> Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable.

Are we ignoring the hundred thousand people dying per year because of coal exhaust? Because it sure seems like that's what you're doing. 13,000 people die premature deaths per year because of coal power in the United States, more in countries with more coal and less stringent emissions controls. If we're evaluating "inherent risks", you really should include that in your calculus.

Natural gas power production probably kills ~4,000 people per year, by the by.

> Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear power and the waste that would produce.

So is fly ash. Hell, so is CO2.

> Nuclear plants take ages to build, and are insanely expensive. These costs make it impractical for a city to invest in. They also require massive amounts of concrete (bad for the environment, locally and globally) and absurd amounts of space.

Never see these arguments raised against coal or natural gas plants and production infrastructure.

Also, it's not like governments don't waste crap tons of money all the time on dumb things. The F-35 is up to what, half a trillion dollars now? The Zumwalt class destroyer cost $7.5 billion each and we don't even have ammunition for its main gun. There is plenty of money around to make nuclear happen, we just decide to pour that money into useless shit rather than power.

> Nuclear is centralized, and vulnerable to attack. In a national defense situation, nuclear power plants are large, easily identifiable, delicate targets that can take an entire area’s grid offline with a single hit to a cooling tower. The damage doesn’t even need to be severe, just enough to warrant a shutdown and inspection.

I was unaware that natural gas power plants can move. Oh wait.

The power grid itself is a huge, vulnerable thing. The actual target for enemy actors isn't the power plant itself, which is usually hardened, but rather transformer stations that are usually soft targets. Hell, one got knocked out in CA recently by an unknown actor with a single rifle, no fancy nation state equipment needed.

> Compared to other readily available green power sources, I cannot fathom why nuclear is preferred to a safe, distributed, clean grid of solar panels.

The rub is that it is currently impossible to run our power grid on renewables. Night time is a thing, as are still days when the wind does not blow. Maybe in a few decades we'll have sufficient grid level storage in order to make this a moot discussion, but we're not there yet. Right now any grid running a significant portion of renewables still requires "peaker" plants to provide base level load when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

And I say that someone with rooftop solar. It's great, but I can't run my house on it at night.