I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

The key is that, watt for watt, new solar right now costs about a quarter what new fission does. The cost difference has gotten that ridiculous. There are other options as well of course. We can use that superabundant power in the summer to split water and make lots of hydrogen, and use that for power in the winter. We can even use it to pull CO2 from the air, convert it to synthetic fuels like synthetic methane, and just run our old natural gas plants for power in the winter.

And we’re easily headed to a world where watt for watt, solar is 1/10th the cost of new fission. At that point, even at high latitudes, it makes more sense to use solar power even in winter. I mean sure, if you’re at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications. But even then, those areas are probably better relying on synthetic fuels made from solar power plants at lower latitudes. Or even better, those higher latitudes also get very long days during the summer months, so they can make their own hydrogen during the summer and run their grids off tanks of that in the winter. Or, if nothing else, we can always just run some long power cables north-to-south.

Quit huffing paint. The future is solar. Fission, like fossil fuels, is a dead-end technology.

Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage.

Thankfully, we are actually solving this problem by just making solar panels comically cheap. We are going to solve seasonal swings in power demand by just spamming the ever-loving-hell out of solar panels. Solar is so vastly cheaper than nuclear that this is the better option.

If the panels are cheap enough, you can build enough of them to meet your needs even on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have dirt-cheap energy. In turn, a lot of power-intensive industries can move to a seasonal model to take advantage of the nearly-free energy during the warmer months. We have a crop growing season, why not a steel smelting season, or an AI model training season?

I’m pretty sure that guy just masturbates every night to Our Friend the Atom.

Like, what if they wont sell to us anymore, what’s the human cost of human life?

Come on, you’re smarter than that. Are you seriously asking, “what happens if China cuts off our supply of solar panels?” Are you a troll, or just dense?

Think about it. Just think about that for one god-damned second. Solar panels last for DECADES. And even after decades they still retain 75-80% of their original capacity. We move everything to solar, and then China cuts us off from new panels. So then…oh no…we can’t get any replacement panels. Clearly the whole nation will collapse!

Of course not. Unless you’re Mr. Burns, you’re not blockading the fucking Sun. This isn’t oil, or natural gas, or uranium someone can blockade or embargo. If the US gets cut off from new Chinese solar panels, we have literally DECADES to ramp up our own production until things really become a problem.

All that matters is cost in the energy transition. A certain subset of person likes fission because it’s always fun to be contrarian. But there’s a reason fission companies have gone bankrupt left and right, and that we’ve seen countless fission startups collapse over the last two decades. Nuclear proponents like to bitch about strawmen Greenpeace activists and people irrationally afraid of nuclear power. They like talking about these phantom barriers to nuclear, as if fear of nuclear power has anything to do with why fission is a dying technology.

Fission is dying because it’s just too damned expensive. Bitch all you want about the intermittency of solar; it’s cheaper to just spam solar panels and batteries than it is to create an equal amount of reliable power with fission.

Nuclear proponents will always state that fission can be done perfectly safe, and that’s true. But when you point out the cost, they then bitch about regulation making it expensive. Never do they connect the dots that it is precisely that heavy-handed regulation that ensures corporate profits don’t result in unsafe power plants.

Fission is an inherently dangerous technology. Yes, some modern plant designs are “intrinsically safe,” if they’re built right and maintained right and no greedy bastard corporation cuts corners somewhere to save a buck. In order to do nuclear safely, you have to regulate the ever-loving hell out of it and make sure every step of the process is checked and double checked, and that there is some neutral third party looking over everyone’s shoulders. Nuclear power, if done wrong, can go absolutely catastrophically wrong. It can render entire regions uninhabitable for generations. It can be done safely, but only if extremely heavily regulated and tightly controlled. And that is one thing that just inevitably makes fission power extremely expensive. There is no “move fast and break things” when you’re splitting atoms. Development is slow, expensive, and bureaucratic. And that is unfortunately just the way it has to be for this technology to be used safely in a for-profit capitalist society.