But in less than a century Miami could be under water. We missed a huge opportunity to buy time.
Nuclear is extremely safe and clean. The passage of time will make it more so as we develop reactors that consume nuclear waste, better storage or nuclear technology, etc.
Challenges to your hand waves are not "needlessly hostile"; they're exactly as "hostile" (i.e. skeptical) as the situation warrants. Maybe it's confusing because you're unaware that the consensus here is not the consensus among people who actually work on this stuff. They recognize that the current "solutions" are only stopgaps.
> Nuclear is extremely safe and clean.
Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Hanford. Not actually a great record considering the number of deployments involved. Yes, newer kinds of reactors are likely to be safer. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not actually against nuclear power. I just recognize that it's not easy or perfect. Blind faith is not my thing.
Regarding nuclear power accidents, of course this is actually a great record considering the amount of power nuclear provides and the number of deaths caused by other forms of power.
I don't think you've yet made a worthwhile argument and you continue to try and be rude. On top of that, you don't even seem to believe the argument you are pretending to make. I won't read further replies here.
That's not the only solution. Texas is big enough that a lack of wind across the entire state is even less likely than the weather they've been having. Wind has held up better than oil and gas there, and properly weatherproofed wind would be even better. Texas also has rivers, and waves. There's still untapped potential in energy storage. Most significantly, better interconnection to other grids would be pretty helpful but has been foregone to protect Texas suppliers' profits. There really doesn't need to be that much non-renewable baseload generation in Texas.
Also, why do you (and others) assume that anyone who mentions unsolved problems with nuclear must be flat-out against it? I for one am not. It can be part of a complete energy solution, but until some of those problems are solved it can't be a primary solution by itself. What I object to, mostly, is not nuclear power itself the simplistic "atomic energy please, this is a solved problem" hand wave. Contrary to the HN ethos, not every problem has a simple technical solution, and people who point that out wrt energy are not necessarily shills or dupes of the oil industry. It's a matter of being empirical about things and working them out instead of turning technologies into new religions.
Better sensor maintenance and weatherproofing systems seem like they could solve the issue Texas faced with nuclear power. That seems like a much more minor change than figuring out how to solve the issues with gas, wind, or solar. Plus, as far as I can tell the problem was with a fifty year old power plant. If we had been building new nuclear plants and investing in them I bet we'd have better, more modular, and safer systems (that might not rely on a single safety sensor system like this).