First off, I will take the feedback that I'm being rude to everybody, but I am sad. I feel, as I've stated, that the level of argument on this topic is pretty condescending and uninformative. I clearly don't have as much information on the topic as others, but one of the reasons I engage in the thread is to hopefully learn about these topics. That requires people who do have information to take the time to explain it. If you don't want to, then don't, obviously, but I think choosing not to present an informed argument but also choosing to take time to post about how dumb the people who disagree with you are is not a particularly social behavior pattern.
I think people made a lot of pretty surprising assumptions about my position and ideas on this topic without making much effort to find out what they actually are. But maybe that's my fault for being too aggressive on the topic because of my irritation.
(And before people make yet another comparison between racism and global warming, please just don't bother. I have already posted my meta-argument for why that's not a good comparison.)
The concern I was trying to outline about Fukushima was actually more social in nature. As you say, clearly we have better nuclear plant designs that have less potential safety issues. But we kept Fukushima around and running anyway! Like, if the Fukushima incident report said "there was this unforeseen safety issue," then I would be like, great, just fix that. It's the fact that the incident report said "we knew how to make a much safer power plant but we were too corrupt and lazy to bother" that gives me some pause. This was genuinely the fact that changed my position on nuclear power from "let's just do it whatever" to "well, I'm worried we will keep blowing them up because yolo." For example, I was arguing about the greatness of pebble bed reactors back in the day.
This post is great and has great citations. I find it pretty convincing, although, as noted, I am hopeful that solar can improve in efficiency quicker than people seem to expect. I personally don't really see a problem with covering huge swathes of American land with solar panels -- we literally have a whole 2.7 states of desert nobody can live in, so may as well use it for something.
However, I was clearly uniformed about the long-term dangers of the Fukushima disaster, which is genuinely surprising to me. So clearly I was wrong about that and thus mostly wrong about the topic. Let's build some nuclear power plants.
