If one desires a good standard of living for only a few elites while the rest wallow in poverty akin to the dark ages then windmills and solar panels are for you.

With respect to Germany and the disastrous "leadership" of Ms Merkel (inverted commas because leading a nation down the energy garden path is hardly the commonly accepted definition of the term) the hypocrisy is unfathomable. The energy currently running the lights and factories of Germany are coming from atoms split in France instead of Germany. By any other name germany is still running on nuclear. The neutrons just have different coloured stripes on their flag.

It is no surprise that German growth stopped in the last quarter. In a manufacturing nation cheap reliable electricity is essentially. Merkel has replaced it with expensive but unreliable wind energy and expensive but reliable French nuclear power. Note the common factor - EXPENSIVE. That means the price of German products goes up and their competitiveness goes down. They sell less and import more.

And I am, so fed up with idiots like Professor Duic who profess (because that is all they know how to do) that nuclear is dead with not a single fact to support their rhetoric. Prof. Duic needs to ask the Vietnamese, Lithuanians, Chinese, Russians, British, French, Indians, Pakistanis,United Arab Emirates, Indonesians, Argentinians, Brazilians and dozens of other countries who are developing nuclear power on a scale we have not seen in decades. There are over 60 NEW nuclear plants under construction as I write this. Another 500 being planned of which about 20% will start construction in the next three years. That is on top of the 440 reactors already in operation around the world.

The media (of course) did not report the fact that China recently completed a safety study of all its new and pending reactors and found no safety issues at all. They will be pursuing their nuclear development plans as originally scheduled. Compare that to the media coverage of Fukushima where no one has died as a result of radiation exposure and exposures are limited to a few workers at the site who will not suffer any long term effects.

So, far from being dead, nuclear power is continuing along its development path as before and the only losers will be the Germans who will see their standard of living fall precipitously as they lose control of their electricity industry to others in Europe who will profit handsomely from the Merkel Folly.

We will see how kindly they will receive the take over of Mercedes and BMW by Tata Motors as they did Jaguar.

http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/karnkraft/article3237968.ece: So far in 2011 only two new nuclear projects have started worldwide (last year 16). On the other hand 13 nuclear plants have been closed. Totally the count of plants under construction is 65 whereof 27 in China, 11 in Russia, 5 each in Korea and India, 1 each in Finland, France and Pakistan (balance under production presumably plants in North America). It is noteworthy that ther are only two ongoing nuclear power projects in Europe (but hundreds of project using wind power, solar power, and other renewable options)

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Thanks Matthew. You hit the nail on the head, but let me explain something. Those German Engineers and Wall Street 'masters of the universe' know as much about nuclear as I do, and perhaps to a certain extent more, but the Wall Streeters are in this thing for money. They can get rich just as fast dumping nuclear as they can promoting successful nuclear investments. And as 'Ingrid' said in a novel that I am writing: It's not just the money - its ONLY the money.

About the future. The most important thing now is to get the correct idea of the optimal mix of electric generation assets. Nuclear is of course there, but also a lot of other things: this includes wind, solar, biofuels, etc, etc...etc. Of course, Peter thinks like some moronic energy bureaucrats and experts in Sweden that wind can replace nuclear, but this is silly for both technical and economic reasons. And as for thorium, it will be very very valuable.

And for your information, voters are NOT going to tolerate declines in their standard of living, although they cannot cure declines overnight. That's Econ 101. An attempt to turn the twisted thinking of Peter and people like him into action will only lead to what I call the "early" introduction of the breeder reactor - by which I mean before governments know how to handle the security issues associated with it.

And finally, I hope that you are not so badly educated as to think that constructing a nuclear plant, and keeping it operative, is more difficult than constructing and operating a very large aircraft carrier. As I informed a French ignoramus recently, constructing and safely operating nuclear facilities are trivial, although teaching half-educated commentors on nuclear the subject of nuclear economics often seems close to impossible.

A fresh report on the worldwide status of renewable electric power. - in several parts of the world already exceeding the nuclear power output.

And by the way, Mr Gillerman is correct when he says that the best predictor of the future is the past. If you want to know about nuclear go back to the l950s and study what was done then. That will give you an idea of what could be done now. Something else, I know that many people don't want nuclear, and I respect that. I also understand it, because they fall on every 'fresh report' as if it were Holy Writ.

Peter is technically correct. Since hydro is renewable, it is a larger player than nuclear in some sectors. The problem with hydro is that it is not clearly expandable, as many of the good sites have already been exploited.

I agree with all of your "reality" stuff, like how people don't want to see their standard of living decline, etc. I posit to you another reality; the reality of regulation. When has that ever declined or recessed? Never. Nuclear power plants are so god-darned expensive to build because of the nightmare of the building regulations. (A friend of mind pointed out the paperwork cost to move a mounted portable fire extinguisher from one wall to an adjacent one exceeded $5000.) The money folks are still staying away from them in droves. The biggest issue with nuclear power (in the West, at least) is not their safety, but their practical buildability. By analogy, look at NASA. With a budget comparable to their present one, they sent men to the moon six times. Then NASA got big and bloated; and have spent huge gobs of money to do...what? Nothing really. Just sent people to purposely orbit the earth, which Gargarin did in 1961.

The point I'm trying to make hear is that nuclear falls under the "politics of big things". Now, some big things can be built privately (like the Chunnel, and some other big stuff that Bechtel does...) but the PERCEPTION of safety/liability concern keeps private money away from nuclear. So we are left with some kind of public/gov't funding. And the "politics of big things" problem.

FWIW, I hope I am wrong, because I think it would be a shame not to displace coal with nuclear, but I don't think I am. Build a coal-fired plant is child's play compared to a nuke plant, so that's how we will roll.

Vaclav Smil gives a diagram here (http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2083/) that compares what really matters with energy, its flow. It's a simple graph and I wish it was better known. It's from 2000, and from memory TPES was about 13 Terra Watts in 2005, with the flux from fossil fuels about 12 Tera Watts.

Once you factor in that only a very small percentage of the natural fluxes can actually be feasibly tapped it's pretty clear that only solar and wind AND something else (viz. nuclear) can do the job.

I must update that graph!