Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

The total impact on health (and therefore the real costs) of the nuclear industry will only be known when the last site will be completely decommissioned and the last waste innocuous.

Low carbon countries are high in nuclear because none of them really invested into renewables. Concluding that nuclear must be part of the mix is at best weird. Especially given that there are very few new nuclear powerplants projects, many of them failures (very over-schedule and over-budget), and that the capital intensity induced by a fair proportion of the few new potential projects condemns them, given that the TCO of renewables is quickly getting lower and lower.

The political side is also grim for nuclear plants, probably mainly because of the NIMBY effect. Most ongoing nuclear powerplants building in progress were ordered by nondemocratic countries (France and Finland being among the rare exceptions, however many in France argue that the democratic process ("débat public") is not really applied upon nuclear matters). This may reflect an 'undue failure', i.e. public opinion may be wrong about this and maybe should forget about NIMBY, however this is at least a failure to communicate as in many countries the official lenient message isn't in favor, and many people just don't want any nuke powerplant. This is not absurd, as the "everything is under control, the risk is infinitesimal" message is seriously shattered by disasters.

As for transport electrification and fuel cells are indeed potential solutions, however even more remote in time than an infrastructure-oriented approach. Generalizing new types of powerplants nationwide cannot be done quickly, costs large amounts of money, and implies trade-offs (see Germany at work, and this nation was lucky because the decision to effectively switch wasn't totally out of the scheduled cycle of nuclear powerplants decomissions, reducing the losses). Modifying the energy architecture underlying a significant proportion of transport means is an even (much) more difficult target.

I hope that thermal solar can be sufficient to provide to fuel cell (no nuclear powerplants necessary), and see no sign of being wrong.

From your link:

"They came from high desert communities such as Daggett, Joshua Tree and Lucerne Valley, where existing solar projects are seen by many as eyesores that destroy desert ecosystems and fuel larger dust storms."

Good thing the Swedish energy grid is not made out of 80% coal and other fossil fuels. It is a strawman argument to talk about shutting down 80% of the whole European energy grid in the context of the Swedish energy grid.

> As an example, I live in Amsterdam

Netherlands power grid only utilize 5% nuclear power. It has no hydro. If you made fossil fuels illegal than that would indeed make civilization as you know it coming to an end. Your power grid is wholly depended on fossil fuels for keeping the light on. Even if more wind farms and solar plants was built the coal would continue to burn during still nights.

It would not however be very hard to change that. A nuclear plant, or if you prefer an experimental battery dam would solve the issue quite fast. Just a simple matter of money and political will. Given the knowledge and experience in flood control it would even be quite suitable placement batteries, pumping in water when wind production are high and the price is cheap, and producing energy when the wind is still. At most 10-20 years, and faster if the incentives were right.

Putting pollution in the sky is not morally defenseable just because you paid a higher markup on the power bill. The markup should only exist to incentivize people to invest, and the cost should be increased until it accomplish this. Since people like to claim that nuclear is currently unprofitable, the solution then is pretty simple. Raise the tax on coal energy so that even just buying coal energy during still winter nights is still more expensive than building the nuclear plant. At that point it is no longer unprofitable to run the nuclear plant. If wind+solar+battery is cheaper then go with that, just as long as the coal stay in the ground.

But for Sweden it would just be easier to ban fossil fueled energy as we have enough hydro and nuclear to get us through still winter nights. It would however force a choice between wind+solar+battery vs nuclear, rather than the current wind+solar+coal vs nuclear. The later is unacceptable from an environmental perspective.

(I will note that a law banning fossil fuel is indistinguishable from a carbon tax that is high enough to make it more profitable to build non-polluting alternative to burning fossil fuels. The fact that people still burn fossil fuel is thus a proof that the tax is not high enough).