Nitpick: Nuclear isn’t obsolete, it’s as modern as the design you choose.

Nuclear isn’t a replacement for renewables (like the coalition tries to suggest), and it isn’t evil (like an internal faction in the greens tries to suggest).

We need:

• Renewables: for the best power production we can produce (when available)
• Energy Storage: to store excess renewable power for when it’s not available
• Nuclear: to maintain baseline power (as opposed to peak power) for emergency scenarios.

Sidenote: Since whenever anyone suggests that nuclear isn’t to be abhorred whenever it’s brought up, here are the 3 common things brought up so no one has to ask it.

1. Risk of meltdowns

• Modern designs are meltdown-proof with passive safety built in (as opposed to active safety where you need to keep providing power to keep things safe like Fukushima). You can fly a plane into a modern nuclear reactor and the reaction just stops.

2. Nuclear proliferation

• We have our own large amount of uranium on the continent. We don’t need to encourage others to mine and sell it, and we don’t need to sell it overseas ourselves.

3. Nuclear waste

• It’s common practice today to simply recycle nuclear waste as nuclear fuel. That way you get many more uses out of with less overall fuel that needs to be produced. By the end of it you have a kind of nuclear waste concentrate that burns itself out much quicker (meaning you only need to store it for about 100 years as opposed to 1000s of years). Also, that concentrate itself can be used in things like betavoltaics (think weak but long lasting batteries in things were you don’t want to have to replace the batteries, e.g. pacemakers, smoke detectors, scientific sensors, etc…)