TWENTY NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS - Fifty Percent of the nation's energy needs.

[jeff47]

36. Because I a more concerned about climate change than nuclear accidents.

Solar is great. I thought it would be the future when I lived in the southwest. Now I live in upstate NY. Happens to have the fewest sunny days in the entire US. Solar looks a lot less like a magic bullet from over here.

At this particular point in time, we have three options:
1) Dark (or more realistically stated, greatly reduce demand)
2) More Fossil Fuels
3) More Nukes

1 isn't acceptable to most people.
2 accelerates climate change.

Leaves me with option 3 as the least-bad option. Note that isn't "good". It's least-bad.

I'd love for there to be more options on that list. But we'll need to invent some new technologies first before we can put intermittent sources like solar and wind on there. Or the people working on fusion have recently gotten themselves net-positive on power, so maybe they'll become practical sometime.

But for the moment, our base load is gonna come from burning fossil fuels, or splitting atoms. Burning more fossil fuels is a guaranteed global disaster. The nuke track record is 1 natural disaster (Fukushima) and 1 intentionally blown plant (Chernobyl). We're better off with rare, localized disasters instead of guaranteed global disaster.