> I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.

Because “cost” is not an argument against something that hasn’t been scaled. Nuclear was snuffed in the crib before any repeatable plants could be brought online.

If you looked at the cost of solar in 1995, using it to power anything like a house was a complete joke. It had to fall over an order of magnitude and leave behind a trail of solar company corpses to get to a point where you can break even after 10 years putting them on a house.

Solar and wind need storage to make a complete solution, so when it comes to climate change discussions, you just end up with two “irrational” groups arguing about the optimistic potential things that don’t actually exist at an affordable cost.