Perhaps the train has indeed left the platform, but the inflection point for solar only happened this year. If the parties to Kyoto had gone home back then and created said regulatory environment for nuclear and gotten on with it, we'd be looking at a 80-90% carbon emissions free electrical grid across the entire western hemisphere today. Climate change would have been more or less solved, and yes, we knew that then, this is not benefit-of-hindsight stuff.
There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.
A coal power plant that is operating normally kills and injures more people, and releases vastly more radioactive particulates into the air, than the Fukushima disaster did.
The Fukushima reactor was old and outdated. Modern reactors are built with passive safety systems that essentially make it impossible for a Fukushima style meltdown to occur.
There's still the centralization problem. Nuclear power is centralized and lends itself to government or corporate control of the energy system, in contrast with solar which gives each property owner individual control.
I'm not saying we can't have both, it's just that the problems with nuclear are not only (perceived or real) safety problems and the fact that it yields byproducts the most tempting use of which is to make nuclear weapons.
I guess the flipside on centralisation is it allows you to build much simpler (and much less) transmission infrastructure (unless we're talking about a scenario where everyone is 'energy independent' at the household level).
I do somewhat agree with you though: the sheer scale of current nuclear power plants (and the technical complexity) means the market is fairly uncompetitive. From what I understand, companies like Westinghouse will practically sell you the plant 'at cost' and then gouge you on the fuel supply contract.
Then again, some of the gen4 designs can work as small, modular fission reactors that might power a small town or community. I know the molten-salt reactor's initial intended applications were: (a) powering army bases and (b) powering a nuclear-powered strategic bombers (which seems rather insane to me).
I agree with you. There are undoubtedly issues with nuclear power but the possibility of a Fukushima/Chernobyl meltdown happening in your backyard is not one of them. The main downside is that this understandable but unfounded fear get in the way of politicians having a meaningful discussions about the real issues of nuclear, such as the one you mentioned.
Admittedly solar does not work everywhere, but there are transport mechanisms, and batteries, and it does work in some places. And we have to decide where to spend our money. Spending on solar is a choice that leads to more local control and less centralized control, as compared to spending on nuclear.
And it's not necessarily totally one or the other in every situation. I'm just saying I have a preference for things that favor local control.
If you are talking about grid-scale transport and storage mechanisms that move power in from "someplace [else]" we are back to a centralized power system.
Moreover, you still have yet to make a case for why a decentralized system is inherently good.
There's a strong argument for centralized systems where they are feasible, and that's that centralized systems are easy and decentralized systems are hard. We all know this from our own experience - it's easiest to use a Single Big Server if you can get away with it, it's tougher to use a cluster of systems coherently (CAP theorem comes into play), and as you continue to decentralize further and further you eventually need something like a blockchain to have any hope of consistency, latency becomes measured in minutes, etc.
Distributed systems are hard and we don't want to make the power grid any more complex than it needs to be. A few big centralized power sources are greatly preferable to many decentralized power sources from an engineering perspective, although perhaps not from your political perspective.
That's another problem with Nuclear. After investing a large capital stake into a nuclear plant, the operators are unwilling to make hard decisions on safety because of how deeply they're invested. The Fukushima reactor design was "safe" for the time it was built, and flaws were found afterwards, yet the plant wasn't taken offline.
Modern passive safety systems are safe as far as the designers can anticipate, just like Fukushima, and there is a lot which can go wrong.
You have to think about the trade-offs... even Chernobyl only caused 56 direct deaths and a five-fold increase in the incidence of normal rate of thyroid cancer (a fairly treatable form of cancer) amongst the 18m children exposed.
I say "only" there not to diminish their suffering (it's a terrible thing happening to a huge number of people) but because the consequences of continuing to rely on coal are orders of magnitude worse.
There's a lot of histrionics around putting oil companies in the dock for crimes against humanity, but anyone who's campaigned against nuclear in the last 30 years can go right up and sit next to them.