[raducu]

> Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy

Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.

Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.

[lostlogin]

> Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.

Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.

[pfdietz]

> unlimited fusion power

This is pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by fantasy. Fusion's sole accomplishment is likely to be making fission look cheap in comparison.

Just because something became a science fiction trope doesn't mean it's actually going to be a part of the future.

[soundwave106]

One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of.

In that:

* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.

* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)

* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.

This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.

The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.

(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)

(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)

[ponector]

>> As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty.

Chernobyl is pretty much habitable now in most places. People live there, work at the power plant.

[lolc]

Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos.

The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.