If they're "at their limits", then people need to switch technology to something else.
Somebody said that IF carbon nanotubes get researched, it is possible to make something like a super capacitator using them - something capable of holding insane amount of energy. IF a single battery can't powerup a single laptop for a month without recharging, it is a joke anyway.

Yes, let's destroy the ecosystem and drown the world in accumulator fluid. Life requires light and it is much more efficient that a solar panel at converting it into energy. Solar panels takes space, and placing solar panel means that a plant won't be able to harness light where panel is placed. Where will the animals go? Sahara isn't a dead place, you know.

I think it is a paranoia. You see few isolated events and overestimate their likelihood. Compared to total number of nuclear plants (over 400, AFAIK), probability of accident is rather small. You're using the same kind of "logic" that makes people worry about getting killed by shark, lightning or swine flu, when in reality they most likely will die from heart disease (just google "odds of dying" on google images).

Yes, and a distant star can fire up a gamma ray beam at your planet and destroy everything. There are many things that could end life on our planet (most of them unrelated to humans), and if you'll start worrying about every single one of them, you'll get a heart attack early.

It is human nature to make mistakes. Which means that solution that you think is "best" most likely will kill everybody because you overlooked few small details. See Murphy's law.

The accident at Fukushima didn't happen in the 80's. It's been this very year, 2011.
Earthquake+Tsunami = disaster
Earthquake+Tsunami+Nuclear plant = disaster for years (they are still not sure if tens or thousands depending on the nuclear waste leaks)

It's not the security, it is the consecuences of an accident, maybe there is only a 0.1% possibility for happening an accident but the consecuences can be a terrible damage to a big piece of earth (say 30 kilometres to the round) for thousands of years.

Everything is dangerous. Millions of people die each year in car accidents. There are dozens of things around you that are a few orders of magnitudes more likely to kill you then a nuclear powerplant. For some reason people are more afraid of something that happens a few times in a century and kills a lot of people than something that kills ten times less people but happens thousand times more often.

I'm well aware of that.
Considering what the powerplant went through and how long it lasted before the accident, I thing it's pretty impressive. For me, personally, it's a demonstration of how very safe the nuclear plants are today.

Everything that generates a lot of power is dangerous. When the thing breaks and the energy is released, the impact to the environment is always serious. But considering how much energy the nuclear plant provides, the energy/risk ratio is better than for any other kind of energy.

Let me put this into perspective.
Fukushima death toll: 5 people.
Number of people that die every year: 55000000. 1.73 people per second.
Usa death statistics for year 2007:
616067 people died because of heart disease in one year - enough to kill the city.

It isn't hard to find a photo on google images to see how much is 600000 people and compare it with five. Yet for some reason nobody seems to care about about heart disease and cancer, however people make a fuss about nuclear power plant. Isn't that hilarious?

Debates like this make me think that people are blind or something. You already have much deadlier things to deal with instead of nuclear power plants.

here's another way to think of it, when an airplane crashes or a train derails catastrophically, several hundred people die in one go, thus making a much more newsworthy story than a handful in a car crash, but statistically there are fewer deaths by train or plane crash than car crashes, but our perception would be biased towards cars being safer.

or better yet look at the alternative, hydro-electric
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200...a_dam_acc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam (no that one didn't produce electricity)
the point being a dam can fail and also kill hundreds to thousands of people along the path of the river.
but dams don't fail often do they

heck, just being in a CITY can be dangerous, just look at the great chicago fire, or the big fire in san francisco after the quake in 1906, but such catastrophes don't happen very often either

statistics aren't about the outliers, they are about means (averages), medians and modes. and just because a huge death toll in one go makes for a sensational story, one accident doesn't tell the whole story, because it is usually much more mundane things that are more likely to kill us than some catastrophic accident.

The ironic thing about it is that much more people might die in the world by the time report makes it into news. It is 1.74 people per second on average, which means 105 people per minute.

The matter is not the dead people the matter is the environment,

To be blind is to think that the problem at Fukushima was the 5 dead people, the real problem is for the future of the environment,
nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years, and an accident makes a piece of world a black hole to live.

And still, we have no idea of the consecuences that are gonna be after Fukushima, there might be people dying the next years, the ones that worked trying to avoid the meldown and the leaks, they where exposed to very big radioactivity measures.

We cannot look to some other way, as if the problem there was over and solved. It is not.

Still, Chernovil is causing problems with the concrete nowadays.

Now I understand the idea of economy of scale but I've always wondered why atomic power plants have to be so large and, potentially, prone to catastrophic failure.

Surely a better idea would be to use the small highly developed (way more RnD research) and efficient reactors found in navy ships and subs. Potentially they have a life span of 50 years between refueling (I'm guessing less under constant load as apposed to a more peak and trough approach in vessels) and are a lot more self contained. If one plant can, as oft quoted, power a small/medium sized city such as Portsmouth (in the UK) then surely a network of such plants placed strategically around a country with a distribution system capable of transferring under utilized stations power to areas having higher requirements (as is already done) would be better.

If each "station" where buried within a semi closed, and ultimately seal-able, shell then any major failure could more easily be contained. Also I believe that such reactors are in themselves far more self contained and don't require external sources of coolant, such as water, that larger plants do which is why larger plants are often coastal in nature.

Another advantage of submarine reactors is they they also are used to produce oxygen and hydrogen and also water purification so it would be also possible, as a by product, to use them to create fuel for say hydrogen powered cars, hydrogen fuel cells, desalination plants, and waste water treatment.

A big advantage would be de-commisioning because as and when a reactor became out dated it could be shipped as a whole sealed unit for storage and a new more advanced design, or possibly newer fusion (if we ever make it work) reactors, dropped into the same place as the old. (The holy grail of old science fiction, plug and play micro piles ;-)

Finally for national security and continuity of power, were an individual station to be taken off line either by terrorists or air strike during a (Non nuclear) war only a small area of population would be affected.

I guess the biggest problems would be :-
public acceptance of of small reactors bordering cities.
security concerns, although it must be easier to protect as a target compared to a few large above ground coastal stations.
re-fueling, way more shipments of fuel around the country every 30-50 years, although much smaller individual shipments.

I also think that it is dramatic. For the next generations... The bomb of Hiroshima, it remains important issues due to radioactivity although 64 ago now.

"the real problem is for the future of the environment". Maybe a Solar plant on planet Mars. You wrote nice posts, very interesting, but I may personally think that nuclear is a no-way direction or a not to go, something that must be avoided in any cases. My guess.

And also what do you do with all those huge constructions of stainless boron steels, and other alloys. They are polluted. And you are certainly not remelt them into any other alloys/metals. Those wastes will remain for years. You store them into earth? You cannot do anything with them. You saw the movie : WALL·E (2008)?

You do know that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear powerplant are two different things, right?

You have too many "might", "we don't know", and "we have no idea". In order to make an argument you have to know with certainty and you must have precise idea, and there should be no "might"s. As I already said, you're vastly overestimating dangerousness of nuclear power plants, plus I have impression that all your knowledge came from media - i.e. you have no idea about subject yourself, since the main purpose of the media is to present any event as a sign of apocalypse.
Your approach is blind and irrational. Humanity have other ways of screwing up environment (landfills, air pollution, water pollution, and waste that doesn't decompose comes to mind), so instead of being scared of nuclear plants, it would be better idea to analyze all existing environmental threats and start eleminating them one-by-one, starting with most dangerous (OR with the one that is easiest to fix from the most dangerous threats). Nuclear power plants are not the most dangerous. People have much better chances of destroying all marine life.
--EDIT--
Your attitude towards nuclear power is very similar to a bad programming practice which is called "premature optimization". In case of premature optimization, programmer "decides" (for no reason) that since feature requires 1 extra cpu cycle, it should be "optimized" (even we're talking about routine that is called once per month and takes 10 millisecond total). As a result, he'll waste development time needlessly. The proper approach is to forget about guessing, and identify "bottlenecks" using real program performance data (measured by profiler).
Same applies to nuclear power. You "decided" (for no reason) that nuclear is dangerous, so you think it should be eliminated. However, you have no real data to support your argument, so it is a blind guess based on 2 accidents, rumors and hearsay. In order to blame nuclear power, you need to use statistics and real world data. And in order to reduce damage to environment, you also need to use statistics in order to identify most dangerous threat and then start with that problem, instead of mindlessly selecting scapegoats(nuclear power) at random.

Last time I checked people still live in hiroshima today. 1 million of them. Hard to say if they live at the detonation point or not, though. As far as I know, the city isn't dangerous anymore.

Exactly HOW are you going to transfer power from there? It takes several months to get there via rocket, plus rocket requires (a lot of) fuel.

It is fiction/fantasy, you know - it has very little in common with reality.

I doubt that the problem with nuclear plants are the plants themselves. Most people forget that nuclear plants are not emission free, in fact they produce one of the most dangerous things on this planet: atomic waste. And not one (nuclear powered or not) nation on this planet has a viable solution for the problem of atomic waste, nonetheless we use this "safe" way of producing energy for more than 55 years now. This waste is far more dangerous than the plants, I would think.

No, it is *NOT* hilarious... all these things like Septicemia, Alzheimer, Diabetes, etc. do *NOT* have the potential to induce long term genetic modifications that may and will prove harmful to the genetic heritage of mankind...

It is not ONLY about who gets killed... it is about a massive growth of incidence in genetically caused diseases induced my long term exposure to increased levels of ionizing radiations and toxic radioactive heavy metals that creep into a biosystem...

Death toll can be accouted for on spot... but what about the "delayed" death toll...??

As I said, to make an argument, it is necessary to provide solid data. The radiation poisoning occurred in the past, so there should already be data about long-term consequences. If you have a solid proof that nuclear power provides threat to all life on earth, then you should pass it to authorities.

The problem is not with "long term death toll". The problem is that if people concentrate on nuclear power (which is not immediate issue), they will miss somthing much more important that will screw up entire planet instead of just one region. If I remember correctly, Jaques Ives Cousteau once released a film where he compared to videos of life in Mediterranean sea - on video was shot when he first tried aqualung, and another one was shot years later (unfortunately, I saw the video so long ago, that I won't be able to locate it now). The problem was that on a first video sea was full with life, and on second video everything was dead - because of people dumping waste into ocean. In other words, a damaged nuclear plant will kill few people and pollute region for a while. This can be fixed with time. However, if you make too many species go extinct (irreversible), pollute ocean and damage ecosystem/foodchains, then it you have good chance of actually killing everybody on the planet. IMO, with this in mind it is quite obvious that nuclear power plants are not the things you should REALLY worry about (you have worse things to deal with) - it is roughly equivalent to worrying about getting a food poisoning when your house is on fire, you're inside, you can't get out, and the whole thing is about to collapse very soon.

you wanna talk environment?
how about the numerous coal seam fires, some of which have been burning for centuries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_se..._of_mine_fires
or the deep water horizon accident?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwat...izon_explosion
or the exxon valdez oil spill?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
or the bhopal disaster?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
or better yet, the infamous love canal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
or just search google for leaky oil pipelines
or this?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/...20120301.shtml
or the Kuwaiti oil fires of 1991?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires
or the dust bowl which was exacerbated by settling in areas not really suitable for settling in addition to poor farming practice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_bowl

and let's not forget natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions which we can do nothing about other than move out of the way and watch them happen, which have far greater environmental impact in one single eruption than humans can even dream of causing.

i could go on, but i think you should get the point by now, why single out nuclear power when a lot of what we do that has NOTHING to do with nuclear power and seems far more mundane, but has just as great if not a greater ecological impact.

nobody is saying nuclear is perfect, but let's look at the facts before making a judgment.