Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.

If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.

Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants.

Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.

China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)

And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.

To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.

> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that

Impossible.

Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.

The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.

They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.

If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.

Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.

> offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.

A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!