[rubber_duck]

My uneducated gut feeling is that the only way nuclear is going to be relevant is if they perfect micro-nuclear reactors.

I remember reading about these 10 years ago [1], and have seen a few more since. Basically they propose small "nuclear batteries" kin of design - this avoids catastrophic scenarios and benefits greatly from economies of scale.

The only issue I see with this approach is political - you would have a lot more nuclear material spread around, spreading this kind of teach where it's easily accessible and hard to protect doesn't sound reasonable with the political situation in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

[stjohnswarts]

There certainly are mini reactor designs which can be put in a grid like network to create the same effect as our current huge-but-old reactors. Luddites, just won't have it, but maybe if leaders just go ahead and get a backbone we can have such things that might just save us from extinction (or at least the end of civilization, I'm sure at least a small cadre of humans will survive, we're pretty adaptable as a species). https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...