[LarsAlereon]

For a high up-front price, nuclear plants give us an extremely large amount of consistent, emissions-free power that can also provide frequency stability to the grid. It's also very energy-dense in terms of Gigawatts per acre. Spent fuel is a largely solved problem, we should reprocess it into new fuel and place the residue into long-term geological storage. Modern nuclear reactors also do online refueling so they aren't shutting down to swap the fuel out.

That said, it's entirely possible to make an argument that the combination of wind, solar, battery energy storage, and kinetic (flywheel?) energy storage can solve the above needs for less money over the long term than nuclear. They can be built more incrementally and in smaller chunks, but there's also a certain value in having huge amounts of energy that can be sited basically anywhere. A big challenge with nuclear is that every time someone costs out a plant, by the time they can gather money solar and wind have gotten cheaper faster than expected.

Overall, I'd like to see a diversity of power sources. I think we should try building some big modern nuclear plants, convert some combustion plants with small modular reactors, subsidize solar and wind preferentially in areas where it makes the most sense, and fund hydro projects where it won't impact the environment.