What would you consider sufficient empirical evidence to change your view on nuclear?

as opposed to unempirical evidence, you mean?

Thomas:

You do this because doing so marks you out as.. Serious.

serious? moi? unsurely you jest.

nuclear power is seriously screwed up, in my distinctly unserious opinion.

Thomas:

Germany getting its carbon emissions per capita below France.

me too, it's so encouraging to see the progress, isn't it?

saving the planet is serious. the nuclear era is come and is going away, like the blunderbuss it is. it had decades to get it right, and still fails the test for security that wind/solar have in spades, as well as the epic, entirely predictable-as-a-swiss-clock cost over-runs.

yes we will learn to do with less watt wastage, and we'll be happy we did. present utility companies are the main polluters, along with the infernal combustion engine, we have the science to do much better, what's throttling renewables is lobbying from dinosaurs capturing the political process, allowing at best one country in the whole of europe to do more than just a symbolic move into a wiser, cleaner future for our families.

the yoyo-ing of incentives and tariffs is a deliberate ploy to undermine, sabotage and brake this transition. coal is bad enough, but it doesn't leave fuel rods that need to be babysat for centuries, needing lots of fresh water we hope we'll still have on a drying planet.

either one is a deal with the devil. gas too for that matter, but even with fracking that's orders of magnitude less malign, and seems to have become the fuel of choice till we finish pulling our heads out of our collective fundament.

at least we could produce some of that at home for pennies, at a pinch, compared to presently enriching  the putinocracy and raving about LPG terminals.

wind and sun? got any? how many wars are those energy sources going to get us into? how many dictators will we have to prop up for them?

look, if nukes were good for us, we'd have got that message by now, on their merit. they had their moment pretending to be the sun-in-a-box, now the real one has come out, no more need for superannuated hack-jobbing energy from the environment, when elegant solutions exist, and could abound with enough support.

instead we have the industry with the worst track record on truth and lies of any, and they can't find insurance from the precious free market can they? the government/taxpayers have to clean up after a whoops, right?

no need for that with renewables... it's common sense not to go backwards technologically if we can help it, deriving energy from near-infinite sources without political fallout or antipodean resource rape.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

What would you consider sufficient empirical evidence to change your view on nuclear?

How about: a commercial entity building a plant on time, on budget, without subsidy, and without the State providing unlimited liability insurance? And then operating it safely, and disposing of all the waste successfully, and no weapons proliferation.

What, no takers, anywhere in the world?  Hmmm.

Doesn't that make the economist in you just a little bit suspicious - that there is no such thing as a market price for nuclear? That nuclear is a loser that only governments can pick?