess but you're welcome to suggest how it would be impossible, electricity prices would increase but thats how it is when you're trying to reduce pollution and reliance on finite resources.

[tggzzz]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...
http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

The UK is very limited in that respect. We are limited to minutes (seconds?) of the total grid demand.

A prime use of our pumped storage is for a "black start" contingency.

[tggzzz]

As long as we are burning carbon or as long as we are using nuclear without a working waste solution, we are in a disastrous situation. Remember with nuclear, it has only been in use for half a century and already there have been some major accidents. How many more accidents will there be in the next 1000 years?

It will kill/injure fewer people than coal/gas plants - they are already killing many people every year, and releasing large amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

Don't believe me? Go and live in lowland China's "airpocalypse", where pollution can be equivalent to a 20-60 fags/day habit.
FFI see http://www.economist.com/news/china/21661053-new-study-suggests-air-pollution-even-worse-thought-mapping-invisible-scourge
http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-and-cigarette-equivalence/

[tggzzz]

The unfortunate conclusion I come to is that there is no such thing as "green energy", only varying shades of brown. 

Very true.

Doubly so when you consider what the implication of ideal green energy sources mean in the long term:  http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

It is all worth reading, but one key extract is:

"Physicist: [sigh of relief: not a space cadet] Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase."

[Someone]

That's a nice wish. The person that manages to do it economically will become rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

In the meantime...

Pumped Hyrdro...
http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/why-pumped-hydro-beats-batteries-as-a-storage-solution

The UK is very limited in that respect. We are limited to minutes (seconds?) of the total grid demand.

A prime use of our pumped storage is for a "black start" contingency.

The UK is limited in its current installed capacity, not limited with the available capacity it has not exploited. But there was 6 pages on that in the other thread.

[hamster_nz]

The other option is to move to Thorium Reactors which can burn Nuclear waste as fuel.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-thorium-can-burn-nuclear-waste-and-generate-energy/

What, like contaminated rubber gloves and other low-level waste?

Or intermediate level waste like fuel cladding that is currently put into the ground in concrete blocks?

Or are you talking about only a small proportion of the estimate 12,000 metric tons of nasty high-level waste that is made every year?

To me it sounds like the green-washing that is the Energizer Eco-advanced battery - each battery is 4% old battery. So it takes 25 new batteries to get rid of an old one... yeah - that's green

[djos]

The other option is to move to Thorium Reactors which can burn Nuclear waste as fuel.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-thorium-can-burn-nuclear-waste-and-generate-energy/

What, like contaminated rubber gloves and other low-level waste?

Or intermediate level waste like fuel cladding that is currently put into the ground in concrete blocks?

Or are you talking about only a small proportion of the estimate 12,000 metric tons of nasty high-level waste that is made every year?

To me it sounds like the green-washing that is the Energizer Eco-advanced battery - each battery is 4% old battery. So it takes 25 new batteries to get rid of an old one... yeah - that's green

How about reading the link before you get on your high horse and act like a dick?

[Someone]

The other option is to move to Thorium Reactors which can burn Nuclear waste as fuel.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-thorium-can-burn-nuclear-waste-and-generate-energy/

What, like contaminated rubber gloves and other low-level waste?

Or intermediate level waste like fuel cladding that is currently put into the ground in concrete blocks?

Or are you talking about only a small proportion of the estimate 12,000 metric tons of nasty high-level waste that is made every year?

To me it sounds like the green-washing that is the Energizer Eco-advanced battery - each battery is 4% old battery. So it takes 25 new batteries to get rid of an old one... yeah - that's green

Mixed oxide, higher burn up, fuel reprocessing, and/or breeder reactors can all contribute to a lower waste footprint for nuclear. The current utilisation of the fuel is woeful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnup
And when you consider the addition energy available from breeding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Breeder reactors could, in principle, extract almost all of the energy contained in uranium or thorium, decreasing fuel requirements by a factor of 100 compared to widely used once-through light water reactors, which extract less than 1% of the energy in the uranium mined from the earth.

You see some big reductions in the waste streams. I found this cute plot which highlights it and compares it to thorium:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/2/20/Nuclear_waste_decay_it.svg
You can reduce the waste radioactivity that needs to be dealt with per unit of electricity delivered by an order of magnitude or more than the current once through process used in most of the world. Its more expensive and has serious political issues, but the option is there. Thorium promises much more, but needs investment and is largely unproven.