[ncmncm]

Money is fungible. Money spent on nukes is unavailable for renewables.

You need to watch some thorium debunking videos. I live near Indian Point, recently shut down. They tried thorium, early on. It cost too much. Every single thing about nukes costs too much.

[pstuart]

But that supply of money is not a single pool. I think of it as hedging bets.

I skimmed the Indian Point reactor -- it appears to be a non-LFTR reactor, and that seems to be where the excitement continues.

But yeah, renewables are great and only getting better. If we had taken a trillion dollars out of the fiasco of the Gulf Wars (ostensibly for "energy security") we could have done significant things. For example, I'm enamored with the possibilities of geothermal around the Yellowstone caldera -- if we could figure out how to do that without destroying the local environment.

[ncmncm]

There is some likelihood that geothermal can be made compatible with any locale, using new drilling tech. But geothermal is likely to remain substantially more expensive than solar and wind, whatever happens: steam turbines are expensive to maintain. It might win at latitudes above 50-60 degrees, if it can compete with ammonia imported from the tropics. But shipping is absurdly cheap.

[pstuart]

There's something to be said about having the energy sourced domestically, and it would make a nice baseload service. I believe that dealing with the waste water can be challenging but again, having a spectrum of energy source would be really nice.

Rebuilding The Grid with HVDC would help too, as well as an ammonia economy to utilize excess power from wind. It all seems very technically doable, it's the politics and petrol people that stand between us and a carbon free energy ecosystem (well, with reasonable exceptions for aerospace and other special cases)