A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

[localroger]

6. Accidents are bad, but they are not the deal-killer with nuclear

The deal-killer is the waste. It has been piling up since 1945 and we have no idea what to do with it. If we were actually generating a significant fraction of the world's energy needs with nuclear, it would be a huge problem. If we moved to some improved reactor tech that is meltdown-proof like pebble bed reactors, they would still generate the same amount of waste.

Accidents are a huge problem too, but accidents can be written off as something for the future to worry about. Profit-driven companies are not going to take the precautions necessary for truly safe operation. (Truly safe operation is possible, of course, as the US Navy has shown. But they are not profit-driven, and they spend the money where they have to.)

But the waste is an immediate and ongoing problem. The biggest problem at Fukushima was not the reactors themselves, but the waste pools. Every nuclear facility in the world has old fuel rods sitting in glorified swimming pools waiting for an ultimate disposal that has never been scheduled. These things will remain insanely toxic for tens of thousands of years and we have no idea what to do with them.

For all its flaws wind power doesn't create waste that will be toxic for ten times as long as civilization has existed. And if I'm not mistaken it's wind and solar that have been keeping Texas' fucked up isolated power grid up during the current weather crisis.