Even the older pressurized water and boiling water reactors are safe. Yes, there's better technology out there. As for expensive... Palo Verde nuclear in Arizona was the last nuclear plant built in the US. It cost $11.5 billion in 2016 dollars to construct. The Ivanpah solar array in California is currently the largest one in the US. It cost $2.5 billion to build in 2016 dollars.
Palo Verde annually produces about 34 times, THIRTY-FOUR TIMES, more power than Ivanpah (32,300 GW / yr vs 940 GW / yr). Both take up roughly the same amount of land. To make solar plants that can produce the same as Palo Verde you'd have to spend about $85 billion in 2016 dollars and those plants would occupy an area roughly 70 MILES on a side. That's how inefficient solar is. That CANNOT be gotten around. You cannot increase the watt density of sunlight nor can you obtain 100% efficiency in converting it to electricity. Perpetual motion machines don't exist.
Then there's environmental... Solar is far less friendly there too. Huge solar arrays create urban heat island effects that change weather patterns. Clear cutting and flattening thousands of square miles of land to put them on is destructive. With Ivanpah, they had to buy additional land equal to the size of the plant and then move Desert Tortoises, an endangered species off the plant land onto the extra land that now can't be used for anything. Ivanpah kills thousands of birds singeing or cooking them from the heat it gives off. It increases the ozone pollution there from the heat too.
Nuclear causes none of that.
The need for natural gas to supplement lots of nuclear would reduce the amount of production needed to support that. So, that industry would shrink in response to market demand. Coal miners can mine uranium and thorium instead.
As for hydrogen, the big roadblock right now is
storage. Hydrogen is such a small atom that it 'sees' a heavy steel tank for storage like a screen door. It leaks out. There are some solutions being tried to this and once a cheap and workable one is in use that problem goes away. The technology to use it is already available and improving.
That's the 2020 Honda Clarity. It runs on hydrogen. It can go about 300 to 400 miles on a tank of hydrogen. It fills up like any other car.
Hydrogen filling station incorporated into an existing gasoline station
It's every bit as practical as gasoline as a portable fuel. Once we figure out how to keep it in a tank without it escaping slowly, we've got this nailed.
That's opposed to having to have parking lots full of these everywhere
Battery cars are impractical.
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