More renewables requires more slave labor from China. If we produced those solar panels here under US environmental and labor regulations, nuclear would be very competitive. That we have to buy them from China for solar power to even make remote economic sense here in the US should tell us something.
A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
I don't think that solar panel enthusiasm has to answer for the cross-sector near-universal effect of outsourcing of industrial production outside of the US, for Americans.
According to a google search:
> American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W.
I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours.
I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%.
And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or!
And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.
A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.