I am honestly open for both - the trouble with pushing renewables exclusively is gas companies are very keen on stepping in to plug the gap.... with fossil fuels.

Nuclear power gets a bad rap but it's a lot better of an option than you might think it is. https://twitter.com/kxd306/status/1288821924492124161

1.) It doesn't take up much space. There's six 900MWe reactors here at Gravelines, for a total of 5400MWe of generation.

It'd require about a thousand 5MWe wind turbines to match that output, for comparison.

2.) It's safe. Despite high-profile screw-ups at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.... the former killed nobody (secondary containment), the second was massively exacerbated by the USSR pretending nothing was wrong, and the third.... killed one person total.

2a.) Chernobyl is however an excellent case in point for what happens when institutions dismiss known issues in the blind pursuit of arbitrary targets, and where a culture of secrecy prevents learning from mistakes.

No other reactor class can fail like Chernobyl's RBMK did....

....and even with the severe flaws in the RBMK design (it can undergo thermal runaway in a way no other reactor can, due to producing more power as temperature increases and water in the core boils, rather than the opposite), the accident was entirely avoidable.

Even after all that - the best guess death toll is ~2000-4000 people. This is terrible and the damage is immense - but it's worth putting in perspective that this was a one-off, extraordinary event.

Fossil fuels kill as many at least every day. Because it's diffuse it's ignored.

3.) It's cheap and fast - if you do it right.

Pick one design. Build identical copies of it. Build several at once. Early builds iron out the issues with later builds - cf. how Hinkley Point C's second unit is hitting milestones faster than the first due to lessons learned.

3a.) Be wary of the private sector. Much has been made of the cost of Hinkley Point C but a lot of this is down to the hideously expensive financing. Interest payments to investors make up about *twice* all the other costs of the plant *combined*

So, use public finance.

3b.) Don't keep changing the design. The first of anything is expensive. Try tying your shoelaces fifty different ways once, versus one way fifty times. Don't reinvent the wheel, pick one design and stick with it, and you will reap the dividends.

4.) It's fast. Individual plants take years to build - but you can build multiple plants all at the same time, thus adding a lot of generation very quickly.

France's "Messmer Plan" did this to get the country off of burning oil - and almost eliminated fossil fuels in a decade.

5.) It's available now. Much hay has been made about advanced designs - and they will come in time - but safe, proven nuclear designs like the EPR, VVER-1200, HPR-1000, and ABWR are available as turnkey products right now.

It isn't "nuclear vs renewables"

It's do both. Now.