Not to mention their entire concept of electricity was about lightning and static!!

Every nuclear power plant provides clean energy out of thin air.

The electricity in a lightning bolt comes out of thin air too.

Because the crappy reporting gave no information about what kind of power this "invention" creates. Electricity has voltage and current. Voltage is potential energy, current is kinetic energy. They both matter for the feasibility of a power source. This is the reason why you can power your entire home from a generator the size of a footstool but if you covered your entire roof with photovoltaics you'd be lucky to run the refrigerator and the vacuum cleaner at the same time.
More like by splitting atoms and releasing the bonding energy in the process. Let's gloss over the toxic waste they make as part of the "clean energy" argument huh?
Wrong. Lightning is a result of atmospheric disturbances, driven by the sun. The entire atmosphere is a giant heat engine. The power source in the case of lightning is the sun.

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Yup. Hydroelectric and wind energy also both come from the sun, not to mention hydrocarbons, which are essentially stored ancient solar energy.

I'm guessing that nuclear and geothermal are the two energy sources that don't derive from the sun. The water vapor energy in the OP might be of little more significance than static electricity.

Nuclear might yet have it's day in the sun, awful pun intended. There's a guy here - B'fest refugee GregDpanda - who is a tireless advocate of the Integral Fast Reactor, a type of breeder reactor. I was skeptical at first but it does appear to be a significantly better design than that of the thermal-neutron reactor, the default type at present. The IFR has issues - it is cooled (energy transferred) by liquid sodium, this to avoid neutron absorption, and sodium doesn't play well with water. IIRC a ruinous fire or two took place around that.

The advantages - allegedly, I'm not a nuke scientist - it's meltdown proof and can process existing spent fuel, using it for more power and leaving it much less problematic than nuke waste as we currently know it.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

This explains the problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjjGrJHSIo&t=0m37s

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of nuclear energy myself. I think it's the way forward for mass production with a minimal amount of waste or pollution. The problem is that the way our present fission reactors work is extremely wasteful and political red-tape makes it impossible to reprocess fuel. So all the waste that comes out just sits around in pools for decades on end. All the high level crap could be refined out and stored safely with the bulk returning to use in the reactor, but no. Politics.

Breeder reactors really are the answer, but they breed plutonium as part of their fuel cycle. The big fear is nuclear arms proliferation, so again, politics. They burn a significantly higher percentage of their fuel load and generate far less high-level waste. Most of the active designs are of liquid metal or gas cooled varieties which are more or less passively safe. Then if you wanna get super technical, the Thorium-cycle is far more useful and orders of magnitude more abundant than the Uranium cycle, but the ore production and research/development is dominated by India. Again, politics.

So here we sit with our BWR and PWR reactors from the 1960s which aren't built to the greatest safety standards, all reaching the ends of their service lives, churning out high-level waste that can't be stored or reprocessed, and people wonder why nuclear has such a bad rap...

__________________
Current stable:
1995 E320 157K (Nancy)
1983 500SL 125K (SLoL)

Gone but not forgotten:
1986 300SDL (RIP)
1991 350SD
1991 560SEL
1990 560SEL
1986 500SEL Euro (Rusted to nothing at 47K!)

Gone and wanting to forget:
1985 524TD 167K (TotalDumpster™) [Definitely NOT a Benz]

Admittedly, I don't know if this is truly possible. Consider loading spent nuclear fuel into big dumb rockets and firing it into the sun. The only effect would be to give the sun more fuel.

Insofar as local hazard goes, I think the issue is vastly overthought. The U.S. Navy has had tens of thousands of sailors living within a few feet of reactors for many years with no apparent ill effects.