Nuclear Power Debate

The subject is up for debate, but a Wired article presents a few reasons for nuclear power.

[D]ams in the US are under attack from environmentalists trying to protect wild fish populations....

Solar power's number-one problem is cost....

[W]ind, like solar, is inherently fickle, hard to capture, and widely dispersed. And wind turbines take up a lot of space; Ausubel points out that the wind equivalent of a typical utility plant would require 300 square miles of turbines plus costly transmission lines from the wind-scoured fields of, say, North Dakota. Alternatively, there's California's Altamont Pass, where 5,400 windmills slice and dice some 1,300 birds of prey annually....

What about biomass? Ethanol is clean, but growing the amount of cellulose required to shift US electricity production to biomass would require farming... an area the size of 10 Iowas.

Living on Earth handed the debate over to Green Brits, but in this case the Nuclear Green wasn't quite effective as the Wired article in the debate (for nuclear written and audio, against nuclear written and audio).

NPR had a brief segment on some minor consequences of enough wind turbines to solve the Earth's energy problem.