[lando2319]

Question, why do people talk so pessimistically about the potential for solar? I see lots of comments like, "there is not enough land for solar panels". People seem to have a fixed view about how much power can be drawn. Sure right now the payoff might be underwhelming in relation to the size requirements, but with more development wouldn't the technology improve?

I imagine a future where the technology improves to the point where people who live in cloudy areas can still generate plenty of power. Is that unrealistic?

[Twisell]

The point is that climat change is real and it’s coming fast. So from a purely pragmatic standpoint it seems more reasonable to deploy solutions as soon as possible with available technologies than to wait for a plausible technology improvements.

Otherwise you risk being almost as inactive in the required efforts than an average climat change denier.

[marcosdumay]

Hum... Do you have any actual solution? One that does solve carbon emissions, can be deployed in reasonable time, and does not involve people getting poorer?

The most pragmatic thing to do is to improve solar generation and all kinds of storage. Those can actually solve the problem. Nuclear can't be here on time (nor on budget), and everything else just won't happen.

We could have avoided a lot of problems on the last few decades if the nuclear countries decided to push for safer reactors with no proliferation problems. They didn't. They all kept going for more weapons. Now we have to live with those problems, and the nuclear economical window passed away, it does not make sense anymore.

[Twisell]

>and the nuclear economical window passed away, it does not make sense anymore.

Say’s who?

Because laws of physics say it’s the more efficient solution yet (not the cleanest thought) to tackle climat change problem. You have to put serious study out to counter that, not hearsay’s by coal lobby or anti-nuclear activists.

[sullyj3]

A certain number of photons will fall on any given square meter per second. You can't extract more energy from that square meter in a second than those photons provide.

[richardburden]

Why not imagine a future where fusion technology improves to the point that there's no point in using anything else? With fission, we're already there, and taking full advantage of fission now, with breeder reactors and spent fuel reprocessing made legal again, will give us the energy to pursue fusion worldwide with a budget similar to the U.S. defense budget. Sticking to solar and other "green" energy means mass-homicidal energy austerity!

[petre]

The tech is there, only breeders are quite expensive, anti nuke lobby and politics screwed things up to such a degree that nuclear became overpriced and overengineered. Still we can fix things, SMRs such as NuScale (basically naval scale PWR tech) are a solution if the licensing hurdles are be resolved and so is geothermal where it's available.