That is absolutely the right idea, the question is, what boondoggles should we put our money into? If we carefully choose the right boondoggle we might even get something out of it. If you want to go down the path of nuclear power then you must consider a strategy that involves the construction of hundreds of new reactors, preferably continuously so that you don't run into the "build everything, then nothing and once you want to build again everyone has retired" problem.

Keeping nuclear power safe is very easy, you just have to decommission old power plants that aren't up to modern standards. That's all it would have taken to prevent Chernobyl and Fukushima. So why on earth do we build nuclear power plants that are difficult to rebuild? Why did we believe that immature technology is going to be enough for the next 50 years? You need to build more, to replace the crappy old power plants, you need to build more, to expand the fleet, you need to build more, to update previously built plants to a new safety standard, you need to build more, just to maintain a workforce.

It's done all the time with solar power and wind. Build it for 20+ years, if new tech comes out you just replace the old tech once it proves uneconomical.

My personal favorite boondoggles are still housing, internet, electric grid and road maintenance. We really need to put pressure on the job market through fiscal stimulus. That pressure will force companies to wake up and actually do something productive.

The best solution would be to provide a broad carbon price. That way subsidy would be applied to renewables, nuclear, insulating your house or things that haven't been invented yet.

If the livability of the planet is important to you, you should give the subsidies to renewables: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...

I'm just not convinced that renewables are going to live up to their promise as a total solution sans nuclear. I think having some investment in nuclear is inevitable and I would rather build out excess capacity and be wrong and not need it than be right and have to play catch up.

We already have substantial investment in nuclear if we want or not. We still have to throw money at this radioactive pile of waste for decades and you still have to get rid of the old reactors which are still there.

Renewables are getting better and cheaper fast and if you have you're not convinced by that, I see no reasonable argument for nuclear.

It depends, economically speaking, renewables are superior. However, you need to convince people who don't believe in climate change and only see the downsides of the new tech that is being pushed.

AS the private sector is already convinced, I don't see much problems there. There is only the remaining resistance in old fossil and nuclear with a small and desperate astroturf campaign (http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm). The energy issue in the always outraged population which became so prominent in the recent years is a tiny problem compared to what really drives them forward. Just hand them out their own solar collectors with some edgy claims on it ;)

It's not an either/or though. We can subsidize both. Especially now that, in the US at least, we are not really fiscally constrained.

No we can't as the budget is not endless. So you invest in what makes the most sense and that's not nuclear.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...

It's not a bad idea to focus on renewables. But the budget is merely limited by full employment.

Think of it this way. If unemployment/underemployment is high then it's like having random people sitting in a bar doing nothing. A government official comes to the bar and sees people doing nothing and tells then what to do. What's being lost by telling these people to do something? The biggest loss is that these people could have done something even better than what the government came up with, however they are in a bar doing nothing, clearly nobody needs them right now.

The question is, does the nuclear industry actually generate jobs that would lower unemployment? Is the type of person that is qualified to work on a nuclear reactor unemployed? I am leaning toward no, I simply cannot imagine the highly vocal trump supporter base being filled with academics in hard sciences. If we are going to do a nuclear jobs program it might backfire because it fails to employ the right people.

It's not "people doing something". To make power plants you need factories running. Produce steel, specialized metals, concrete, refine silica sand, produce electronics... You need mines for the base materials, and factories producing mining equipment. You need some rare earth metals, potentially. You need chemical plants too. And of course power and water input for the manufacturing sector.

All of which is nontrivial amount of investment nobody does where there is unemployment, because it's cheaper to do it in China as the base and subcomponents are already there... (there's also unemployment)

Trap of deindustrialization runs deep.

To be honest, I think at this point a shotgun approach is the way to go. It seems overly risky to put all our eggs in any one basket.

It may be worth noting that the companies that control the military nuclear stuff also control the civilian nuclear stuff.

Fair enough and we can have that discussion but at least I know what I'm getting (at least in part) when we build a nuclear plant.