The record in Texas is that their free market approach was successfully and safely generating wind energy & gas energy, until suddenly it bigly wasn't.
This is rather why I'm so leery of nuclear power.
As long as everything is good, it's clean.
Except for the waste disposal issues.
Lets look a bit more at those "waste disposal issues".
In the left corner we have a terawatt of coal power. In the right corner we have a terawatt of nuclear power. Both obviously produce waste.
In the left corner we dig a hole to store a year's worth of the fly ash. The stuff is rather toxic, it needs to be sealed against water intrusion.
In the right corner we dig a hole to store the waste. Again, we seal it to keep it out of the environment. To be fair we make the same hole as we did for the coal.
A year goes by. The left hole fills up. The right hole, however--the spent fuel comes out of the reactor and goes to the reprocessor. Unused fuel (only about 10% has actually been used) goes back to the reactor. Commercially useful isotopes are extracted. That which is neither of these goes into the hole.
Next year, we need to dig a new hole for the coal plant. The nuke plant's hole has plenty of space.
.....
10,000 years from now we have 10,000 holes for the coal plant. The nuke plant's hole has finally filled up.
10,001 years--we dig yet another hole for the coal. On the nuke side, however, we simply take out the first batch as it is no hotter than natural background radiation. Maybe it's got something useful in it, if not it can go in the regular trash at this point--it's pretty much devoid of the heavy metals that are a problem with the fly ash.
......
100,000 years from now we have 100,000 holes for the coal plant, the nuke plant continues to function with just it's original hole.
Or lets look at the radiation the plants emit.
Go to the fence of the coal plant, record the radiation release. Now go to the nuke plant and replay those readings--the alarms go off, they shut down the plant and look for what's broken and leaking hot stuff.
(Or, consider the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. They had to apply for a waiver on the normal rules for how hot their waste water could be as it was inherently impossible for them to meet the standard. The problem is the reactor cooling water is cleaned-up sewer water and the water coming
into the plant doesn't meet the standards for how hot it can be going out. The problem is patients undergoing various nuclear medicine procedures and pissing out the results. The doctors capture the really hot stuff (radioiodine treatment for thyroid cancer) but most of it just goes down the toilet. Both my wife and I have had Tc-99M imaging studies, absolutely zero efforts to contain the leftover radioactivity other than she got a card from the lab as we were doing an international flight the next day--and she was hot enough to set off two radiation alarms in Shanghai/PuDong.)
