While the danger of installing solar cells is a good point, I suspect most working class neighborhoods would rather have these high-risk, well-paying jobs for a

While the danger of installing solar cells is a good point, I suspect most working class neighborhoods would rather have these high-risk, well-paying jobs for a lot of young people than have a much smaller number of people running a nuclear plant at some remote location. Concentration of capital is also a risk. I would add that the problems of nuclear are mostly self-inflicted and due to an unwillingness to admit to its own shortcomings. To give you an example, a Nuclear physics professor told my class, with a straight face, that nuclear plants were designed so well that one could expect a catastrophic failure no more than once every thousand or so years. Since the actual frequency of catastrophic failures has been more like one in every twenty years or so, his model was clearly off by orders of magnitude - but he hadn't updated it! Nuclear has probably the largest expert problem of any industry I've encountered, it's full of smart people living in a completely different world than the 'un-scientific' public they look down their noses at. If Nuclear is to fulfill its potential the people in the field need to do some painful introspection and recognize that the uncertainties in their models are actually much larger than they'd like to believe. I'd recommend any book by Taleb if you think that's an avenue worth pursueing.