For storage, PSH[1] while obviously not lossless can deal with excess peak capacity -> cyclical demand in a fairly scalable way and unlike lead-acid, LiCO2/LiFePO4/etc, don't suffer from anode dendrite formation.

I have extreme reverence for Bill Nye as a voice of rationality[0], so when I heard him on a talk show nay-saying nuclear power with his prime argument of 3 failures against ~400 I poked to see what sorts of impact it had. At first glance, a failure rate of of almost 1% is absolutely insanity. Things have significantly changed, however, since the design of Chernobyl. Control technologies had progressed in modern (3rd and 4th generation) nuclear power plants, which are safer and cleaner by quite a bit compared to what the 60s hippies were riled up against. (In fact, there are 3rd generation plants that can be powered solely off of the waste-materials of ~7 older plants, providing an auxiliary benefit of consuming spent-fuel rather than having to can->seal->bury). The important thing to consider is that as technology progresses, we (humanity as a collective) should revise our expectations. After all, we don't factor the failure rates of Wright brother era endeavors into Boeing numbers.

Either way, seeing that segment got my curiosity fired up enough to begin some inquiry. (Standard caveat of "everything that follows is armchair"; this isn't even close to the field of study I'm well-versed in. The closest I get to energy professionally is low-voltage/low-amperage li-ion power control, spun such that units pass UL/CSA.) Were his fears founded/relevant to modern nuclear power sources? Were his fears a product of him living through the Cold War as well as living through all 3 of the major disasters that made his fears more emotional than my own? (I.e., he's in his early 60s and lived through the media coverage of 3 mile, Chernobyl and Fukushima[2] which would have impacted his opinion; I'm about to hit 30 and only Fukushima impacted my perception so my fears might be assuaged easier than his.)

I turned to full-cost accounting (from drawing board to decommission; factoring materials sourcing and the ecological impact (e.g. Aluminum takes a lot of power to produce); factoring in transport of sourced materials; maintenance (operational/preventive and modeled failure red-tag fixes); waste disposal) makes nuclear look somewhat appealing, even compared to PV/wind (typically deemed it's closest competitor). As one would expect PV/wind/hydro/thermal/nuclear all score about the same (give or take 50% for all of those technologies), while conventional non-renewable hydrocarbons operate within the next order of magnitude up.

So where does this leave us? Well, certainly there's agreement that fossil fuels/hydrocarbons should be phased out sooner rather than later[4,5,6]. From the damage done to the coal miners lungs, to the carbon impact they're about an order of magnitude less efficient (half-an-order with newer processes to reclaim heat excess and spool up turbines, not unlike using your cars' exhaust volumetric flow to spool up turbos as a form of auxiliary power).

Similarly, those super-tankers that get our iPhones from Foxconn to California off of diesel are doing quite a bit of damage[7] as well. Russia is still using nuclear power for their ice-breakers in the Arctic without incident. I'm not sure how close to catastrophe those units are, but all of the active US Navy combatant submarines are nuclear powered. I'm sure those sailors are thankful they don't have to drink water tainted with diesel as they did in years-yore. I wonder if anyone has conducted viability studies re: utilizing the same power mechanisms that fuel the sub props for those super-tankers (genuinely not sure - if anyone has more information, hit Reply).

Apples to apples (e.g. they both happened within a few years of each other) - the Deepwater Horizon had a catastrophic impact on our ecology. I'm not sure how bad the long-term ecological impact was compared to Fukushima, but I know after a "BP cares" PR campaign, we got right back to business as usual -- we're still pumpin' that black-gold - no one shutdown any hydrocarbon based operations as a result of the catastrophe. The only reason I can think of Fukushima having such a large impact is the historical weight "nuclear power" is burdened with. Someone needs to bring in a PR firm and come up with nuclear's equivalent of "clean coal".

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[0] Shills on Fox News show up as guests frequently and try to attribute climate change to 'natural cycles in the world' using cherrypicked data (say: CO2 statistics from a selected 7 year period). Nye elegantly anticipates these arguments (not too hard, I suppose, since there are a finite number of them) and then contextualizes them (e.g., bringing out a graph showing a 100 year period). Go watch it on youtube, it's quite entertaining and a very elegant way of argumentation that's accessible to the "Glen Beck" demographic [using pretty charts instead of a chalk board].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/fukushimas...

[3] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/forms-documents/technology...

[4] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... - Note this is consumer cost, not "full-cost".

[6] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2014/05/20/why-t... (Standard full disclosure any time I cite a source that's not purely academic/where conflicting interests may exist: Brookings is a "liberal" think-tank. Even though I agree with most of their publications, I don't think they should have an .edu any more than the Cato Institute should.)

[7] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i... This question was posed in response to a Daily Mail (UK) article that was sensationalist-journalism. The Quora response is of far better quality and addresses the nuances with significantly more insight than the original article.