After 30 years of dedicated research, I strongly disagree with your statement that nuclear power is not the end all and be all of energy.
I have studied many hundreds of reactor designs, and written about them extensively here.
Out of many hundreds of designs, in thermal reactors, which dominate the current world fleet are basically of three kinds. PWR, BWR, and the marvelous HWR ("Candu" )
These reactors are all designed to produce less than 40% thermal efficiency - more generally they are around 33%.
They are based on technology that was developed in the 1950's and 1960's when a computer the power of the one on which I write would have filled an entire building.
They have operated for half a century - under constant attack by mindless people - and they still produce, reliably, more primary energy than all of the world's solar and wind facilities combined.
As I have spent much of my adult life reading about energy and the environment in the primary scientific literature, I stand by my claim: There are zero forms of energy available to humanity that are as sustainable and, frankly, as safe, as nuclear energy.
I have absolutely - with tons of hard work - convinced myself that very high thermodynamic efficiencies are available from nuclear technology; something I learned by studying a form of energy that is really killing the planet: Dangerous natural gas. A combined cycle gas plant is nothing more than process intensification.
We do not need water for certain designs. In fact, there are lots of useful things we can do with waste heat. I will note, however, that putting barges at sea to service unreliable wind projects, also require water, and that many water supplies have been damaged by mining related events, and if there is one thing that low energy to mass junk like solar cells and wind plants need, it's mining.
As for fusion: For over ten years, I have attended lectures at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab's Science on Saturday series every winter. Almost every single one has at least one or two - sometimes three lectures - on fusion energy.
It's not here yet. The ITER will not be hooked up to an electrical generator.
If it takes ten years to get one hooked up, that will involve 24 ppm higher concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the grand international waste dump, our atmosphere.
Fusion is nuclear energy, and I have nothing against it other than the fact that it isn't here. Neither is the solar and wind nirvana that's been predicted my whole life along with fusion really here. In terms of energy, 12.27 exajoules out of 599+ exajoules at a cost of three trillion dollars is just a silly, but deadly, joke.
The world built more than 450 nuclear reactors in a few decades, until construction and development was stopped by appeals to fear and ignorance. Our nuclear engineering infrastructure was deliberately destroyed by appeals to fear and ignorance.
Nevertheless, the oldest nuclear reactors, even with their lack of versatility - they were designed to only produce electricity - have proved to have the lowest death rate per MWh of any form of energy, at least if one is educated enough to know about Banqiao.
We don't need all that other bullshit. We just need people to think.
I have thought about it.
I grant that people won't think, and so, well, if a world with a tropical Canada will still be a world nonetheless, I find it unsatisfying that we have consigned ourselves to that for no good reason. It won't be a world in which I would want to live. Frankly, I would have preferred to leave my two sons a better world, not a worse world.
If that world contains human beings, and if they have a sense of history, this generation of fools will be regarded with extreme contempt as well it should be. They'll be all kinds of toxic shit leaching out of abandoned batteries, out of solar cells that have become electronic waste. In addition, the survivors, if there are many will need to consider what to do with rotting and abandoned wind turbines strewn over every piece of the Earth.
All this, because a few atoms of cesium-137 found in a tuna fish could raise an international chorus of stupidity.
Nuclear power need not be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It only has be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
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