Nuclear is not only A Solution, it is THE Solution. The Folly that this person refers to is out of date and there aren't enough rare Earth's to build an economy based upon wind and solar.

Now, how this book is so out of date. It refers to an old but today still the mainstream technology, boiling water reactors. I agree, they are bad for two reasons, they are unsafe and they produce long term radioactive waste. The current boiling water reactors are unsafe for several reasons. They are pressurized at 300 atmospheres and explode as a result, dispersing radioactive material, a bad thing, they use water as a coolant, this has several bad aspects, neutrons split the water into hydrogen and oxygen which if ignited explodes. This is what blew the containment domes off of Fukushima reactors. Using water as a coolant also means that some hydrogen is transmuted into deuterium which is further transmuted into tritium which being a gas, escapes. It has a very short biological half life because we humans cycle water through our bodies very quickly and it also has a relatively short radioactive half-life of eight years so not a long term legacy thing, and it is light so it tends to rise in the atmosphere. But none the less it is undesirable as a released product, however there are some future technologies that will address this. Second, existing boiling water reactors use solid fuel and thus the fission products remain in the fuel rods. This is the primary cause of meltdowns. When a reactor is scrammed, i.e., shut down, the fission products continue to decay and produce heat. This is the source of virtually all meltdowns.
Lastly because of this decay heat boiling water reactors require cooling even when they are shutdown. If you lose all power and your generators are under water, like in Fukushima, meltdown.

Second problem with boiling water reactors, they all are what are known as thermal neutron reactors, that is neutrons are slowed by moderators to what are basically room temperature neutrons because these are most readily absorbed by U235, the fissionable isotope of Uranium. This is and in that some uranium rather than fissioning absorbs neutrons and becomes and even heavier atom. The odd atomic numbered elements aren't a big issue because they are fissionable and will just become fuel, but the even ones, some of these have very long half lives and this becomes the portion of nuclear waste that lasts hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Because most of the fuel in conventional boiling water reactors is a mix of fissionable U235 and non-fissionable U238, some of the later does breed even though this is very inefficient with thermal neutrons and becomes U239. Because this is the only isoptope of Plutonium produced by boiling water reactors, it is easily chemically separated into weapons grade Plutonium, and this is THE reason better nuclear technologies have not been adopted.

But.. We have a new very good and safe nuclear technology known as molten salt reactors. Molten salt reactors do NOT operate under significant pressure, about 1.4 atmospheres, just the pressure required for the pumps to pump the molten salt through the cooling loop, and because the salt has a very high boiling point, it will not flash to vapor even if pressure is removed. Second no water no hydrogen-oxygen resulting in explosions. Third, no water, no tritium. Forth, passively safe. In a molten salt reactor the fission products are continuously removed. This means there are no fission products to continue generating heat in a shutdown. In a molten salt reactor safety is by physics not by active mechanisms. A molten salt reactor has the fuel dissolved in the fuel, and the expansion coefficient of the salt is high, so if the reaction level becomes too high the salt gets hotter, expands, and slows the reaction. Further, the physics aspect of safety, there is a drain plug of the same salt between the reaction tank and a much larger shutdown tank that is kept solid by an electric fan keeping it cool. If electricity is lost, the fan stops, the plug melts and all the liquid fuel flows into the much larger tank where it disperses far enough to stop the chain reaction. The larger tank is large enough to dissipate all the remaining heat in the fuel passively.

While it is possible to build a molten salt reactor with a moderator and operate it as a thermal reactor, this is stupid because it uses only fissile fuels which are only the .7% of Uranium that are U235, and not fertile fuels such as U239 which is 99.3% of natural Uranium and U-232 which is 100% of natural thorium, both much more abundant fuels. It also does not have the capability of burning the actinide wastes, a feature we really want so that we can burn existing long term waste in these reactors and leave no long term radioactive legacy. The fission products all decay to safe levels in three years or less.

The molten salt still can have plumbing problems, but in that event, because nothing is under significant pressure, you leak some liquid fuel onto the floor where it solidifies. You shut down the reactor, fix the leak, put the fuel back in the vessel and life goes on. The public is never in danger and the danger to the plant workers can be managed with proper equipment and procedures.

So we really do need to build these plants, not only to provide the energy for a modern society and not go back into the stone ages as Ramana would have it, but also to turn all the long lived actinide waste into short term waste so we don't live a million year long radioactive legacy. And on a side note, we could generate all of our electical needs just using that existing waste as fuel for the next 1000 years.

Now, the reason governments have made this technology so difficult to bring online, while these reactors do generate some plutonium, they generate a mixture of isotopes that are ill suited for nuclear weapons without isotopic separation. This is THE reason the nuclear regulatory agency and the energy department and equivalent agencies in other nuclear powers are dragging their feet on this technology. And this mix of isotopes is not an environmental problem as it can just be left in the reactor and serve as fuel along with the other actinides.