The time has finally come for geothermal energy

I've always been curious why a cost-effective widespread implementation of geothermal energy has never been considered a holy grail of energy production, at least not in the public debate. Much of the discussion is so focussed on nuclear fusion, which seems so much harder and less likely to be reliable.

Drilling is one of those things which used to be extremely expensive but has very gradually come down in price. Thanks, ironically, to the oil industry. It's unsexy because there's no "silver bullet" waiting in the wings.

It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.

Focusing on fusion .. I think that's a legacy of 60s SF, when the fission revolution was still promising "energy too cheap to meter".

To be fair, that promise of fission made sense from a purely scientific and mathematical perspective, before running into the practical realities of how its externalities interact with real-world politics. Fission is expensive because in practice it turns out we care quite a lot about proper waste management, non-proliferation, and meltdown prevention.

In a world where anyone could just YOLO any reactor into production with minimal red tape, consequences be damned, fission energy would actually be extremely cheap. Hence the optimism around fusion. The promise of fusion is an actualization of last century's idealistic conception of fission. It can be a silver bullet for all intents and purposes, at least once it's established with a mature supply chain.

I fully understand that waste management of fission reactors is a Very Big Deal. But I still stand behind the argument that opposing nuclear power in the 70s and onward is possibly the biggest own goal the environmental movement has ever achieved.

At worst, nuclear waste contaminates a discrete section of the Earth. Climate change affects literally everywhere. The correct answer would have been to aggressively roll out fission power 40-50 years ago and then pursue renewables. You can argue that other solutions would make fission power obsolete, but we would have been in a much better spot if it'd at least been a stepping stone off fossil fuels. Instead, we have 40-50 years of shrieking and FUD from environmentalists over an issue that can be kept under control with proper regulation. The US Navy has operated reactors for over 60 years without incident, proving it can be done with proper oversight.

TL;DR nuclear has issues, but I'd take it over coal every day and twice on Sundays, at least until something better can scale.

The problem with that argument is that nowhere did environmentalists in the 70s or 80s prevent nuclear power plants from being build. Nuclear has received much more subsidies than solar or wind ever did (even if we ignore the indirect military->civil subsidies) and it still never became economical. Back in the 70s and 80s coal was much cheaper, and now solar and wind are so much cheaper it doesn't make any sense to invest in nuclear. The nuclear power plants that were build, got built largely for political reasons (energy independence, and military), and the reason why not more got build was not those pesky environmentalists, but that it was expensive.