I think people can tolerate something like this:
This is environmentalist politics we're talking about. 0.2% of the US population lives in Alaska. Maybe about 10% of the Alaskan population lives anywhere near the areas affected by Alaskan drilling. Even if the only known method to drill in Alaska resulted in the death of all life of any kind within 200 miles, less than 60,000 people, probably less, would be affected.
Yet there is immense opposition to drilling in Alaska.
edit: same BS applies to nuclear power.
The principles behind conservationism and environmentalism are not based upon the direct impact disturbing wild areas has on people. It's true, there's practically no direct impact. Rather, the motives are a combination of several factors:
a.) Preserving wildlife in its full diversity.
b.) Providing pristine lands for people to explore purely for leisure.
c.) Giving a choice to future generations about what the best use of undeveloped land is.
The opposition to Nuclear fission that arose during the 1970s was based in entirely different reasoning. Nuclear power plants, after all, are generally built near population centers, not out in the middle of nowhere -- it's an energy transmission efficiency issue. (Light water reactors need a substantial water source, so that also limits where you can put them.)
What really killed the nuclear power industry in the U.S. was the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. The reactor containment vessel actually worked as intended, but for some reason they decided to vent excess steam and hydrogen straight into the atmosphere. Naturally some radioactive isotopes were carried along for the ride, although the overall exposure to individual citizens did not exceed ~100 Millirem. That's quite a few x-rays, but probably not enough to cause noticeable harm.
Three Mile Island was fundamentally a loss of coolant accident. There were several chances during the development of the incident which could have prevented it, but ignorance on the part of the operators as to the actual state of the reactor prevented correct action. (Part of this ignorance was caused by the lack of any instrument to directly read the water level in the core.) Even when the containment building sump (a low section that catches fluid) started filling up, which would generally be a clear indication of loss of coolant, the operators made no response. Errors like these compounded until the reactor was no longer salvageable.
The decline of nuclear fission plant construction wasn't cause solely by Three Mile Island. After the 1973 oil shock that substantially damaged the economy, some analyses of electric energy demand concluded that overcapacity existed. As a result, at least 40 planned nuclear fission plants never went into production.
I favor progression of research in nuclear reactor design, especially the Integral Fast Reactor. This uses liquid sodium as the coolant, which alleviates the need for highly pressurized water. As a result, the reactor core is close to ambient pressure, and the chance of a loss of coolant accident are remarkably tiny. The drawback to liquid sodium is that it reacts rapidly with air or water, and so must be carefully controlled to prevent sodium fires (air mixture) or outright explosions (mixture with water). The danger is dramatically reduced by the introduction of an intermediary loop between the reactor (sodium source) and the turbines (water source). With this, any explosion that may occur between sodium+water reactions would be contained away from the reactor core. Naturally, this extra but necessary complexity raises the cost of the design.
Integral Fast Reactors are also designed to be used as breeder reactors with fuel reprocessing. It has been estimated that they can achieve ~99.5% energy extraction from the nuclear fuels given the correct processes. This compares unbelievably favorably with standard light-water single-process reactors, which harness only a meager ~1%. A substantial additional advantage to breeding and reprocessing is that the final products are much less radioactive, on the order of about 200 years to reach natural ore radioactivity. This is much better than several thousands of years and makes it feasible to store practically all waste on site until it is safe to move elsewhere.
The opposition to breeder reactors is mostly based on nuclear weapons proliferation fears, which are largely unfounded. Although the reactor does produce plutonium, it is not weapons grade and is intermixed with other fuel metals. The high radioactivity of the mixed fuel source also damages purity by producing isotopes not desired for weapons fuel. Most importantly, the plutonium used by the reactor
never needs to leave the plant site. This makes protecting the fuels a simple matter of properly securing the reactor, something which is generally already done. Indeed, the total amount of radioactive material leaving a well-designed breeder reactor would be significantly less than a typical light water reactor.
The other major, practical contender for the energy market is solar, either photovoltaics, solar thermal, or both. Solar has the significant advantage of locality, meaning that you can produce energy very near to where it is actually being consumed. This both increases grid efficiency and makes the overall energy infrastructure more robust and less centralized. However, solar naturally does not work at night; as a result, it is necessary to have a significant storage system for handling night-time use. Further, locations too far from the equator do not receive a high enough intensity of sunlight to be feasible without mirrors or other concentration methods.
Producing photovoltaics has the moderate issue that some relatively rare metals like Indium are required. However, the world supply of Indium has been deemed adequate to meet predicted demand. (Consider that Silver, a rarer element, is mined at roughly three times the rate per year.) Efficiency of solar cells has also been questioned. Average efficiency of basic mass-produced cells is generally between 10 and 15 percent. Specialized cells that capture multiple segments of the electromagnetic spectrum are able to reach and even break efficiencies of 40 percent, although they are naturally more complicated designs to produce.
For very warm climates with lots of relatively flat, open land (say, desert) solar thermal is an excellent power generator. It is an extremely simple technology, easy to make and easy to deploy. Large sheets of metal are laid out and warmed by the sun; mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight in a limited region. The metal is connected to water or another medium that can extract the thermal energy. In hot climates like southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida this type of system can scale to meet practically any level of energy demand at an affordable cost. When operating temperature is raised enough, water can be swapped out for a dry heat exchange mechanism. This substantially reduces water use and is of great use in the desert where water is scarce.
