IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there.
What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.
You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.
There you go.
Efficiency also matters for costs. If we use inefficient methods of generating electricity, the electricity will cost more. This affects us as direct consumers of electricity, but also in consumer prices in general, since everything costs energy to make & transport.
The thing about solar energy is that the source is so powerful and abundant that the dominant factor for its economical viability is our ability to produce devices to capture it.
When nuclear is getting more expensive over the years(as the completely safe reactors prove to be not that safe and more safety is introduced), the devices used to capture the solar energy have been getting cheaper and cheaper. So it doesn't matter if solar is half the efficiency of something else if we can make the devices to capture the solar 10x cheaper.
Solar has already become very cheap, what we still need to do is to figure out the storage. So far the success is limited but because all life on earth is doing it already, I think it's a solvable problem.
Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
The sun is literally a nuclear fusion reaction. Wind and hydro are an artefact of the sun + the motion of the planets. We could even stretch the argument that fossil fuels are also indirectly solar from photosynthesis.
Maybe it was a typo?
Your point stands though. I meant type of energy that's readily available on Earth - either Sun based (fossil, solar, wind, hydro - all directly depend on the Sun), or nuclear fission. We don't have any fusion available, yet - that would be a real change.
"Nuclear power has historically been one of the safest and cleanest energy sources."
Again the same bullshit.
Even hydropower is 43 more fatal than nuclear.
However, death rate is only one metric for safety. Fukushima may not have made (yet) lot of deaths, but it sure impacted a huge population, and will do so for many years to come.
One has to look at the impact of an incident. Once installed, solar or wind poses very little risk to you or your neighbors, even in case of natural disasters. And even in the case of the worst impact (deaths), this impact is limited in time/space. This is absolutely not the case of nuclear. Moreover, how do you evaluate the risk of nuclear waste?