This is gonna blow your mind, but it is entirely possible to be against both coal and nuclear, while being for other clean forms of power generation such as solar and wind.
Of course, I don't expect most people to understand electrical engineering and basic statistics about the type of harm caused by nuclear power. I just group such people into the annoyingly stupid category.
And considering you like to claim you're fiscally conservative, you really shouldn't be supporting incredibly expensive nuclear builds.
Here is a shocking point, providing a continuous source of electricity over a wide geographical area is going to be expensive no matter which way you do it. You can quite easily fund such things without the taxpayer if you remove politics from the equation:
The main curse of any state-owned industry is political interference. Eskom was free of this from 1923 until 1994. Its brief was simple: to make sure that South Africa had enough electricity. It was very lightly regulated, much less so than private electricity utilities in the United States of America (USA). It was an autonomous organisation run by technocrats. Engineers were in charge and were appointed entirely on merit. Even under apartheid, there was no attempt to Afrikanerise Eskom's senior management. Eskom's greatest CEO was Ian McRae, an English-speaker. Eskom was entirely self-financing. There were no state subsidies for electricity.
In about 1969, after South Africa's economic growth rate had topped 6% in various years in the 1960s, electricity demand threatened to outstrip supply. In those years, growth in electricity demand was double economic growth. Near panic set in. Then Eskom made its best ever strategic decision: it decided to embark on a concerted programme of building huge coal stations of standardised design, each one having six identical units. The result was that vendors and contractors from all over the world tripped over themselves to give Eskom the best prices and conditions. The stations were built on time and on budget. They were funded via cheap debt and all the debt was timeously repaid. The taxpayer didn't have to pay a cent. By the end of the programme, Eskom had plentiful and very reliable electricity at probably the lowest prices in the world - lower than that from private utilities in other countries.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/the-rise-and-fall-of-eskom--irr
I am extremely pragmatic when it comes to the engineering limitations behind solar and wind, there are technological limitations which millions of Musk batteries do not solve.
Namely the frequency stability of the grid. Every time you plug something into the wall, the generator that is ultimately powering it has to produce more power. This they do with control systems, but increasing the power output of any power station takes time, which means that if you don't have something to power the grid in the duration it takes to increase the power, the frequency of the grid drops. That is a bad thing.
Currently, it is solved by the inertia of the big rotating chunks of metal which are rotating at high speed. Now you want to unplug that source of stability and replace it with a bunch of generators that *might* be on.
This paper goes through all the racist and oppressive electrical engineering that explains the problems that wind power has on the frequency stability.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08235.pdf
But don't listen to any of this, believe all the scaremongering about nuclear power instead. I mean why bother using a solution that already works eh?
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