zlacker

Why isn’t wind and solar politically dicey? Nuclear is only politically dicey due to ignorance. I’d rather one nuclear plant than having the landscape covered with huge windmills — windmills made out of materials that aren’t recyclable. Solar is even worse. Nuclear doesn’t affect wildlife like wind and solar.

>>briand+(OP)
Spending $20B for $1B worth of generating capacity is and always should be politically dicey.

>>briand+(OP)
Until it does…

>>briand+(OP)
Nuclear elicits outrage from customers forced to pay for it because it's so expensive. How do you propose muting them politics?

>>briand+(OP)
I agree that the safety fears and waste disposal issues around nuclear are overwrought, but still: I would much prefer solar and wind farms (even with the downsides you mention) over the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Even if the probability of something like that is 0.0000000001% or whatever, the consequences are so severe that it just doesn't seem worth it when there's a good-enough alternative. Also consider that nuclear is expensive (both in capex and opex)! The whole "too cheap to meter" nonsense from the 1950s never came to fruition.

I get that opinions differ on this (clearly you have a different take), but that's fine; reasonable people can disagree.

(To be clear, I don't believe solar/wind is the be-all, end-all. Base load generation is still a problem there, and neither source is reliable or consistent in the way that something like nuclear is.)