Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.

We need a mix. Centralization isn't the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won't be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.

We can and should be doing both. Use the money our governments are giving to fossil fuels in subsidies. $7 trillion PER YEAR (that's 11 million every minute) in public subsidies go to fossil fuels. Channel that to nuclear and renewables and there's more than enough to decarbonise the grids with both short- and long-term solutions.

What we definitely should not be doing is closing perfectly working nuclear power plants.

Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.

I can't imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.

not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.

Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.

Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.

For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.