With all your suggestions, have you taken a look at Energize America (www.ea2020.org)?

Good article.

13. jon – Nuclear power is the only solution that really makes sense for providing our civilization’s energy needs over the short and medium term, and due to fundamental limits on the availability of uranium fuels, the medium term is only viable if you go to breeder reactors. Third generation reactors produce far fewer nucleotides than present 2nd generation reactors, meaning that the non-reprocessable wastes are highly radioactive but short-lived. The best way to handle wastes is still to dig boreholes and lower stainless-steel encased vitrified (turned into glass) waste below the water table several miles down, and this has been the case since the 1980s when it was first produced. When buried that deep, nothing, not even volcanism, seismic effects, or ice ages will dig it up again.

Wind, solar, tidal, oceanic current, geothermal, and hydropower combined cannot provide for the energy needs of humanity over the short and medium term, even with a massive drive for improved energy efficiency. This means that nuclear power is required. Since there’s not enough uranium to run on purely uranium for more than about 30 years at today’s consumption rate (never mind the consumption rate if the world transitions away from coal to nuclear), only by consuming secondary fuels like plutonium will nuclear be viable over the medium term, and plutonium fuels inherently implies breeder reactors. There simply isn’t any other logical conclusion.

Finally, non-proliferation is busted anyway. The goal of the international community and the United States shouldn’t be stopping the spread of nuclear power technology, reprocessing technology, or even nuclear weapons, but the careful and safe dissemination of those technologies and draconian, automatic penalties for anyone who propagates those technologies beyond their ability to control them. See Revisiting Nuclear Non-Proliferation on my personal blog.

Except for the absolutely insane recommendation to transition to the widespread use of breeder reactors. That solution is orders of magnitudes more dangerous than the problems of global warming. Sprinkling large scale factories of plutonium creating reactors around the world will destroy any hope to restrain nuclear proliferation, assisting in the creation of ever more nuclear weapons and nations possessing them.

Breeder reactors have many safety and security problems. There need to be large scale reprocessing plants to separate nuclear waste and refine it into new fuel rods, adding to the management problem. Large amounts of extraordinarily radioactive materials will have to be regularly transported by road, rail and water.

There is no long term solution for the safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste. The half life of plutonium is 100,000 years. At that point, one half of the plutonium has decayed into other daughter products, many of which are also highly radioactive. It takes about one million years for plutonium to fully decay into stable, non-radioactive products. The history of recorded civilization is perhaps 8,000 years old. The limit for safe containment of nuclear wastes is less than one thousand years. There is no geologically stable place to bury it for the time needed for decay. Most storage technologies are only effective for a few hundred years, and we have already had widespread contamination from earlier storage methods that failed.

Time between ice ages is about 10,000 to 100,000 years. The effects of global warming could be absorbed and corrected by the natural processes of the earth well before the nucleotides have finished their decay.

Radioactive products not only cause cancers and other diseases, but can alter DNA and genetic materials of many species including our own. Most mutations are not beneficial to the individual or the species. Nuclear testing and radioactive leaks have already more than doubled the background radiation of the earth.

Please, do not recommend a widespread science experiment be performed on all of creation, with no way to predict the full outcomes, and no way contain or reverse the problems it causes.

I’m surprised to see San Jose included in this lineup since it is neither coastal not low lying. The Wickipedia has its elevation at 26 meters or 85 feet. I’m thinking that Miami would be a far better substitute and far more vulnerable.