"Effective fusion" will always be that perpetual "20 years away" we've been hearing about for the last 60 years. Nuclear's "large risks" are considerably more

"Effective fusion" will always be that perpetual "20 years away" we've been hearing about for the last 60 years. Nuclear's "large risks" are considerably more mitigatable with the new generation IV reactors. They fail cold/safe, use far less fissile material, in some of the models can consume the waste from other facilities, and in other cases, the waste they generate remains radioactive for less time. Hydro has significant and lasting impact on ecosystems downstream from wherever they're damming up, to the detriment of biodiversity, fish species, watersheds, etc. Solar is great, when the sun is shining, though, you know, we're running out of sand, and they take up a ton of land. (Though I do think a bigger push for more rooftop makes a lot of sense, and have a system on my house.) And wind also takes up an insane amount of space, is fairly limited in terms of where it can be utilized, kills birds by the truckload (though apparently making one blade a different color can solve for that), and the blades themselves are impossible to properly dispose of or recycle. (Not actually impossible, just impossible in the way that our capacity is super limited, it's super difficult, and no one wants 120 ft aged out fiberglass paperweights which are super difficult to cut.) My point is while it's easy to suggest the hydro/solar/wind triumvirate as a stand-in replacement for nuclear, we're _still_ grappling with those technologies' significant shortcomings, as you can witness by watching Germany transition away from nuclear and more on to... wait for it... NG, because they can't consistently meet demand or manage peaker events with renewables and decommed way too much capacity with nuclear. A single waste site the size of two football fields is enough to store ALL waste generated by Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station: the largest nuke in the US, which has a capacity of 3,930MW -- enough to serve more than 4 million people. That's a hell of an efficient means of generating carbon free power, with very little footprint. (Worth noting that PV needs a large on-site reservoir for cooling since it's in a desert.) Still, compared to the largest solar farm in the US, Solar Star, which clocks in at 579MW from a system spread out over 3,200 acres (142 football fields), it's a decent compromise. My point here is that instead of imagining nuclear as a point-in-time from tech decades ago and comparing it to new and current solar/wind tech, exploring nuclear's newer options could be huge if we could get out of our own way, and with limited risk.