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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Serious questions for people not looking to play political whack-a-mole and slapping people around online.
I haven't taken the time to research - but is the "solar overtaking nuclear" because of the dramatic increase in solar farms? Or primarily from the increase of tech? I imagine an mix of both, but the quantity increase seems to be significant.
Are nuclear plants as efficient as they can be? Or are most of plants decades old with problems from aging?
Can the rise of solar be more person to person investment? Or is it's increase mostly from huge cap ex from people wanting to own and charge for the energy? Nuke is obviously a huge expense begining to end.
The price per watt is rapidly shrinking all while the batteries keep getting cheaper and better. Progress keeps being made. Sodium batteries are coming and promise inferior storage capacity, but excellent reusability at a much better price point than regular lithium batteries. So they might not be put in phones, but for static installation such as houses, they are very promising.
I believe the price per watt almost everywhere on earth is better with solar than with coal/oil/gaz, even in the USA where they are actively working against solar. Another advantage solar has, is how easy anyone can have it installed. So it fits almost anywhere without complications. I couldn't tell you if the rise is mostly individuals or companies looking to resell the energy though. But for sure, solar is replacing all of those.
As for nuclear, they require HUGE commitments, a lot of consideration on where to put those plants and where to store the wastes. Nobody wants to live anywhere near wastes and everybody is at least lowkey fearful of a nuclear powerplant. It's not surprising with what happened in the past. Even if all incidents were mostly due to someone cheaping out on something. Even that incident in japan due to a tsunami. (Btw check out the show Chernobyl if you haven't, it's really good).
Another disadvantage of nuclear is they are far too dangerous for gouvernments to just "let you build it out" as an energy company. That's not much of a problem for solar plants.
Modern nuclear remains very much cheaper on the long term and is totally safe, but it's hard for governments to keep long term commitments when political will is so easily changed. So nuclear plants are rarely built and yeah, mostly aging out.
When we figure out fussion though... Oh boy, nuclear is going to be THE source of electricty. No wastes. Just clean energy. But that's not soon.
The Dept of Energy was stripped of a lot of nuclear oversight staff and regulations by Trump and Doge, to fast track microreactors for data centers.
Fuck us and all the life forms living here I guess.
https://www.washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/trump-administration-nuclear-waste-cleanup-team-staff?redirected=notus_org
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-04-10/nuclear-safety-at-risk-whats-changing-under-donald-trump/
https://futurism.com/science-energy/nuclear-workers-trump
...and I think they've all gone "Screw that! Gas turbines are cheaper. Fuck the emissions."
Nuclear fusion has the same problem as fission. In theory the energy is enormous speaking of a nuclear bomb or the power of the sun. But in order to make it a stable/sage energy source and the inefficiency of turning heat into energy, the net amount of energy gained is so small they had to scale the plants up so much for it to gain enough energy for it to be economically sensible. The initial plants were way smaller.
What we really need is better was to convert other forms of power into electricity, store it efficiently and reduce power consumption. Normal pressure, normal temperature Supra conducting would be a game changer for example. That could reduce the worlds power consumption by 60%
I think it’s just the economics of it, as it almost always is.
Solar panels have been dropping logarithmically in price for 50 years. Battery improvements don’t hurt either.
I am a fan of nuclear energy, but its cost has not done anything like that. It would be a good thing for us to develop cheaper fission and build more reactors. I know there are companies trying to bring it back, at least.
Nuclear has lots of regulations so there had been little to no research in scaling it up compared to the vast sums of private RnD that panels and batteries have seen.