The huge risks (both financial type and "boom" type) with building and supporting nuclear reactors seems like pretty solid evidence that they are not "one of the best alternatives".
"best" is relative; what is better, that can scale up sufficiently to meet the world's energy demand?
Perhaps renewables can scale up, but last I heard that wasn't realistic on the time scale humanity needs. Does anyone have good information on that question?
Renewables haven't scaled yet, even if they are making progress.
Nuclear is interesting in that we have around 70-90 thousands years of fuel for the plants, which can only get cheaper/safer over time as the technology gets better. Currently, their capital requirements (they are expensive to build even if they are cheap to fuel) and waste problems make them fairly unviable. Couple that with being even less on demand than coal...
Oh come now. 70,000-90,000 years? If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.
The article specifically mentions that pretty much every major builder of nuclear plants outside of China are in trouble and/or downsizing/restructuring in big ways.
Nuclear generates a lot more kilowatt-hours per square-foot than renewables, especially in places that aren't very sunny or windy. I am not advocating for a 100% nuclear grid, but I don't see how we can get rid of coal without a decent number of nuclear plants.
It's very relevant, because a) we need to reserve enough area for people to live, and for growing the food we need, and hopefully for a few parks as well, and b) transmission and storage of electricity across long distances is not trivial. It isn't feasible to, for example, cover the entire surface area of Africa with solar panels and use that energy to power the rest of the world.
That entire thinking is flat out wrong - even if we were 100% solar the idea we won't have any land left to live on is insane [1]. Solar will get more efficient and more dense, to what peak we don't know but even at current efficiency we could more than power the world in unused and unlivable land.
> pretty much every major builder of nuclear plants outside of China are in trouble and/or downsizing/restructuring in big ways.
The proximate cause AFAIK is lack of demand, which depends on politics, which depends on public perception of its danger. It doesn't depend on economics, or at least that's not the immediate problem.
