I get a lot of stuff backwards Phil, that's why you and Warri are needed.

I'm too lazy to study anything deeply, just use tidbits of info to see if they fit patterns. If I get it wrong, fine, I'll change the 'theory'.
I see the world as tiny pieces all building a bigger picture and when some don't fit I start to wonder why. Just a hobby.
I just seem to remember that scientists were aghast when they found out that nuclear energy research was being steered towards weaponry rather than power generation, so I won't argue that you're right that the bomb came before the power plants.
But I don't believe they were the original intention of the scientists' initial research into nuclear energy potential. That intention, as I remember reading of it, was the same as 'green' technology scientists are researching today. A viable alternative for increasing power demand into the future, with the knowledge that fossil fuels were finite.
I'm not anti green technology per se. Just green technology that is no better for reducing the 'emissions' in their production than what they are replacing is emitting. I won't settle for pie in the sky, look good, massively profitable to their manufacturers only, white elephants.
I'll let DB carry the technicalities and figures, that's his area of expertise, but half of the country covered in windmills and mirrors would still produce only a fraction of the power that a couple of nuclear power plants could put out.
They are a step on a long journey toward renewable power sources. That 100 years of uranium should give us enough time to perfect green technology. If not then we are even sillier than we look and deserve to drown in our own garbage. But we need time to replace what works now. The world cannot be sustained without fossil fuels overnight. The Greens/Greenpeace demands of instant cessation of fossil fuel use is insanity.
Nuclear energy is a stop gap measure that relieves at least part of the pollution problem and 'saves' the planet from strip coal mining and maybe a few of those oil wells in inappropriate places that Greenpeace is in trouble over now.
That they've scared everyone so much that nuclear power has become an almost impossible alternative is why we have so much pollution from coal.
We should have started building nuke plants years ago, as soon as the new better, safer, design technology was available but politicians were too afraid of the deadbeat banner wavers and the scared voters to start them.
The greatest percentage of the last decade of fossil fuel 'emissions' in this country, OZ, can be laid fair in the lap of the Greenie scare campaigns. They are hoist by their petard. I say again, no free lunches, even for Greenies.
Warri, you won't find as much as a potato peeling around my yard. You won't find an unwashed can in my recycle bin. We never left a picnic site showing sign that we'd been there. We never kept undersized fish except poddy mullet for bait, and even that is legal.
My family were both miners and farmers. The mining part of their lives they had no control over, but as most farmers are, they were environmentalists. They had to be to keep the farms sustainable. Nothing was wasted, no tree was cut that didn't need to be, no creek was polluted because that was the most precious asset of the farm. We were and are not planet trashers, just realists.
But we picked wildflowers, and the boys back in the 30s collected birds eggs. But never more than one egg from a nest. The eldest of them enforced that rule on them, he must have been a forerunner of the Greenies without even realizing it. I remember his collection from when I was very young and he had only one egg of each species.
I've lost count of the spiders I've swept out rather than step on and of the lizards I've saved from the over enthusiastic dog.
Just because I don't approve of the Green movement's motives doesn't mean I don't respect life and love nature.
It doesn't mean I approve of massive mining, just that is a necessary evil.
Nor does it mean that I want to see the planet trashed.
It just means that I realise that we have to sacrifice some Utopian fantasies for the real immediate needs of supporting the society we've built. And that the Greens are not the answer, their ideas are fantasies of what should be, not what realistically
can be.
Nor are they looking at the real underlying causes of why the planet's being trashed.
Why too many chemicals being used? Why so much and many pollutants? Why so few trees, and whales? Because too much food and infrastructure is having to be produced for the planet to cope with, for too many people needing it.
btw: one of those 'kinder' replacements for DDT is what's killing the bees. no free lunches.