Can you link a source that isn’t pay walled?

Believe it or not you can turn a reactor off if necessary, or up and down. Crazy I know.

Biomass isn’t practical as it releases far too much emissions to be worth it, you almost might as well use gas. Actually thinking about how much land use it would take, it might actually be worse than gas overall. Biomass is only really sensible when talking about material we would waste anyway like food waste and other waste that can be burned, but that would barely make a dent in our energy needs.

Not everything is about economics, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be talking about renewables at all.

As for “free energy”, no energy is free. Solar panels and wind turbines still have a finite life span. Nuclear fuel is cheap enough to the point where it too might as well be free if we are willing to call wind turbines free. This is especially true for Thorium technology or actinide burners. Actinide burners literally reuse nuclear waste.

Not really, no.

Have you actually looked at the data? You might be surprised.

As opposed to the ever so clean extraction and storage of nuclear fuel? Come on.

Yes actually. Uranium mining isn’t nearly as bad as needing tons of lithium, cobalt, and who knows what that goes into solar panels. Thorium containing materials are literally a byproduct of other mining operations that gets thrown away.

From what I gather, wind is on par with nuclear. Other renewables have slightly more than either wind or nuclear, but compared to the other nonrenewable alternatives either option is far better.

Nope. Wind generates 11 tons of CO2 where Nuclear only makes 6. Solar isn’t even close. Biomass is the worst of the renewables and is closer to fossil fuels in its pollution levels than the other clean sources of energy.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

And all of this leaves out the most important aspect - nuclear is incredibly expensive compared to renewables, and is trending more expensive each year, while renewables are trending in the opposite direction. This means that for the same amount of resources, we will be able to displace more nonrenewables, leading to a net reduction in deaths/emissions pursuing this route as opposed to nuclear.

Is it? Most people aren’t factoring the cost of energy storage. No one is suggesting Nuclear as the only source of energy. It is very helpful though for grid firming and reducing the amount of expensive and environmentally destructive energy storage therefore reducing the overall cost of operating the grid while increasing reliability and reducing land usage and environmental damage.

While the upfront investment in reactors is large, the cost per energy produced and ongoing costs are quite low. Lower in many cases than fossil fuels like gas. Plus reactors last longer than solar panels and wind turbines.

Of course, I have nothing against fully privately funded nuclear. If private actors can make the economics work under safe conditions, then nuclear construction is an obvious net positive. When they displace public investment in renewables, however, then they are a net negative.

What happened to the idea that renewables didn’t need public funding anymore? If it’s really so cheap as you say that wouldn’t be necessary.

The reality is both renewables and nuclear needed huge state investments to get off the ground.

That’s a lie. Renewables produce more CO2 than Nuclear reactors per unit energy produces. They can also be significantly more dangerous (higher number of deaths per unit energy) in the case of hydro power or biomass. Solar and batteries require various rare materials and produce significant pollution when manufactured and must be replaced every 20 or 30 years.