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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It's entire existence is predicated on public R&D. Virtually all of its generators are public projects. It's a notorious money loser to operate. We still don't have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands and in Superfund sites, too.
That's not the reason it lags the alternatives, though. If public spending got us cheap energy with zero trade offs, everyone would be France by now.
Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels. It outperforms in defiance of subsidies, often growing market share in states that are actively hostile to its expansion.
Even in the face of enormous cuts to public spending and bailouts to coal, under Trump 1 & 2, renewables increased their market share.
That's because renewables aren't just efficient, they're profitable. Enormously profitable. The private sector loves high margins on their capex spend, and renewables consistently deliver.
Even France is replacing nuclear with other sources in the long term.
You seem to be implying that solar cells weren't. I don't believe that is true. Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites. (PV was initially discovered privately, but so was nuclear.) Solar was considered a notorious money loser to the point where it was only deployed for spaceflight. It was only after 60 years of public R&D that private commercial solar became variable in the 2010s.
This I'll concede. In fact, in the US, it's worse than "public lands": it's often indigenous reservations, so land the US doesn't even own and sacred sites.
I'll note that despite this being indeed a very big issue, nuclear land use is still two orders of magnitude less than solar for equivalent energy generation.
Not true at all. In FY 2016 alone, US subsidies were just 415 million to nuclear, compared to 3036 million for solar (https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf Tables A3, A4). That's nearly an order of magnitude. Nuclear is operated by companies just as solar is.
Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research. Nuclear only got 40. I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.
Tell it to Bell Labs. Tell it to the the Solar Energy Industries Association. Idk why Americans couldn't get on the ball publicly. But solar was squarely in the private domain for generations.
They were brought about by the industrialization of satellites, certainly. But the R&D was all heavily privatized by and for the private telecommunications sector.
When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation's largest installer and purchaser. No state or federal department came close to it.
The largest investors in new build construction are NRG Energy and Google. Even the state regulated utilities lag behind.
Largely overseas and financed by foreign governments or private firms. The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.
Tell it to the US Council for Energy Awareness. The existence of Bell Labs was a bit of an aberration as AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly. They had a consent decree with the government to release innovations into the public domain so AT&T would not be broken up as a monopoly. In fact, since 1913 it had official recognition by the government as the natural telephone monopoly, until of course its breakup in the '70s.
Solar R&D was hardly private. You're completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation's Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division. I only haven't mentioned things like the Atomic Energy Commission because that seems obvious, not that there is no solar analogue for these things.
Amazon is still the largest purchaser of solar. If the implication here is meant to be that solar's biggest supporters are private, no state or federal department ever came close to being the largest installer and purchaser of nuclear power plants because there are absolutely no public-sector nuclear power plants. All builders are private. Westinghouse of Nikola Tesla fame has been the top builder for a very long time and was bought out by private equity (thanks to a bankruptcy, sure, but that bankruptcy can be blamed on Bush's rugpull shortly after announcing long-term nuclear funding, the Great Recession, and Fukushima).
This is also to say nothing of
And yet, my point is, even they're still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear! I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.
It was certainly a monopoly. But hardly government supported. The government has issued major sanction against the company no less than three times.
The NSF has always languished in funding and has historically failed to deliver major breakthroughs, much less any kind of physical rollout, of a public solar/wind energy grid.
If anything, it has operated as an echo chamber of the fossil fuel industry, downplaying the efficiency and ultimate profitability of a renewable grid.
Hardly a subsidy.
Show me the solar powered submarine.
Show me the solar powered aircraft carrier.
Show me any meaningful federally contracted project to implement solar power for domestic or international consumption.
At the very least, I can point you towards Georgia's Vogtle 3 and 4. Nothing like that exists in the renewable space.