It’s scary every time around. This attitude is what got us someone who stalled on even admitting climate change was a thing for almost a decade instead of Al Gore in 2000. Like sure not as fraught as now but imagine being a decade ahead on implementing green policies even if those policies were watered down.

Tooth fractured about 90% through at the gum line after I got hit by a car while biking.

It would be ‘fine’ (painful but just really sore like the rest of me) if I bit down on that tooth for a bit to fully seat it, but every time I talked, ate, or otherwise accidentally jostled it it would be like someone jabbed a red hot poker into my face - the crack went across the root and any bit of movement pulled on it.

It was a rough two weeks to get it looked at and a root canal done. I kept getting woken up by searing pain if I moved a bit during the night.

Sure, but the court doesn’t actually have any enforcement mechanism - that’s all held by the executive. Like, a president who orders the military to assassinate a political rival is not gonna wait for multiple months of trial and go ‘oh OK I guess that wasn’t an official act off to jail I go’. They can just intimidate the judges. The Republicans are counting on any Democratic president not doing that, and are probably right.

Or you could… Actually read the entire source you linked? It’s a pretty good article and goes into a lot of detail on why LCOE estimates vary significantly between countries and depending on discount rate assumptions, so quoting one specific number is useful context but not the full story.

The problem isn’t whether the LCOE numbers you quote consider the capital costs - they do, and that’s correct - so do the ones in the table below it. It’s that those are average values taken from the USA, which has among the highest capital costs for installing new reactors in the world. At best that tells us that fusion isn’t cost competitive in the USA right now.

If you scroll down literally like. A paragraph past that you will see a very nice table showing the spread of nuclear costs. Some (including in the US, which is used for the EIA figures) are quite expensive, but others (notably South Korea) are very much cost-competitive or better than renewables. Also worth noting, the renewable estimates have spread themselves, and do not include overinstallation/storage required to behave as firm power.

Which is to say:

A - there certainly are quite a few places that nuclear doesn’t make sense, at least currently. Including the US

B - equally, there are a lot of places around the world where nuclear is competitive

C - we should perhaps look at why the US is so expensive relative to other countries; it’s not some law of nature, we can change it. And it’s probably not just because other countries under-regulate them (I’d buy that for some of the countries listed)

Yeah this isn’t even like a complicated idea; I don’t get why people have trouble with it.

As a practical real world example: in the 2000 election, Bush won Florida by 537 votes. (the exact number is questionable because of the recount and the bullshit that was Bush v. Gore. Which we can and should be very angry about but also doesn’t change the conclusion here).

97,488 Floridians voted for Ralph Nader.

Now, I’m gonna assume that people who voted green care about like. The environment. And I’m quite sure that Nader was more progressive on environmental issues than Gore was – Gore would probably have been a boring and relatively centrist democrat. But by voting for Nader over Gore we didn’t get Nader, we got Bush.

If even 1% of the green voters in Florida had held their noses and voted for the candidate who they maybe didn’t align quite as well with but had an actual shot at winning, we could have had a president who actually recognized climate change as a threat almost a fucking decade before we did,instead of a climate change denier. Would it have fixed everything? No! But we’d be a hell of a lot better off than we are now.

Right? “the only sane choice”? The antivaxxer? The “covid is a bioweapon” guy? The “I don’t think we need a ceasefire in Gaza” guy. That guy? What a fucking joke.