Open your wallets.

[SarahD]

https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-vogtle-nuclear-reactor-delay-f9492baa97be46bfdaa555907454700c
It's pretty clear we're going to build a whole big herd of nuclear power plants. They promise almost limitless energy with no greenhouse gas emissions. And we are unwilling to curtail our energy usage because we are accustomed to our excessive lifestyles. So it appears we will have all the electrical energy we desire and a cleaner environment. Hooray! Just don't make the mistake of thinking this will come cheap. Your electric bill will look like your rent. Not kidding. And more state and federal tax dollars will go to subsidies and tax breaks. Do you have smart kids? Tell them to join the Navy and become nuke operators.

[Easterncedar]

1. Conserving isn't even mentioned any more

I’m so old I remember when that was a thing.

[Think. Again.]

2. It seems obvious to me...

...that our only choice at this point is a drastic reduction of energy use, or face extreme ecological and health declines, and massive societal upheaval.

So get ready for extreme ecological and health declines, and massive societal upheaval.

[SarahD]

3. That's what bothers me.

Once we build 300 new nuke plants, we will go nuts and use energy recklessly. People will lose interest in recycling, turning down the thermostat, and so forth. Once we have electric cars and charging systems that allow long trips, we will go completely berserk. We wallow in excess. Just look at that California desert full of huge RVs and noisy dune buggies. People think nothing of spending $250k or more on an RV and a toy hauler full of dirt bikes. Try driving through the four hour traffic jam of environment wreckers in eastern California sometime. Those people will not be discouraged by economics of environmental concerns. They will spend their last nickels to run over desert tortoises and shoot holes in traffic signs. Conservationists are just tree hugging buzzkills who want to rob them of their joy in life. Unlimited energy will open the floodgates and there won't be an acre of land not overrun with vehicles.

[Think. Again.]

6. Well said.

[hunter]

4. Germany and Denmark have some of the most expensive electricity in the "developed" world...

... largely because of aggressive "renewable energy" policies that FAILED.

Germany's "green" plan was especially hypocritical because they shielded their heavy industry from these costs with accounting tricks, allowing these industries cheap electricity produced by burning the cheapest, filthiest sort of coal.

Meanwhile in France, they closed their last coal mines more than twenty years ago.

Wind and solar are less expensive than nuclear only if you ignore the costs of the "backup" power needed whenever the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. The problem is the same at any scale, from a small house to a national electric grid.

Again:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

In the last year Germany had a carbon intensity of 403 gCO₂eq/kWh. In France it was 53 gCO₂eq/kWh, and they enjoyed lower electric rates.

Like it or not, nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which is something we need to do.

But I repeat myself...

[SarahD]

5. Here is our future.

The push is on and cannot be resisted. We are almost certainly headed the same direction as France. They are experiencing a whole host of problems; technical, operational and economic. This is what most people on either side of the nuke debate fail to see: there is no silver bullet.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-hopeful-end-sight-long-delayed-budget-busting-nuclear-plant-2022-06-16/

[Think. Again.]

7. And that doesn't even start to address...

...the basic problem with nuclear... What do we do with all that radioactive waste?

[SarahD]

8. We're not allowed to call it waste anymore.

This is another clever aspect of the nuke industry PR campaign. It assumes a reprocessing capability that is completely theoretical right now and may never work out. And it assumes things like plutonium powered reactors that burn all that magically reprocessed spent fuel. There's the rub. We will do this. And we're committing to realizing many theoretical possibilities. Hope it all works out. I'll be pushing up daisies when the chickens come home to roost.

[Think. Again.]

9. As I mentioned before...

...the only way through this that I can see is a major reduction is energy use, and I believe that will happen, but not because we chose to do it, and it will probably be the least of our worries at that point.