Chernobyl was a big cock-up allright, as was Fukushima, although that seems to have been less severe.

What would you say is the most dangerous form of energy production we have now? What about the safest? Look up "Deaths by terawatt hour", you might be surprised.

Even wind power has killed about 3 times as many people per TWH produced as nuclear, AFAIK mainly due to the amounts of steel and concrete used in constructing the plants, the production of which is relatively dangerous. Coal is on a different planet altogether, killing about 1500 times as many people per TWH as nuclear.

Even if you assume the total deaths from nuclear power production are underreported and underestimated by a factor of 10, that would still only put it on par with solar power in terms of people killed to produce energy.

Now, nuclear isn't a cureall solution to our energy problems. Even if we wanted to, we simply couldn't build enough power plants to cover all our energy needs with nuclear, you've got the storage issue, you've got the issue of plant placement, and in general relying on one technology alone is a bad idea.

Still. Coal. 1500 times as deadly. How many articles and videos have you seen on how scary coal is? What gives?

After reading some more on the subject, this has been that way for many decades, possibly longer but the history is spotty further back. The CSIRO thinks it is possibly due to the nearness of a coal seam to the rifts and/or drought.

The recent fracking has drawn attention to it, with many locals claiming it has gotten worse since the fracking. Scientists are still researching it further to see if this is true.

I don't support fracking, but some of these reports usually are about things that were pre-existing due to the natural layout of the region. However, there are some cases where it is definitely a cause of the companies fracking in the area.

For instance, a recent study proved that drinking wells in Texas and Pennsylvania were affected by the fracking company not following the correct procedures. This led to the wells being contaminated with gas. They found that there were clear cases of substandard work that led to cracked steel and concrete in the casing of the drill sites. They said in the study that if the companies had followed the correct procedures, the contamination could have been easily prevented.

More on the wells - http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-wells-tainting-drinking-water-texas-and-pennsylvania-study-finds-270735

They probably should use the same method to check the origin of the noble gases in that river.

That is absolutely not true....all of it.
First, it's only close to true if you only count the direct costs of production, and ignore all the cost to mitigate the damages energy production causes.
Second, even then it's not true. I put in a solar system on my house around 10 years ago. It paid for itself in savings in under 8 years, and has a lifespan of over 20 years. That means, compared to coal, coal, and coal, it's incredibly more efficient and cheaper.

Geothermal is the MOST efficient and 'clean' form of energy out there. Where did you get your information, a BP flier?

So, if you should swap energy sources when they make (economic) sense, that would have been >10 years ago. If you count all the costs involved with other energy sources, not just basic energy production costs, it would have made sense to switch around 40+ years ago.

And see, this is what makes you a great person. Just imagine if you HADN'T been there to roll joints for your friends -- sorta like It's A Wonderful Life. Without you, your friends would have been trying to make a pipe out of a plastic bottle, a Bic pen, some tinfoil and Elmer's Wood Glue. They might have succeeded, too, much to everyone's horror when the foil rips and they inhaled burning coals of pot directly into their lungs, leading to them dying terribly! But they never built that hellish contraption because YOU were there to roll joints for them instead! And teacher says every time a bell rings, some stoner just tried to make a pipe out of an apple. See? It really IS a Blunt-er-ful life!

I'd just like to say a word about dabs and the partaking thereof: Jesus Christ these things are like getting kicked right in the third eye by one of those horses from My Little Pony. Like maybe the blue one or something. I dunno, I'm pretty high right now, but I'm sure there's a blue one. Anyway, yeah, dabs . . . fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

So wait...the agreement is to 'limit' temperature rise to 3.6F, the exact temperature rise they have said is the point at which feedback loops become engaged and make CO2 the least of our problems? Then...at some future point...they agree to limit CO2 production to levels that natural processes can absorb, with no time limit for that, and until then we'll continue to add to the already out of balance levels of CO2, adding to the already unsolvable problem? How on earth can they expect to do the former without first going well beyond the latter? There's no way to limit temperature rise from CO2 without lowering the amount in the atmosphere...and this plan NEVER goes that far, it only agrees to, at some point, balance the amount we add with the amount being removed...that keeps the levels at above current levels, it does not lower them. That keeps the temperature rise in effect, only lowering the speed at which it's rise accelerates, not lowering the speed it rises.
From what I can grasp of this 'agreement', it's beyond worthless and does nothing to solve the problem, only agrees to limit the speed at which we make it worse. It seemingly ignores the fact that what we do today takes 50-100 years to effect the climate and pretends that slowing (not stopping) the RISE in CO2 production is in any way meaningful. If we stopped ALL human CO2 production tomorrow, we still will see the 3.6F rise, the acidification of the ocean, and the myriad of issues that come from those and other disrupted natural cycles.

Also, if we stopped all CO2 production tomorrow, that would mean shutting down coal power plants, and that (while necessary) brings with it the problem of stopping global dimming. Global dimming occurs when aerosols block sunlight in the upper atmosphere, and has directly counteracted some effects of global warming. If we stop putting the pollution up there, we get a few more degrees of temperature rise from that alone.
Unexpected feedbacks like this make solving the problem an issue that requires thorough knowledge of all the processes involved, a near impossibility, meaning anyone who's not a professional climatologist who's offering solutions or opinions is really just spouting hot air....kind of like I just did.

content was interesting, but the host was distracting (trying to be like Vsauce guy too much?)

what's so extreme about this science? Maybe it would be extreme engineering if they tried to build a geothermal power plant in Centralia that ran off of the long-burning underground coal.

Burning coal releases more radioactive material in the environment than nuclear power. [1] [2]

Cool, I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with @kir_mokum, he just didn't actually make any points.

I agree that nuclear weapons are not really an issue when it comes to building power plants. Personally, I think it's hypocritical in the extreme for the people with the nuclear weapons to tell others they can't have them. I'd much rather no-one had them.

"Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around"
Depends on what you mean by "lying around". No, it's not out in the open, but it is just "lying around" in the sense that they have shitloads of it (in one site alone they have nearly 126000 barrels) and they're not doing anything with it. Waste disposal *is* a serious issue with current nuclear technology.

As for deaths, I suppose what gets people about nuclear disasters is that other disasters tend to be more short term. From a media POV: if some people die in a coal mine, that's sad, but they were miners and it's over pretty quick, but dying kids from Chernobyl make great TV!

I tend to agree that it's probably safer in the long run.

Sorry to jump the thread here; not sure if dubious is the word either, but pretty amateur and more fear mongering with no supporting data.

First, the suggestion that no more reactors should be built because people use them to aid in production of nuclear weapons. Well kids, that ship has already sailed: In June 2014, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that nine nations (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) possessed approx. 16,300 nuclear weapons in total. So someone builds one or 10 more? Yeah, that will matter. Someone needs to read up on the concept of deterrence.

When talking about waste: "Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around" - well, that's just horseshit.

Regarding accidents and number of deaths due to nuclear reactors: "devastating disasters every 30 years" - devastating? Come on, people died, but compared to other sources of energy, according to the WHO, it is by far the safest. Consider:

Energy Source Mortality Rates; Deaths/yr/TWh

Coal - world average, 161
Coal - China, 278
Coal - USA, 15
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Solar/rooftop - 0.44-0.83
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - world, 0.10
Hydro - world*, 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04

* Includes the 170,000 deaths from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975

So, if not dubious, certainly cheap and pedantic.

The rozzers arrested a single (!) person during those clashes that saw 34 cops injured. One person. One. They arrested some 200 folks during a peaceful protest against open pit coal mining in Garzweiler last week.

But wait, it gets better. The only person they arrested in Heidenau was... this journalist/photographer.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

No, my first paragraph attempts to spell out why solar PV is a dud for people who do it the worst way possible, by selling all the electricity produced at drastically reduced rates to the grid, then buying it back at exorbitant rates, you are wasting well over 75% of what you could be saving. Of course it looks bad when you waste that much.
I have no mechanism needed to make it financially viable, and the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous.
I didn't 'make time' for anything, it just so happened that my lifestyle was perfect for solar, since I already did my housework during the daytime.
I have what's called a 'time of use' meter, which means it splits the day into 3 time zones, and keeps track of what I produce vs what I use from the grid. That means I essentially do get 1:1 for my production, which never reaches the point where they owe me money, but does offset almost all the juice I use (during the daytime) At night, we use normal grid power at normal grid rates. Too bad Australia doesn't do it that way.

yes, there are costs to an array, but they are one time costs, and FAR less than what's saved. That part is simple math. My system cost around $34K after rebates, maybe $40 without them, and it saves me around $5K per year in electric costs (based on 2007 rates, which have gone up). That includes production costs, installation cost, shipping cost, permit cost, etc.
Here in the US, daytime IS peak power use time. it's when business are using the most power, and when AC units are on, so the grid uses the power I feed in without problem. Industry uses WAY more power than homes. Solar offsets them using the hydro, gas turbines, and ramping up nuclear plants during the day, when they are used the most.
If my bill is lower, it means I used less fossil fuel generated electricity, so it IS working like a charm. How do you think otherwise? it's not perfect, and doesn't erase all other production, and is not a solution to ALL energy production problems, but it is a good part of the solution, unless it's done in the least productive manner possible.

What are you talking about, 2-3X the energy input? If you actually only count the costs, not the profit made at each stage in selling/installing panels, they probably come in more like 5-10 times the energy input, with little or no carbon footprint (many factories make the panels using power produced by other panels...as in pure solar factories).
My calculations (verified by my bills) put it at <1/2 the cost of buying (mostly coal produced) electricity from the grid at 2007 prices (even without any rebates), so how do you figure coal power production is cheaper, even ignoring all the other costs/problems? Coal may give a 30 to 1 return if you ignore ALL the other costs involved in using coal. If you count them, it's more like 1 to 2, because the effects of coal are so incredibly expensive, as is the cost of digging it up, transporting it, storing it, burning it, and disposing/storing the toxic waste products.

The cost of restoring a river is far more than the value of 100% of the power generated by a dam during it's lifetime.

Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?