Ideally we'd use renewables but there are limits to the current tech that need to be solved before we can go 100%.
In this paper the authors model renewables in Artic isolated settlements. It's only a model but looks promising.
Edit : apparently the answer to this question is "downvote" :)
That's an illusory number. Wind requires backup power, or lots of storage. Wind turbines have a ~20 year lifespan, compared with ~60 years for coal/nuclear plants. Once the safety and economies of mass-produced Gen IV SMRs are accounted for, nuclear is MUCH cheaper than wind.
What would be really bad would be the first time thousands of people die when the wind/solar powered grid goes down during a cold snap.
I know someone who actually did heat their home through some pretty brutal winters using just solar heat.. and a pretty simple setup he jury-rigged himself, at that.
So it can be done.
There are also energy storage technologies like ordinary batteries to more exotic technology like molten salt storage for energy generated by solar panels.
It may be the case that nuclear energy is required to stave off climate disaster, but given the political instability that’s also likely to engender, I’d like to see anyone speak to this with anything like a historical perspective.
As for how nuclear power will fare in the event of war or state collapse, really badly, like everything else. Any state capable of running a nuclear reactor built by someone else, never mind building their own, has the capacity for modern industrial warfare, which is insanely expensive in lives and capital. A doubling or trebling of cancer rates due to a Chernobyl level disaster would be background noise compared to war.
I wouldn’t worry excessively about state collapse. There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation. If North Korea can keep going and there hasn’t been an instance of non-war induced state collapse in Europe since Rome’s withdrawal from Britain I wouldn’t worry. Think of Libya, Yugoslavia or Somalia. The first fell to outside aggression, the second was a civil war massively prolonged by outside interference and the third had state capacity too low to be relevant in this context.
With proper management (reprocessing), we're talking a hundred years or so. That seems like a reasonable time frame to me.
In comparison, the 2011 Tsunami in Japan killed 15,000, yet people are still allowed to live near the ocean...
Obviously it was not a good thing, and could have been even worse, but I’d be curious to see a scientific explanation of whether a civilian reactor accident or meteor strike could make half a continent unlivable.
Zero. There simply isn't enough radioactive material in a reactor to contaminate half a continent, even if it were dispersed that widely by an extraordinary event like a meteorite strike. And the smaller you make the reactor, the less radioactive material there is inside it.
As has already been remarked, Chernobyl is a good benchmark for a worst case scenario of a catastrophic event with a reactor dispersing radioactive material over a wide area. And even counting Chernobyl (and Fukushima), the number of deaths caused by nuclear power per unit of energy generated is orders of magnitude smaller than the corresponding number for any other energy source. So I simply don't see black swan events as a valid concern that should stop the widespread deployment of nuclear power, particularly given the advantages to be gained.