Yes. I think that is increasingly the sensible way to frame it: there probably isn't one replacement for fossil fuels; there is a portfolio, and nuclear looks much more important in that portfolio than it did 20 years ago.
Solar and wind are excellent where their intermittency can be accommodated cheaply—especially for daytime electricity, favorable climates, and places with hydro or other dispatchable generation. But once you try to make them the entire backbone of a grid, you run into storage, transmission, land use, overbuilding, and long periods of low wind/solar production. Batteries are terrific for hours, considerably less compelling for weeks.
Nuclear has the opposite virtue: enormous energy density and continuous generation. It occupies relatively little land, produces essentially no operational CO₂, and doesn't care whether it is cloudy, calm, or nighttime. That makes it particularly attractive for the portion of electricity demand that needs to be there all the time.
Geothermal is rather nice too, but geography limits it. Hydroelectric is superb where you have the terrain and water, but we've already exploited many of the best sites. And fossil fuels remain useful for some applications—particularly aviation, shipping in some circumstances, and industrial processes—where replacing the fuel rather than merely the electricity is difficult.
The interesting question, then, isn't really "nuclear or renewables?" It's more like "how much of each can economically and reliably do the job?" And on that question, nuclear seems to have moved from being an awkward special case to being one of the major pieces of a plausible post-fossil energy system.
The big caveat is that nuclear's weakness isn't physics; it's construction economics, regulation, financing, and the extraordinary tendency of large nuclear projects to take far longer and cost far more than originally promised. If those problems can be brought under control, the argument for nuclear gets considerably stronger.
Yes, although I’d put that one in perspective. Wind turbines do kill birds, and the mortality can be substantial in absolute numbers, particularly at large wind farms. But it isn't generally regarded as one of the largest human-caused sources of bird mortality; cats, collisions with buildings and vehicles, and habitat loss are typically much bigger contributors.
The important distinction is which birds. Wind turbines can be particularly problematic for raptors and other large soaring birds because they use the same air currents that make good turbine sites. That makes location crucial. A poorly sited wind farm can be considerably more damaging than the average turbine would suggest.
And this is another example of why "renewable" doesn't mean "impact-free." Solar has land and habitat effects, hydro radically alters rivers, geothermal has localized environmental consequences, and wind has wildlife and transmission issues.
Nuclear, rather amusingly, has a remarkably small direct wildlife footprint for the amount of electricity it produces. Its environmental controversies tend to be concentrated around waste, mining, accidents, and the construction process, rather than millions of square meters of energy infrastructure spread across the landscape.
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