There's a lot here, so I'll just focus on the part that lets me raise my preferred talking point. >Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will

There's a lot here, so I'll just focus on the part that lets me raise my preferred talking point. >Poor people don't own enough land to put up solar. How will they own their own solar. Solar requires own or renting of land. In reality poor people will have access to some kind of place they can plug into and get power for money. And solar or nuclear makes no difference. There are farmers in Afghanistan and India right now that find pumping water with solar panels more economical than diesel pumps. Nobody is going to build an access point for these kinds of places to plug into electricity from a nuclear plant, they're that poor. And yet, solar technology is allowing them to increase their production today. Nuclear is too large and unwieldy to do much in marginal cases like that. At best it would provide cheap energy so subsistence farmers can get more handouts from an industrial center, but there's no way of increasing margins/ownership of the poorest. The optimistic Nuclear vision sees to be one of industrialism perfected, an age of Big Everything. But the world isn't moving to better industrialism, it's moving to postindustrialism. Solar is postindustrial, it's proven in rural Afghanistan because it's cheap and distributed and empowering. Even in a place where a $100 for a panel is a huge investment, it's often worth it when locals have small electricity requirements like charging mobile phones. That's the kind of poverty where solar is a technology that can help today, no central planning needed. Which IMNSHO is a very good good thing if the planning would be done based on models off by factors of 50 000. TL;DR: Good Postindustrialism > Better Industrialism.