All these stories aren't pointing at nuclear being unreliable, all of these articles have issues that could also pop up in cheaper power productions as well.

The french one they discovered corrosion and crackign in critical cooling pipes that seems to have been a manufacturing defect. So they shut down similar reactors for inspection to be safe.

The one in Belgium had a short circuit in a critical component, again something that can easily happen with other productions of power.

To me it seems you hand picked these stories because they forwarded your goal, but you conveniently left out WHY these places were shut down hoping someone wouldn't actually read them. Coal and Natural gas plants are cheap to run (or used to be anyway) and they had issues all the time that required down time. It's just unfortunate that in these cases the faults that occurred are in critical systems so the whole reactor needed to be shut down until it can be fixed.

Nope. Just didn’t reveal anything when I looked. Thank you!

Thanks for your insightful and level headed response. Like I said, I think the future is brighter with a combination of the renewables you prefer and nuclear I prefer. We can both agree fossil fuels should be phased out.

I’m inclined to agree with you about the future of battery storage will fundamentally change how renewables are marketed across the country and world. I only see their adoption increasing (and even more so as battery technology develops).

My point to the grid, and even more so US PV manufacturing, wasn’t meant to imply we shouldn’t be changing to these forms of energy. We will need a more modern grid one way or the other and there’s no doubt solar and wind will become bigger and bigger parts of this. We shouldn’t discount them now because of how things are. Rather, the point I was trying to make was that many studies I see that portray wind and solar as the future because of their “green-ness” or “cost competitiveness” with other forms of energy aren’t really apples to apples comparisons. I think this is usually due to the fact that accounting for all the little factors that go into building an entire nations energy supply is - unsurprisingly - a hugely difficult undertaking (I also try not to infer bad motives on people when a lack of understanding could also explain the result). My gripe is that I often see solar and wind studies like the one you listed used to promote policy when the study isn’t showing many of the important downsides. Oil and gas do the same thing when they always ignore favorable subsidies and accounting policies they use so as to skew their cost effectiveness. Again, I’m biased here, but I don’t see that same benefit of the doubt given to nuclear and often it seems like that’s due to some pathological fear of nuclear.

As for recycling PV, this is huge! I’m very happy to see this and I want to read up on it. I don’t think many people understand this is possible with solar or nuclear for that matter but I hope to spread the word on this.

You don't think Solar Panels and Lithium come from Shady sources in China?

What nuclear reactors are you talking about, exactly? Current generation nuclear reactors are practically impossible to melt down. Heck, even the three mile island and Fukushima reactors couldn’t melt down via a positive feedback loop like Chernobyl did. But even if you don’t buy that, I wouldn’t advocate for building nuclear reactors along a massive fault line or any other area prone to extreme natural disasters. Those seem like perfect places for wind/solar/geothermal/etc.

As for the rare earth metals: sure nuclear uses them too. But the scale is not even comparable. Every single solar panel uses them, whereas every nuclear reactor also uses other REMs. The difference? Nuclear is orders of magnitude more energy dense. The need for as many REMs to produce comparable energy at scale is not even close. Nobody is, or should, claim that any energy source is 100% clean and free of external costs. But each one needs to be compared based on its comparative merits and costs. There isn’t a one size fits all policy to meeting global energy needs. Yet for whatever reason, the solar and wind proponents seem to think that’s all we need.

And finally, for storage. Currently we throw the spent nuclear waste into a mine built kilometers underground below a mountain. There is literally no human health risk related to this storage solution. Each American would require roughly one soda cans worth of nuclear fuel to power their entire lifetimes worth of energy. To put that into perspective that’s a couple fully filled football fields worth of spent fuel we would need for all of America to store which is currently feasible with existing mines we have. We could even take the entire planets waste, store it in this way, and still barely make a dent in our storage potential for this waste. Or we can recycle most of it, using the process the French employ.

I’m not pretending anything. I try to live in reality and not convince myself that a bunch of windmills and solar panels will solve an increasingly electrified worlds problems.

Once again, a subsidy is not a tax break.