I've seen plenty of conservatives say they'd rather have a loud data center than quiet solar farm near their home.

I don't understand.

Turns out we already have fusion power, it's just been placed safely 149.6 million km away. The solution to energy independence comes up every morning.

Nuclear plants - with high start-up costs, national security risks and high output - will always require concentrating large amounts of power in few hands.

Solar has much greater potential for decentralization.

Greater inequality results in a worse society in just about every imaginable way. And nuclear will always encourage that more than solar.

You mean we can make FREE ENERGY in our BACKYARD for almost NO Money? This is TERRIBLE!

-LITERALLY Conservatives!

headline is clickbait. here's the only thing it relies on:

According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.

Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.

so it's saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear

Technically solar power is nuclear power ☝️🤓

While I consider myself pro nuclear, there is something that gets forgotten everytime this conversation comes up.

Nuclear produces waste, which is mentioned often but it is usually responded by pointing out that it could be recycled and the worse to be buried.

Here is what people miss:

Are all our nuclear waste handled correctly today? If not then why should we imply that they will be in the future.

The problem with nuclear isn’t that the waste is impossible to handle, it’s that humans are too short sighted to follow through with it.

And imo that’s a very valid argument on why we should use solar as much as we can.

nuclear power is expensive to maintain, plus needs all those expertise. and building the power plant takes like a decade+, and then you have to deal regulatory issues.

solar, you can pratically put that anywhere on the cheap.

Solar is great but so is nuclear. They have different use cases, we need both.

Nukes are very expensive to build, but easily the cheapest energy is that you have a nuclear power plant up already and you keep it running. Germany royally fucked that one up.

We could have had this 30 years ago. There have been improvements in the tech and manufacturing, but the main reason for the price drop has been the scale of sales.

We included solar panels and a battery when we built our new house in Tokyo, and even though it’s in a quite shadowy area, I’m surprised how much power we get out of them (even on cloudy days). Switching to an EV now too. It’s an absolute no-brainer.

Averaging nuclear over the entire world really doesn't give it a fair shake, since there are many jurisdictions that won't build nuclear capacity for political and societal-preference reasons, rather than technical ones. Where I am, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power plants is more than five times what's supplied by solar and wind combined, and we're doing just fine (and building out more nuclear in addition to more renewables).

Turns out the sun has a few competitive advantages over nuclear: free fuel, no radioactive waste, and it doesn’t need a decade of permits before it starts shining. The real bottleneck now is grids and storage. Imagine losing the energy race to a giant fusion reactor 93 million miles away. 😎

Big star object provide energy for everyone for most of day, it s possible now to make it available for entire day with battery tech, affordable with less waste and risk than old fossils energy. Sounds good and should applied to all of place asap.