Haven't you heard? Nuclear is also apparently a
renewable source of energy.
No energy source is truly renewable. We could, if we desired, replace the entire worlds electricity consumption for millenia with nuclear power at current levels. We'll voluntarily stop using fission when we get fusion on line or anything else that's cheaper(geothermal, solar and wind will be competitive in a large fraction of locations). So for all intents and purposes fission is de facto 'renewable'.
'proven reserves' refer to what is economical to mine at current prices. Nuclear energy is almost immune to the price of uranium, so reserves will grow extensively if fission is still competetive and we're starting to run out of uranium.
What we call nuclear waste is actually something like ~96% U-238, ~1% PU(fissionable), ~3% actual waste and some small quantity of unfissioned U-235, depending on reactor and enrichment of fuel elements.
U-238 is turned into plutonium in normal reactors by neutron absorbtion, but not at high enough rates to transmute more U-238 into plutonium than U-235/PU that is burnt in the reactor. Fast breeder reactors manage this feat. There are two reasons fast breeders aren't in use outside of experimental reactors.
The first reason is proliferation. This was a reasonable objection when it is was supposed that trans-uranics would have to be separated; but it is not nescessary for trans-uranics to be distinguished, and you can instead just seperate them from the waste. This can be done at the nuclear plant, so that no trans-uranics ever leave the plant. The fuel will be highly active and it would be almost impossible to steal it; even if you manage to do so you have to extract and purify the PU and that's very difficult without the proper facillities and radiation shielding. It would be easier to simply buy yellow cake and refine with centrifuges.
The second reason is cost. Natural uranium is such a negligible cost of nuclear power that we don't have to care about using a sensible fuel cycle. I beleive that vitrifying and burrying 'waste' would be a mistake, when we do not yet know if we'll eventually use breeders. It makes no economical sense to incur the extra bill of materials and operating costs.
Another benefit of breeders is that you can burn the actinid components of the waste(the components of waste that have half-lifes of centuries) in the reactor. This means the actual waste will only be above background for a handful of centuries.
Breeders allow us to use all of the U-238('depleted uranium') as fuel in the reactor. As U-235 is only .7% of natural uranium this extends the fuel supply by a factor of ~140. This will last longer than we're ever likely to need it. You can further extend the supply of nuclear fuel by breeding thorium into U-233; thorium is a factor 5 or so more abundant in the Earth's crust.
Even if you can manage to convince people that nuclear is a good idea, the time it will take before something even begins construction will be years. Well over a decade for a single nuclear plant.
That includes non-standard technology and red tape. E.g. Planned construction time for a third generation standardized VVER-1200 is ~54 months. There are some plans for nuclear plants that use more standardized elements which could cut construction times to around 3-4 years.
But then you have the problem of public perception again. Making people accept the idea of small low-power lightweight cars when they've been used to buying land boats with massive displacement and ridiculous horsepower (albeit pretty lousy for an engine of that displacement)
It's only cool to waste something that's abundant. If gasoline where to go up in price because of limited availability or if people payed the real price of gasoline(political, health and environmental cost included) it wouldn't look so sexy anymore.
Shortage of land isn't always the problem. Prarie grasses and waste wood sound like some sort of cure to the cost of field maintenance, fertilization, irrigation etc... but the technology to make good use of it isn't there yet.
Both BTL and cellulose to ethanol are still comming down rapidly in price and are expected to be competitive with oil in just a few years. There's no reason to expect this trend to stop.
And of course, as you said, corn and sugar cane aren't suitable for the US to make a meaningful ethanol yield. Biodiesel is far better in terms of what we can do right now, but getting people to move to diesel is nearly every bit as hard as getting them to buy tiny electric 2-seaters. The main advantage of ethanol is that it requires minimal modifications to most existing vehicles on the road, so the uptake can be quick.
Energy balance is actually fairly similar at current tech(~2).
Disregarding algea which are in a class of their own; yields per acre of cellulose vs. oil aren't close for easily harvestable crops. The limiting factor for derivatives of cellulose(ethanol, butanol, syn gas derivatives etc.) is the production process. The limiting factor for oil is the crop. This makes me believe cellulose has more legs than oil production(disregarding algea).
I don't know anybody posing all-electric or fuel cell as a *short-term* solution, though. I don't think battery technology or hydrogen-delivery infrastructure is even a fraction of a percent of the way to what we'd really need. Maybe in a few decades, it'll be ready.
I beleive it will be an important component of mitigating oil dependency in the short term. It makes a tremendous difference if tiny 2-seater EV's replace 20% of ICEs over the comming few decades. I believe the perception problem will persists only as long as oil is still cheap and I believe oil still has a long way upwards to go before there's any potential of it starting to get cheaper.(there's a lag before the current boom in drilling rig production, test drilling and other exploration leads to mature oil fields).
