Nuclear is the best option. It’s the cheapest when considering the energy output, most environmentally friendly, and takes up the least amount of space.
It’s the most environmentally friendly, if you don’t consider that it is not renewable and that there are no waste management solutions for the highly radioactive waste.
Nuclear power is exactly as renewable as solar power; and ‘highly’ radioactive waste is a fraction of a fraction of the waste generated, with most waste being less harmful than living within 50 miles of a coal mine, or 100 miles of a coal power plant. It’s also entirely defeated by a relatively small amount of one of the most common metals on Earth. Additionally, if we were to power the entire world with just nuclear power, the amount of unusable waste generated per year globally would be smaller than a compact sedan, requiring a little less than a box-truck sized container to store it safely anywhere on the planet. It would take several tens of billions of years to accumulate to a problematic size for safe storage.
So we build more Nuclear Power Plants, because the highly toxic waste is not “enough” to care? Where are keeping it then?
Literally in any of the hundreds of current underground sites? It’s also not highly toxic, it’s radioactive. There’s a pretty huge difference. Nuclear waste doesn’t leech into the water cycle like the run off of broken solar panels or turbine arms.
It not being renewable doesn’t really matter when talking about its CO2 emissions. And the neat thing is, radioactive waste decays on its own so the “waste management” needed is to bury it somewhere and leave it there. It ain’t that complicated.
It’s a bit more complicated. Where are you gonna bury it? It has to be somewhere, where normally nobody is. Also you have to keep the waste containers safe (and in one piece) for a very, very long time. How are you gonna mark it that people thousands of years in the future still know that it is dangerous?
