Yes, it's much better to burn up the fuel and spread it into the atmosphere where it will cause a massive climate change. Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
> Note:I'm comparing nuclear to fossil fuels which was the only tradeoff until some time ago.
Last I checked, it still is. Solar can't get anywhere near baseline production that we need currently due to lack of storage options. And solar is the only thing which currently has even the possibility of scaling.
Careful how you phrase that. There are lots of storage options that are viable - batteries, gravity, thermal, compressed air, etc - but none that have become major commercial products or installed on the grid at scale. Yet.
But there is no reason it should be impossible, or even outrageously difficult, to store enough offline energy to make a solar/wind grid viable. And, given modern software's ability to manage an automated pricing market from diverse sources, there's tremendous pressure to do just that.
This is why we're seeing massive active investment in storage products - not just Tesla, but many competitors. And not government funding, but rather venture capital. This is a technically feasible market worth hundreds of billions to whoever gets there firstest with mostest.
So I'm not the least bit concerned. Storage options will happen, and they will happen very quickly.
I can build a house today in the Northeastern US that's completely solar powered and off-grid. It adds about 15% to the cost to build. (2500 square foot home, 68k for panels, 18k for batteries, an extra 5k for a heat pump instead of a gas or propane heater.) The price of the panels and batteries is only going to drop.
For on-grid solar, the panels are already the cheapest form of energy available, when paired with a heat pump instead of natural gas. (When paired with using a giant resistor they cost equivalent to natural gas.)
