Nuclear fission is the best existing option in terms of pollution, resource use, construction labor, maintenance labor, and fatalities. So uh, nuclear good? Some of those might not fit with your intuitions, but the comparison is not one nuclear power plant to one wind turbine, it's one nuclear power plant to a thousand wind turbines. Which are all real machines made of real components that need actual maintenance and catch on fire sometimes.
Nuclear power plants take ~7.5 years to build on average (most are shorter, a long tail of plants sit in permit hell forever). This is not a problem for a centrally planned economy - you don't have an infinite supply of labor, so you can't actually build all your renewable energy at once to take advantage of the better turnaround time. It is a big problem under capitalism, which requires that each plant sit there not making a profit for seven years while it gets built, during which a faster to build plant could've already turned a profit and started funding the next, multiple times over.
(I'd also hope that a centrally planned nuclear power buildout would, you know, take a single reliable but somewhat dated plant design and build a thousand of those, saving a bunch of time and labor. But, as an engineer, I prefer to plan on no technology or process ever improving, and being pleasantly surprised if they do.)
So if you're arguing in front of your local central planning committee, go pro-nuclear (and also get me a visa to wherever you live). I you're living in a capitalist country, push for whatever you can get (and sabotage an oil pipeline if you get a chance).
Nuclear fission is the best existing option in terms of pollution, resource use, construction labor, maintenance labor, and fatalities. So uh, nuclear good? Some of those might not fit with your intuitions, but the comparison is not one nuclear power plant to one wind turbine, it's one nuclear power plant to a thousand wind turbines. Which are all real machines made of real components that need actual maintenance and catch on fire sometimes.
Nuclear power plants take ~7.5 years to build on average (most are shorter, a long tail of plants sit in permit hell forever). This is not a problem for a centrally planned economy - you don't have an infinite supply of labor, so you can't actually build all your renewable energy at once to take advantage of the better turnaround time. It is a big problem under capitalism, which requires that each plant sit there not making a profit for seven years while it gets built, during which a faster to build plant could've already turned a profit and started funding the next, multiple times over.
(I'd also hope that a centrally planned nuclear power buildout would, you know, take a single reliable but somewhat dated plant design and build a thousand of those, saving a bunch of time and labor. But, as an engineer, I prefer to plan on no technology or process ever improving, and being pleasantly surprised if they do.)
So if you're arguing in front of your local central planning committee, go pro-nuclear (and also get me a visa to wherever you live). I you're living in a capitalist country, push for whatever you can get (and sabotage an oil pipeline if you get a chance).