[moz]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

You've got that backwards. Today's nuclear plants use fission... the separation of atomic particles.

Yup, I was talking about stars. In case you didn't misspeak above, the separation of atomic particles stage is the energy-expensive part of the process (enrichment), it's the stimulated fission part that releases stored solar energy.

So-called "renewable" energy is almost entirely solar-derived, most of it in ludicrously inefficient ways that only work because the sheer amount of solar energy available is so large. Unfortunately that tiny fraction of it that is available for fission plants is both hard to get and unable to give us more than another brief consumption boost before running out.

I think we need to decide how long we want the human race to be around for and plan our resource use accordingly. So any plan to replace much of our existing electricity generation with nuclear fission needs to clearly tell us how long that will be for - none of the estimates I've seen suggest even a millennium worth of fissionables exist on Earth, let alone enough for a more acceptable timeframe. It would be a shame to discover later that transuranics are actually useful and we've burnt them all up, as seems likely to happen with fossil fuels.