Alright, the rich text reply editor still isn't working for me, so I can't quote people without it fucking up the formatting, but Bofferbrauer's response I can get behind. It is true that future gens of nuclear fission hold a lot more promise than the current gens, and are way safer. Fission isn't a long term solution though, even with the better plants. That Ted Talk I linked in the messed up formatting reply features a chart that explains that at current consumption of energy, there just aren't enough reserves for fission to replace fossil fuels.
I'm not nearly as pessimistic as some of you are on solar. In fact I'm incredibly optimistic. The technology for battery backed 100% renewable grids exists TODAY and in a financially feasible form. All that prevents it is the political will. It requires a reworking of the entire power grid and the power plant business model, so as to make it less a bunch of power plants providing electricity at a cost per Watt to a network of connected homes across huge distances, and more a bunch of networked networks of microgrids generating power locally, and storing it at power plants, which also generate electricity, and instead of selling the electricity per kWh, they sell a monthly service to connect and regulate all the microgrids. So if a storm blocks the sun in a microgrid dependent on solar, that microgrid gets its energy from neighboring microgrids that are having a sunnier day, and battery backs everything up so that if there are a lot of rainy days everywhere for everyone, there's enough extra energy to hold everyone over. A renewable grid can be sustainable, reliable, and not fluctuate wildly, it just needs to be scaled properly and the business model needs to be reworked. Not likely to happen under the current private system, but Bernie wants publicly owned power, which would be the easiest way to organize this.
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