>How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? As many as it takes to keep even more birds being

>How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too. Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.