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.