In 30 years, solar will have taken over. Using safe existing nuclear power plants is OK for me, building new ones seems stupid. For some countries, replacing an old unsafe one with a good new one seems plausible, but more seems a bad choice.
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.
Ignorance and coal are not the answer.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most people aren't experts in nuclear plant design and regulations. They rely on authorities, but when accidents that aren't supposed to happen end up happening, they (rightfully) start to distrust the ability of the authorities to provide them with proper risk assessment. If you tell someone that one Fukushima type disaster will happen every 30 years and that occurs, then they can at least judge the risk and decide whether or not it's worth it. If you tell someone there's little chance of that kind of disaster and then it happens, they're naturally going to be skeptical of your later pronouncements that "Of course that happened to THAT plant, but now there's REALLY little chance of that happening."
People might make a bad decision because of this, but the concern isn't irrational.
Time passes. A truly stunning insight.
You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.
Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.
The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.
The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.
In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.
completely unnecessary sarcasm.
A tone argument is a logical fallacy, and I made a substantive post. Do you care to offer anything else in response?
Fukushima type plants have Chernobyl type disasters approximately never. That part was not a lie.
Supposedly new plant designs never have Fukushima type disasters.