Were I you I’d consider joining the Navy and working in their nuclear activities. Twenty years and you’d earn retirement.

The US nuclear industry is probably one more meltdown away from melting down in toto.

I’m not saying we’re going to loose control of one, but we continue to wander off in that direction from time to time. If we do a full Homer and let a significant amount of glowing stuff get outside the containment dome we’re likely to see a Germany/Belgium/Japan/Switzerland reaction to just shut them all down. It could happen.

I suppose you could finish out your career in cleanup, but that doesn’t sound very interesting. Being a janitor wearing lead briefs….

Nuclear is a box canyon. It always was but taxpayers were fooled into funding these “too cheap to meter” boondogles for making weapons grade plutonium. It’s over for that poison generating bureaucratic, closed nuclear club, secrecy loving and high salary demanding monstrocity.

bottom line is very clear: most or even all of the world can be powered by renewables… for even cheaper than other options.

It’s more than clear that we could supply 100% of our energy needs from renewable sources. Jacobson and Delucchi did that bit of math in 2009.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

Solar, alone, provides far more harvest-able energy than we can conceive of using.

http://i2.wp.com/cleantechnica.com/files/2011/08/energy-resources-renewables-fossil-fuel-uranium.png

We know that we can run major grids using nothing but renewable energy. Budischak, et al. ran the numbers for the largest wholesale grid in the world. Diensendorf, et al. did the same for all of Australia.

While Jacobson and Delucchi showed that the energy was available and we have the technology needed to harvest it these other studies have shown that it would be practical to use renewables for our energy needs.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1NrBZJejkUTRYJv5YE__kBFuecdDL2pDTvKLyBjfCPr_8yR7eCTDhLGm8oEPo/edit

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-intermittent-renewables-will-work-92421

Clearly your opinion that ” Nuclear is our only viable option to meet energy demands whilst reducing CO2 emissions” is incorrect. Data tells us so.

—

Gen4 reactors are hypotheses. They are unproven ideas.

They might work or, like pebble bed reactors, they might not work. Until proven we can’t consider building our grid supply around them. The same holds for fusion.

Someday. Perhaps….

Furthermore there is no reason to suspect that Gen4 reactors, if they can prove themselves, would be cheap enough to use.

Nor would Gen4 reactors deal with the majority of our nuclear waste problem. At best they would decrease the amount of waste fuel we have but they would do nothing for the millions and millions of gallons/pounds of liquid/solid radioactive waste that is plaguing us. They would, in fact, create even more.

Energy storage is the big problem facing us right now. It’s certainly not an unsolvable problem since we could do the job with pump-up hydro. We have more than enough places to build all the pump-up we would need (existing dams would give us plenty locations, closed loop greatly expands the number).

We aren’t to the point at which large scale storage is needed. Wind and solar in the US are in the 5% range and our grids can convert to ~40% wind/solar before storage is needed. By the time we need storage we are likely to see better options than pump-up.