The Japanese reactors were inundated with a beyond-design-basis earthquake and tsunami that killed 30,000 people (zero of whom died from radiation). It'd be tou

The Japanese reactors were inundated with a beyond-design-basis earthquake and tsunami that killed 30,000 people (zero of whom died from radiation). It'd be tough to argue that they're incapable of running a plant. They just didn't build appropriately for their environment (that plant in particular was designed to be safe from USA tornados...) Russia, S. Korea, India, & China are building economically feasible reactors right now because they standardized on a design and are building multiple of the same kind. [1,2] Current batteries are not a feasible solution for leveling large capacity renewables. The 10-day total wind outage that just happened in the US pacific northwest kept 4 GWe of wind offline. The battery to back that would have been 100 stories high on a football field and cost $90B, and would have to be replaced every 20 years or less. Not even 100% renewable superstar Jacobsen [3] (who's suing his scientific critics) suggests using batteries for large-scale load balancing. (He uses hydro with pumped storage, which is actually not a good option due to biogenic methane emissions) [4] Nuclear waste is a solved problem, technically. You put it in crystalline bedrock, salt deposits, or deep boreholes. The Finns are opening their repository in 2023 [5]. It's a political problem. There's also very little of it; you're entire lifetime of waste (were you 100% nuclear) fits in a soda can. Nuclear is one of the only energy sources where it's even feasible to consider handling the total waste because of this energy density. [1] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Russia-achieves-serial-nuclear-power-plant-construction-03061502.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Russia-achieves-serial-n... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106#f0060 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... [3] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060 http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060 [4] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0161947 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...