Chernobyl was a snowballing of terrible decision making. Turning of safety systems conducting test a 1/3 of required power. Setting the coolant flow way too high. The turning off of the automated reactor shutdown systems. Basically Chernobyl was the result of doing the exact opposite of what you should be doing when trying to run a nuclear power plant safely.
People over exaggerate how bad Chernobyl really was. The other reactors at Chernobyl continued to run for over a decade after the accident. The disaster happened in 1986 in reactor 4. The other 3 reactors continued to run until reactor 2 was taken offline due to a fire. Reactors 1 and 3 continued to run until 1996 when reactor 1 was shut down, and reactor 3 continued to run until 2000!
At this point, spending the money on IFRs is definitely money way better spent than spending it on Solar. IFRs have proven to be extremely safe, by design they are basically meltdown proof. Not to mention the waste actually has extrmely low levels of radiation and most experts say that simple sea water uranium extraction would be enough to provide enough fuel to satisfy our energy needs indefinitely.
Also, the prototype IFR was brought online in 1964, and cost about $233 Million in todays money. It was a very small reactor designed only to test the theory. It still managed to produce 20MW of electricty
24/7/365 for 30 Years!
As for this solar project, everyone seems to make a big deal about Google being involved, but no one seems to want to mention the fact that they actually pulled out of the project financially in 2011 because they said this type of solar power wasn't economically viable. Interesting...
Also, while the maximum output of this solar array is 400MW, the expected average output is only 126MW. For the money they spent on this thing they could have built 10 IFR reactors, easily outputting close to double the electrical power and they wouldn't need 5 square miles of desert.
If people are really worried about nuclear contamination caused by nuclear reactors, even though IFRs make it basically impossible, what is the argument against putting them out in the Nevada desert, in the areas that are already massively contaminated from all the nuclear tests conducted in the 60s? There are 1,300 square miles of desert in Nevada designated as the Nuclear test site, put the nuclear reactors there. There is very little chance of earthquake, and pretty much 0 chance of tsunami or a tornado strong enough to cause any damage.