> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.

If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.

> Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.

Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.

It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:

1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];

2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];

3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.

Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?

But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.

[1]: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016...

[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

> If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear.

Don't forget the enormous battery arrays for winter, cloudy skies, or wildfire smoke. Hope you have enough batteries. But you won't, so ok, now you need gas reactors to fill in the blanks. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?