I’m liberal, I agree with the right that nuclear power is the only path to replace nuclear, I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem and that nuclear power has risks. I disagree with the right heavily about the security risks of nuclear. They feel extremely overblown. But the track record of renewables is that they fail to offset fossil fuels in any meaningful way. We take it as an accomplishment when a single random day in a country is 100% renewable. Meanwhile France is nearly 100% fossil free energy every single day of the year. And when Germany cut back on nuclear, renewables fail to absorb that and fossil fuel use went up. So our choice is to focus on political problems and fix those but they feel intractable so people focus on the positives of renewables and because it’s “easier” (no messy / scary political issues) but ignore the fundamental technical difficulties of using renewables to replace fossil fuels. Yeah sure, nuclear has lots of problems and risks. Most of the cost issues are self-imposed. Cleanup costs fail to be factored in for political reasons but at the same time it’s not trillions of dollars per plant and we also do have enough research to know there’s reasonable paths that we’ll get to of building reactors that can’t melt down.

re security concerns, take for example North Korea which has been nearly globally embargoed but yet still has built successful nuclear weapons. They struggle with ICBMs because that’s what it would take. By comparison, Iran has been subjected to all kinds of targeted military and covert action to sabotage their nuclear program. By all accounts those actions have kind of been successful in the sense that experts agree it’s going to take Iran longer to create those weapons, but it’s a question of if not when. That’s why I’m so frustrated by critics of Obama’s Iran deal. The 0 tolerance approach is not going to work and the Obama deal had the best concessions from Iran that we’re going to get - it’s not going to be better when Iran actually has nuclear weapons. And Iranians have AFAIK been very honest players in terms of at least trying to stick to the Iran nuclear deal even after Trump blew it up. The primary problem there is that Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Israel which complicates things a lot (a stronger Iran that a nuclear deal allowed for is a problem for other security issues in the region). But notice how none of those issues have anything to do with enrichment capabilities of civilian nuclear reactors. And generating fissile material is not the bottleneck for building those weapons. So it’s all silly FUD-driven BS we pick up from movies and imagining things than actual problems on the ground.