Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

I haven't seen any superplants which break from the usual evaporation tower scale. I also haven't seen something I'd dip behind a dam which would evaporate it's lake, and yield the depth-energy somehow (perhaps more efficiently than a regular old dam's drop-pipe construction). There should be some special space-age-scale plants too. It's not like I'd know who'd buy one, but submarine/boat powerplants are legal if they stay in open waters, and scale pretty large. There's a certain terratory for nuclear train, certainly. All presently best in class designs for those have contamination and bulk issues (and not even either!). But it'd also not know who sells those! So it's still a hole in the market, either way. And with space, there's an interest in building spaceborne nuclear power plants, which now is likely to become commercial enterprise, but was not recently a purely governmental affair. So that can be very lucrative, yet safe.

The 'aftermarket' for these products, which includes armed assurance of retrieving 'misplaced' fuel, and a suitable construction for assuring the safekeeping of said materials over their dangerous lifespan, with/without the fiscal instruments for these materials to be kept retrievable ('depleted' is relative). Is, well, basically just more market really. But it's important to capture this market very aggressively, or the materials will not be treated appropriately and the cost may be left uncarried.

It may end up being incredibly unsustainable, with mineables lasting 60-80 years with reasonable (curved up) adoption, which is definitely on the short side. Space mining may yield tremendous amounts, and will more likely laser it moon/earthbound rather than shipping the uranium (but we'll see! It's 'down' in the gravitational spirals, so it may even yield energy on the way down hah). Water sourced uranium mining is something to be proven before we'll know what kind of 'solution' we're facing, but the idea of finding lots of uranium anywhere is nice. I'm positive we're not actually done prospecting the earth, just that the mines we do have are thusly rich we're not looking further!

So, clearly you're not going to use gas, because you don't sound at all pleased by renewebles relying on "fossil fuel backup" to fill in the gaps, so what's left?

Are you thinking about Pink Hydrogen? i mean that's a good plan but it's also basically storage, the same as green Hydrogen would be, no?

However. but the best power is the power you have. While renewables are cheaper, we don't yet have enough renewable capacity. And while fixing that is happening at an enormous pace, it's going to take a bit of time. A few decades should help.

E.g. China has more than a TW of coal plants and more under construction. The global rollout of renewables is in the order of a bit over 100 GW. At that pace, it would take a decade to roll out enough (globally) just to get rid of China's coal plants.

That's why they are investing in expensive Nuclear plants. 150 plants adds up to about a TW pretty much. Assuming these are pretty big ones doing 6GW each. That's not because they are so cheap but because it is the only way to get China on a path where they can shut down most of their coal this half of the century. Doing that is becoming more urgent.

Long term, they might shut down those nuclear plants as soon as they can get away with it to save money. That will require a massive increase in production for renewable generation and storage. These plants have a lifetime of around 60 years. They might not actually be online that long.

I have good news:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.RNWX.KH

"My problem" is that there is a physical cap on this with fuel extraction: EROI. A trillion dollars a pound for ore will not matter if it takes more energy to recovery a resource than it takes to produce it. The seawater recovery part of this story is dubious at best at the recovery factors used in their calculations.