No need to defer to me. I am just a lowly user with many opinions I cannot seem to keep to myself. The reality is we are not too far apart on things just a few minor points.

Still calling them as I see them, only now its just expressed as opinion not editorial action.

Cheers.

TomW

The Truth is the Truth, even if no one believes it; and a lie is a lie even if everyone believes it

My problem is there is no safe way to get rid of the waste, instead we just bottle it up and pass it on to our children. Here kids, your parents made a bit of a mess, can you clean it up for us?

Yeah other forms of energy are not real good for the environment, coal pumps out huge amounts of CO2, but if we stop using coal today the trees can clear the air after several decades.

If you think nuclear is safe, have a look at this site - http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/rep02.html
And dont forget Chernobyl, the nearby city of 100,000 people had to be evacuated. Its now a ghost town, and will be for hundreds of years. Imagine if the reactor just east of Orlando Florida suffered the same fault, and the residents of Orlando were told they had to leave their city, and never come back.

Its just too great a risk.

Don't worry,you don't look like a spammer.
Let's talk about nuke.

In my opinion civil nuke is just a byproduct of military nuke.
Without massive military investments civil nuke wouldn't have
existed.

The most interesting thing about nuke power is not the grid power
but the power to kill people like mosquitos.

What is the economic reality of keeping an eye on nukewaste for
hundreds of thousends years.

What about all those nuclear submarines rotting away in russia because
suddenly there is no more money to take these horrors to pieces.
And chernobyl??
Yes,that was those stupid communists.Nowadays people have becomme wise :(

I can tell you that our economy will not be stable for hundreds
of thousends of years.It's just stupid to think that it will.

No enterprise will invest in nuke if they have full responsability
of nukewaste because it's economic nonsense.

By the way I like americans too(proof: I love this board).but I like french
too.I just try not to practise favoritisme and appreciate people for their
qualities.

1. Use smaller, gravity-fed and non-pressurized water cooling systems.  The french do this rather well, but most of the rest of nuclear users do not.  It seems to me that most of the operational problems we see with nuke plants are in the pressurized cooling systems.
2. Use standardized models of reactors.  Again, this is something that the French do well.  The Soviets also did this, but since they were dual-use reactors, saftey was a lesser issue.  In the US, all of the power generators are one-of-a-kind, essentially experimental models.
3. Design reactors that can use heat generated from older fuel, less-enriched fuel, or waste.  At the retired nuke plant in my area, the temporary expired fuel holding pond is reported to average about 190 degrees F.  That's 100 deg. F that ought to be recoverable somehow.
4. Do more research into radio-isotope electric generators that can use low-level waste.  Must it always be highly enriched plutonium for these types of units?  Can we generate a few watts at a time from all of our wast  Those few watts will add up over time.  Better than wasting the decay energies on the walls of a salt mine.
5. Do more fundamental research into radiochemistry and radiophysics.  Is a half-life truly unalterable without an explosive yield?
6. Move and group reactors into remote locations and use an efficient transmission grid to bring the power to where it is needed.  Sure, there would be transmission loss involved -- but so what if (a) we could generate extra and (b) isolate/secure a physical area by simple distance.

We already have hydrogen energy carriers as well -- they are called "hydrocarbons" and are the basis of both life on this planet and the Industrial Revolution.  There's nothing really new here, and we probably can't get much more efficient than this either without some heavy-duty biological engineering (combining sunlight, carbon, and water in a plant directly into tree-bark made of coal or into a sap that happens to be gasoline).  And even then, since we have been "blessed" with an atmosphere of 78% nitrogen, we still have to worry about poisoning ourselves in any chemical energy liberation action.

Space-based capture of solar energy will probably be the way to go.  Even at 7%, humanity will never capture even 1% of all the energy out there without a Dyson Sphere.  That <1% has already powered everything man can come up with; capturing another <1% mechanically will power everything man will EVER come up with.  Economically (if one gets past the ridiculously high start-up cost) even a series of 1-use power satellites with a life span of 5 years would be profitable over the long run.  If testing the technology in space wasn't such a pain in the butt (all of this energy transfer via microwave technology has been repeatedly ground tested), we'd be good to go.  With the release of former Soviet ICBMs for commercial research, expect to see a few small-scale tests of this technology in the near future.
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Where's that 7% number from?

Last I heard (back in the '70s or so) the estimate for getting the power to the ground was better than 85% (DC in at orbit to DC out at ground) and the generator could be a water-based steam engine with efficiencies comparable to a land-based fossil fuel plant.  That multiplies out to quite a bit more than 7%.  (I need to dig out my old L5 society stuff...)

Low, but the available energy is essentially infinite.

(Which DOES make efficiency a minor consideration, doesn't it?  B-)

The problem is that space based sysytems degrade fairly rapidly.  And currently we have no way to service them.

"Fairly rapidly" is a relative term.  For a steam engine with focusing mirror collectors and decently thick plumbing the degredation rate would be a lot lower than for hi-tek semiconductor devices or even photovoltaic panels.