It's nuclear fission. It's always been nuclear fission (well, at least since the '50s) and it will continue to be until we commercialize fusion reactors. Everything else is nice to have but it's like NIH syndrome.
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Geothermal is a great fit for dispatchable power to replace coal and fossil gas today (where able); batteries are almost cheaper than the cost to ship them, but geothermal would also help solve for seasonal deltas in demand vs supply ("diurnal storage").
https://reneweconomy.com.au/it-took-68-years-for-the-world-t...
https://ember-energy.org/data/2030-global-renewable-target-t...
I also love geothermal for district heating in latitudes that call for it; flooded legacy mines appear to be a potential solution for that use case.
Flooded UK coalmines could provide low-carbon cheap heat 'for generations' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860049 - November 2025
We deploy solar PV capacity, this doesn't mean we actually get that much power from the deployments. Nuclear fission provides reliable, baseload power, and doesn't require huge battery arrays to compensate for the sun setting or winds calming.
(and to stay on topic for this thread, geothermal is a component of this when geothermal potential exists, cost is competitive, and dispatachability is a requirement to push out fossil generation in concert with renewables, hydro, legacy nuclear, battery storage discharge, and demand response)
https://www.google.com/search?q=baseload+is+a+myth
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/11/15/coal-killing-sodium-ion...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/q3-global-power-rep...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44513185 (lfp battery storage cost citation in 2025)
Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when they EOL in 25 years? They go into landfills and leach toxic chemicals into the ground. These chemicals, like lead and cadmium are toxic forever. They have no 'half-life' in which their toxicity reduces.
Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions, as of this comment, and there is no plan for long term storage or recycling. Nuclear generation is experiencing a negative learning curve; we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.
(solar PV panels have a 25-30 year service life, at which point they will still produce power at ~80-85% initial rating, batteries have a 15-20 year service life, with sodium ion chemistries estimated to have up to 50 year service life assuming once daily cycling)
https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/beyond-recycling-...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/09/nuclear-power-energy-radioac...
https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal
https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all...
(nuclear power accounts for about 10% of electricity generation globally, as of this comment)
Unsophisticated investors like the Chinese government? 'Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.'
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
Your citation comes from an organization with pro nuclear bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Institute
Can China Break Nuclear Power’s Cost Curse—and What Can the US Learn? - https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/can-china-break-nuclear-... - September 17th, 2025
China built more solar power in the last 8 months than all the nuclear power built in the entire world in the entire history of human civilisation. And even if you adjust for utilisation rate to compare against nuclear utilisation China built more solar power generated per hour than all the nuclear power currently in operation generate in an hour - and did so in 12-18 months - https://bsky.app/profile/climatenews.bsky.social/post/3lggqu... - January 23, 2025
China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week - https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa... - July 15th, 2024
Nuclear Continues To Lag Far Behind Renewables In China Deployments - https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la... - January 12th, 2024
Nuclear Energy & Free Market Capitalism Aren’t Compatible - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-mar... - November 6th, 2023
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1910780131318374524 | https://archive.today/iu9jx (China demographics citation)
Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure? Huge solar and wind farms spread out over vast areas, essentially destroying the local ecology? NPPs have a relatively tiny footprint.
Every cited source has a bias. You think 'Clean Technica' is unbiased? Come on.
That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
> Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
Let's compare to spent nuclear fuel, which we know for sure does not end up in landfills. I am talking about today, not some hypothetical utopian future. Today, NPP spent fuel is safely sequestered while solar panels are dumped into landfills.
> nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions
It does, it's just not built yet because it doesn't make sense to do it now. In a few decades, maybe a century we will have commercialized fusion reactors. Once we do, we switch to fusion completely and build the deep geological repositories or whatever other solution makes sense then. Or we can even recycle the spent fuel–the only thing stopping us from doing that now is misguided US politics (as usual).
> we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.
It's capex. We are investing in nuclear technology. If you have a proven design and build the reactors at scale, the costs will flatten or decline, which is obvious to anyone who knows about economies of scale.
France had to nationalize EDF because they could not afford the costs associated with their nuclear fleet. The 70s are 50 years in the past, and are not what the future will look like.
This is also why Spain plans to retire its remaining nuclear generators, and go all in on renewables.
EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-wil... - November 17th, 2025
French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l... - March 4th, 2024
Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~1GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~28-36 months; per Electricity Maps, only 17.25% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear)
Tangentially, Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, for scale.
Wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants and never will.
Heck, Germany tried that on the small island of Pellworm and failed and yet some people think this will work out for the whole country.
It does not work.
Go and throw all your money into renewables stocks and ETFs if you’re so convinced.
I bet you’re not doing that because you realize that the industry isn’t doing well and it’s nuclear power nowadays where all the money goes.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/global-renewabl...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-...
Not really. Solar has gone down in price almost 500X since 1975.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
Wind has gone down significantly too.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/54526.pdf
Meanwhile, the graph for nuclear waste disposal is going rapidly in the opposite direction.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-6587/us-spent-fuel-liabilit...
This is basically nonsense to the extent that it is becoming difficult to extend the presumption of good faith to you. In the 70s solar panels cost US$25+ per peak watt, in 02021-adjusted dollars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#/media/File:Solar...
Now they cost 5.9¢ per peak watt: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
Installing a gigawatt of solar power generation capacity for US$25 billion is in no way comparable to installing a gigawatt of solar power generation capacity for US$59 million.
Wind power has experienced a similar but less extreme cost decline.
https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and...
'Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.'
https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
And for good measure: 'Recycling Lead for U.S. Car Batteries is Poisoning People'
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...
But TCLP is already an extremely rigorous test, far worse than nearly all actual landfills, intentionally. It uses acetic acid, one of the very few acids that forms a soluble salt of lead, and none of the anions present in normal soils that normally immobilize lead, such as carbonate, phosphate, sulfate (!), and chloride.
And air pollution from pyrometallurgical recycling of the kilogram quantities of lead from car batteries is totally irrelevant to the safe containment of the milligram quantities of lead from (probably hydrometallurgical) recycling of solar panels. I am really struggling to imagine how your understanding of the issue could be so shallow that you thought it might be relevant.
Scrap lead is like US$1/kg. Nobody is going to recycle solar panels for that.
