The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

I don't get all that either, though I don't mind if nuclear is the future we'd just need to let go of the brakes on it. The other thing to look at is overall growth of each type - China is going ham on wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear yet they've still had to increase the total amount of power generated by coal, oil, and gas anyways. Graphs always predict something like https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.09.27/main.png but we really always end up with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ch...

Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.

About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.

"Once again, China's nuclear program barely added any capacity, only 1.2 GW, while wind and solar between them added about 278 GW."

Dwarfs is the most apt description. (~250x)

First of all, I don’t accept the a priori premise that cutting is needed. But if I did want to cut, I would want to have an actual plan for how to figure out what could be cut and what tradeoffs were involved, and then to execute that plan in way that balanced as many equities as possible and was done in a way that followed some sane and transparent process (as well as relevant laws).

Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.

Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.

A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).

> because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently

It literally isn't. There are two known solutions already. The stupid way, which is to put it in a dry hole in a geologically stable desert, and the smart way, which is to use it as fuel because it isn't actually waste anyway.

Neither of these things are currently happening for only one very specific reason: The global fossil fuel industry (including Russia) lobbies against them because they want to retain a piece of political rhetoric to argue against replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.

But that's a self-solving problem, because if you actually do replace fossil fuels with nuclear then the fossil fuel industry goes away, stops lobbying against anything, and then you can use either of the known solutions. Which means we'd only have to store the material for a few decades until that happens. The solution to that is what we're already doing at existing reactors, which is largely to keep the spent fuel rods at the power plant.

It may also give you some indication of the scale of the problem to realize that you can hold all of the spent fuel ever generated by a reactor that has been in operation for decades on the site of the reactor itself.