Why do you think I’m saying it’s an either or? Wind and solar are an important part of the energy mix. But if you truly care about minimizing the impact our energy use has on the world around us, you have to take a mix of all of it. Wind and solar alone will never rid us of fossil fuels on their own. Nuclear has lots of important properties that make it a much better overall true replacement for our fossil fuel dependence. The data clearly shows that wind and solar paradoxically increase fossil fuel usage. The reason is they lower the cost of energy, which attracts more industry, which requires more fossil fuels in the situations where/when it doesn’t work. Batteries and stored hydro power help but don’t fully solve the problem due to scale/cost. You don’t have to buy the causation argument. We have pretty compelling and consistent A/B environments here to observe the correlation that when you add renewables + nuclear you reduce fossil fuel usage. You add renewables alone, they do not displace fossil fuels.

“Deserts are big” isn’t a compelling argument to me. Oceans are even bigger yet I’m still unhappy with how much pollution goes into them. The only thing deserts have for them is that it’s easy for humans to ignore them and it’s politically easier than “omg scary nucular” (ignoring the fact that coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime).

Think of it this way. We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. They primarily displace about 10-20% of our energy mix that usually is other sources anyway (geothermal, hydro, natural gas, etc).