Like most discussions of nuclear power here, this will rapidly devolve into proponents of nuclear arguing it's necessary for our near term future while opponents argue that everything that made nuclear weapons bad and 1960s reactors expensive is still the reason that we can't use nuclear going forward.
The truth is that both sides need to update their knowledge of the state of the art in nuclear power generation, learn how the power grid works in depth and learn the patterns of power consumption both by residential locations and industrial ones.
Once you have all the knowledge about what's needed to avoid a significant decrease in our standard of living, you'll understand that a power generation technology with certain characteristics (foremost it has to be carbon neutral) is required... not optional, in other words, and simply adding more renewables is not enough to solve the problem.
The only practical solution (barring spending trillions of $$ and time to completely rebuild the US power grid and invent power storage technologies that don't exist as well as the industrial processes to produce them and infrastructure to handle their whole life cycle) is modern nuclear technology.
I would add that beyond that, electricity is usually a rather small (~25%) fraction of final energy consumption in developed economies, so really there's a lot more to worry about if we're thinking about climate, and that might well imply "lifestyle changes" as David MacKay called them.
The truth is that both sides need to update their knowledge of the state of the art in nuclear power generation, learn how the power grid works in depth and learn the patterns of power consumption both by residential locations and industrial ones.
Once you have all the knowledge about what's needed to avoid a significant decrease in our standard of living, you'll understand that a power generation technology with certain characteristics (foremost it has to be carbon neutral) is required... not optional, in other words, and simply adding more renewables is not enough to solve the problem.
The only practical solution (barring spending trillions of $$ and time to completely rebuild the US power grid and invent power storage technologies that don't exist as well as the industrial processes to produce them and infrastructure to handle their whole life cycle) is modern nuclear technology.