If we had pursued nuclear energy decades ago we would have saved millions more from air pollution, mitigated climate change and reduced poverty.
The same is true for solar, wind and batteries.
Solar, wind & batteries can't provide the same quality of life improvement nuclear can. I'll tell you why.
You can't add enough batteries to solar and wind to make them reliable. Nuclear has the advantage of being reliable. For every huge windfarm or solar farm built, you need a large, fast-acting natural gas plant in spinning reserve ready to take up the slack. That also means that solar and wind will be limited to a small fraction of electrical generation, because all the other sources have to be ready to pick up the slack when the clouds come out and the wind dies down. Those reliable power plants still need time to ramp up and down, and if they can't ramp fast enough to account for the loss of 'green' generation, then the grid operator has to drop cities and counties off the grid. Lights out. Search for 'Duck Bill Curve.' I just refreshed myself, and besides the power generation problem, you also have a frequency control problem.
For frequency control, it turns out that several thousand tons of spinning turbine generators- in nuclear and conventional plants- stabilize the grid in ways that solar inverters & wind turbines can't. Rotational inertia matters a great deal.
The amount of electricity flowing through the grid is so mind-bogglingly high that electricity must be produced at the same rate it is consumed. Batteries and other storage methods can smooth out short-term problems, but building enough energy storage to make wind and solar significant energy sources is an economic and physical non- starter.
Some folks might be fine with that because they bought expensive, automatic backup generators, but I ask all of you to think of other folks might be out of luck for longer than 20 seconds. (Not to mention that backup generator operation cancels out any theoretical environmental gains.)