Biomass is a red herring as a fuel source (I'm counting biofuels in that). We'd literally need to cultivate every single acre of arable land on the globe, and even then we'd produce less than a tenth of our energy requirements. It sounds good for oil companies to say that they're researching it though.
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Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium
Nuclear power is also expensive to build, and while it may be clean for the most part, It creates a lot of water vapour which it releases into he atmosphere via cooling towers, and it also creates waste which at the moment we haven't the faintest idea what to do with.
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That's one of the big counts against nuclear power - a huge chunk of the energy you've tapped is lost straight into the atmosphere as hot air. It does depend on the type of reactor, though the most predominant type is the pressurised water reactor which wastes something like 40% (though I could just be making that figure up). One of the plusses of nuclear reactor technology though is that not all waste is bad waste. The current state of reprocessing technology means that spent fuels can be turned into reprocessed uranium or MOX (mixed oxide fuel) with relatively little waste. Of course, that still needs to be disposed of, so it only really alleviates the problem rather than solves it.
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Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium
I read recently that tidal power could provide up to 15% of the UK's energy requirements, it's regular, and it doesn't seem to have any adverse effects.
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Tidal power has great potential, as does wave power. There are a limited number of sites (in the UK at least) where it would be feasable to build tidal power facilities, and much like hydro the environmental impact has to be considered very carefully. Wave power, by contrast, doesn't have that restriction, but at the moment there are two big problems to overcome - firstly, it is a new technology, and most of the designs that have actually been built and tested have a tendency to fall to bits after a while. Secondly there's the matter of actually bringing the power ashore, which of course is also an issue with offshore windpower. It's all solvable stuff though, and certainly an avenue that must be explored further.