Solar panels don’t have the capacity to effectively create the amount of energy that we use today, nor are wind farms a feasible alternative because of the huge amounts of land needed for them to produce the kind of energy that our country has grown accustomed to, thus you have two options: You can build nuclear plants that will shut down the coal plants in a decade at the most, or you can wait for solar and wind to become more efficient and keep drilling for coal in the process and maybe get rid of the coal plants within the century.

From an economical standpoint, nuclear energy is going to drop the price of the electricity that you are paying for, so in the end, it’s like the gov’t is giving the money to the taxpayers. I know that that last one is a stretch, but it really will lower bills. I moved from an area where nuclear was used to an area supplied by coal and my electricity bills doubled…Food for thought

You need a mix of power sources.

Solar & wind are “ideal” from a green perspective, but suffer from high costs and reliability issues. They’re currently pretty expensive (in terms of capital investment for how much power they produce), but that’ll come down with time).

Nuclear is pretty darned clean, but suffers from a huge fear factor.

Natural gas is ok for pollution, but relies on the oil & gas industry. For the time, there seems to be enough natural gas in the US to supply our own needs, but that may not be able to go on forever.

Coal is horrible for pollution, but we have enough coal in the US to be independent for many, many years to come.

The problem I see with a lot of people is that they’re unwilling to face the technical limitations of wind & solar and blindly believe that those two technologies can solve all of our problems.

You need a mixed approach.

Surely you jest. Solar still has many technical problems that aren’t easy to solve, with the main one being storage. How do you feed power to the grid at night? What about when you get a 2-3 day weather pattern where there’s a drop in sunlight availability.

Solar works well with other units that can be turned on/off at will (i.e. coal & natural gas). Wind combines nicely with solar, too, but it has many of the same issues that solar has – you can’t get your power reliably.

So the plan is to INCREASE the use of nuclear power without having a clue as to where they intend to store the waste?

What kind of a lopsided plan is this? What am I missing here?

Watch them spend this money, and come up with a bunch of half-finished nuclear plants.

Solar is the way to go.