Why not nuclear power?

[Bearware]

21. Problems with other energy plants

I would say wind and solar have an crippling disadvantage that their proponents rarely mention. Their intermittent nature means they can only be connected to power grids by having a backup power source - often natural gas peaker plants. Peaker plants can rapidly spin up compared to continuous gas plants but are not as efficient so they burn more gas producing more CO2 and likely leak more natural gas than the more predictable continuous gas plants. When you combine the cost of mitigating the damage from extra CO2 and from the leaked natural gas with the CO2 savings by using wind and solar, the result is not so impressive and may be negative.

Wind and solar are hardly low carbon. Not only are they energy intensive to produce because of the heat required but the solar panels need to be replaced every few decades resulting in more toxic waste. We have mined so much uranium that a current design molten salt reactor would need thousands of years to burn it all into short lived isotopes. However if we build a thousand of them maybe we will start mining the ocean for uranium after we have emptied Yucca Mountain and all the stored nuclear "waste".

Germany wants to get rid of nuclear power plants and discovered the massive installation of wind and solar were not enough. They currently buy lots of French nuclear power and have slowed down their process of shutting down coal plants. Their utility bills are up as shown here in DU posts by NNadir and others.

Insurance problems will probably decline in proportion to the amount of time people are spending in the dark in declining economies because they do not have enough reliable power.