Anti-Nuclear Rhetoric

I was reading The Double Standards of Green anti-nuclear Opponents by George Monobiont in the online Guardian--a very balanced look at nuclear power and how it dangers compared to other energy sources are often exaggerated and, as usual, once finished I went browsing the comments and following up some of the links provided by concerned readers. I came across one comment a few times that I just can't reconcile with my understanding of reality so I decided to write a comment, which I'll share here.

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3. The creation of energy through renewables has the potential to spread wealth, generate employment, and increase equality.

The above comment confuses me, yet I've read it in various places by different people. For the life of me I cannot see how renewable energy has the potential to do any of those things.

1) Renewable energy collectors / transducers / distribution lines will still be built by companies who will still reap most of the benefits (even government contribution will be reduced the way the UK is going).

Energy production/distribution is big business and building a different type of energy generator is not likely to change that. Even if we each have personal solar panels everywhere, we'll still have to buy the equipment etc. and there will be some form of tax to make us pay more (or, in UK, we'll have a few sunny areas we'll go where we'll pay to rent space for charging our panels!).

Building a personal wind farm is impractical due to money and space (again, especially in UK where there are more people per square km than China, and a lot less area. However, you may be able to rent a windmill at a reduce rate...)

2) I can't see that the construction would require that many more people but, in the case of wind, it would obviously require much more area also --> would that not result in greater damage to the environment? Even the sea has creatures and ecosystems and a wind farm has a huge footprint.

Maintenance would likely be similar for both

Any renewable source requires almost no further human intervention apart from maintenance, construction and manning the stations--same as non-renewable sources (i.e. no mining, shipping, waste removal, etc are needed). Therefore, any non-renewable source almost by definition would supply more jobs.

3) Given the above--that wealth will remain localized to the companies, and that there will not be any more jobs than with non-renewable energy--how will renewable energy contribute to greater equality? I just don't see it.

So, I'm quite confused by some of the arguments and would appreciate some clarification.

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And I would, because some of the arguments put forward by the anti-nuclear lobby seem full of meaningless utopian rhetoric.

Edwin