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Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by lurgee.

Nuclear prices are going up because they are under attack from the fossil fuel industry and they are not allowed to innovate with new technologies that are much safer and cheaper.

Also no private insurance companies or banks will touch nuclear developments without state governments taking on the long term "externalities" like waste management and other risks

nuclear power is relatively safe now, but it is more expensive in the long run now than even natural gas electric

glorified steam machine that creates radioactive waste

Not if done right.
There are ways to do it without excessive waste, safely with zero possibility of meltdown or radioactive release, but getting new processes approved beyond experimental plants is nearly impossible.

Also, ironically, it's anti nuclear activists that got America to store rather than re-refine our waste, which adds exponentially to the costs and dangers. Reenrichment on site removes all the dangers of transportation and storage of waste, and means up to 90% less mining for the same amount of fuel....but we don't.

Don't get me wrong....I'm far more in favor of solar, wind, wave, and tidal generation, but I think nuclear power has it's place, and already exists. I just think it's dumb to be doing it as wastefully and dangerously as possible.

Good point. I know France recycles their expellants down to the low percentages. We should have that in North America

I guess the point is that if we can get such cheap energy directly from the sun there is no longer going to be a point to it

"The Stone Age didn't end for a lack of stone and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil."

38 minutes of "brilliant analysis" later and wind power still requires subsidies and unbalances grids while nuclear power needs only more concentrated investment capital and long term government guarantees.

Building wind turbines is a good investment because they scale well and have political backing including subsidies. Nuclear power is a long term investment in a volatile sector.

Once the whole planet is run by banks and all continents are politically united, connected by a network of thick cables, wind and solar will have a chance to dominate. Right now you need backups for all those windless nights, safety valves for windy Sundays, and new transmission lines to be safe from crazy neighboring countries.

Hardly a brilliant analysis - more like a brilliant piece of advocacy that, like most of its kind, is long on optimistic projections and very short on real numbers and a real analysis of those numbers. For instance: what is the megawatt hour cost of a solar power generation station that can replicate the power responsiveness and availability factor of a fossil power generation station (over a similar life cycle). He quotes the kwh cost for solar and wind power systems but each and every one of them is "backed up" by a much larger conventional power generation system that, ultimately, is burdened with the costs of maintaining grid stability, grid voltage, and grid frequency. There are huge engineering problems and substantial costs associated with maintaining a power supply that we now require to operate a modern economy. Just ONCE, I would like to see the green power advocates address those challenges and costs in a realistic way instead of glossing over them with their fantasy projections.
And I will say, as an aside, that I have spent my entire working career working in the renewable energy sector and fully agree that we need to transition to a renewable energy economy - but unrealistic projections are going to doom our economy if they are taken as being possible in the near term.

I agree for the most part, but with batteries, now becoming reasonable in size and price, it's not so hard to be totally off grid. Micro hydro can also be efficient power storage if properly designed with a dual reservoir system.
Granted, that seems to work best in small scale setups so far, but there is an island .....(https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/09/17/349223674/tiny-spanish-island-nears-its-goal-100-percent-renewable-energy)
...currently (since 2014) using this tech to be nearly 100% green.

Dismissing projections as unrealistic without fully examining them may doom our economy and planet.
That's what happened with solar, people just claimed it's expensive and unreliable, which meant those they convinced didn't know how wrong that is, and didn't buy systems or support solar farms. I ignored them and did some light math, and found that even an expensive high tech system with batteries, professionally installed, would pay for itself in about 8 years, with a 20 year expected lifespan (and I live in Humboldt county, with the foggiest airport in America, not Arizona). I'm damn glad I didn't listen. Even a 2 year delay would have cost me 1/2 my rebates, making the system take an extra 2+ years to pay for itself by costing me thousands upon thousands of dollars (instead of saving me thousands per year).

Edit: Also, here in Humboldt we just switched to choice in electricity, we can choose regular pge power (mostly old school generation), a mixture of up to 75% (I think, maybe higher) renewable for cheaper, or 100% renewable for more. All 3 now bill transmission (including voltage/frequency regulation) separately, so it's easy to see what generation alone costs. It's clear so far that mostly renewable is the best bet economically, and I assume it will become more renewable as new technologies become available.....at least I hope so.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Ted talks, solar roofs, solar windows, Ramez Naam' to 'Ted talks, solar roofs, solar windows, Ramez Naam, singularity university' - edited by Eklek