"ignore the production costs" - what exactly do you think you're paying for when you buy renewables equipment ?
Items that had their sales cost lowered by subsudies.
"ignore the environmental cost of the equipment" - the energy paybacks on all renewables techs are now very low.
Only because you ignore the environmental impact you shipped off to some poor nation.
In the long run, renewable is pretty much our ONLY choice, but lets not be fucking retarded and pretend they are the only choice for the immediate future. Theres a big picture to look at, not just your own agenda on how you want things to be.
Nuclear IS the right thing to use NOW. Solar and Wind hopefully in the near future, when we are more proficient with them. The physical foot print of these methods are currently untenable. Its not that they are eye sores, its that they will change their environment DRASTICALLY when implemented, so we have to implement them in a well thought out and efficient manner, engineering our climate by using their installation for more than JUST energy production.
The only real problem nuclear has is paranoid nut jobs acting like the world comes to an end over a minor incident. Fukushima WAS A MINOR ACCIDENT with practically ZERO consequence, regardless of how bad you want to blow it out of proportion. There has been more radiation spread from the energy (generated from coal) used to power the Internet based discussion about it than Fukushima itself released, its fucking ridiculous to treat it any differently. Yet you are.
Fukushima was a cluster fuck of preventable accidents and heads should roll for what happened when the plant survived the actual disaster only to succumbed to being unprepared for something that could have happened even WITHOUT a tsunami. We should bust our asses to ensure those faults do not happen again, but we should not run off on some ignorant tangent about using some other inferior (today) energy production method because people are afraid due to ignorance.
Nuclear can be MUCH safer, but retarded fear won't let anyone replace plants that are of known inferior designs with once that mitigate the problems passively. Everytime we see something like this happen, its to a plant that we should have decommission or in this case WAS about to be decommissioned in favor of a newer design.
You mention the very solution to the problem, then go off to stick your head in the sand out of fear that you don't understand it. You're going to have to deal with it eventually, how many disasters is it going to take before you finally realize that hiding from something you have to learn is the right idea?
