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exabrial

Take all of the ethanol subsidies and build nuclear, cover parking lots with solar.

This is all we want.

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Or build renewables and storage and get massively more energy, in a few years rather than in the 2040s.

Not sure where this fixation on new nuclear comes from?

It's the magic bullet that will solve emissions, I suppose because it's advanced technology and the hippies are against it.

Ignoring the enormous cost, and long build times, plus the fact that when it gets hot they have to be turned off like last Summer.

Yeah, they have their place, but renewables are the real hero here.

When it began to dawn on them that their political "side" was intentionally ignoring climate change to boost fossil fuel profiteers they fell back to mocking hippies and silly women environmentalist for supporting feel good renewables instead of manly nuclear.

It made them feel much better, so now they need to desperately avoid learning anything about either renewables or nuclear power because their ego will collapse if confronted with reality.

Their side will never learn, as it isn't an education issue, but an ideology issue. Anti renewables is deeply ingrained in their identity and belief system. We just need to keep powering through the energy transition while ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. You're not going to logic and reason someone out of ideology [1] [2]. Same reason 100k churches are going to close over the next 5-10 years [3]. The ideology ages out, because it is rigid and in many aspects, unwavering versus being able to change.

Not many coal generators (~182GW) [4] and mines [5] in the US left to go. Keep going. Fossil gas gets pushed out next.

(If the US replaced all of the ag land it uses for biofuels, about the size of Oregon, with solar PV, it would produce more power than the entire country consumes while being wildly more efficient)

[1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/idaho-coun...

[2] https://www.datawrapper.de/_/vecRk/ ("755 counties have ordinances against renewables, and 61% of those counties are rural.")

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302 (citations)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704064 (citations)

[5] https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=03b7a02fb9c24967918...

("Progress occurs one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck)

I had Claude make this table of CO2 emissions per capita and nuclear energy share, from 1960 to today. https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/9ef28451-1f6c-4809-b575-4...

I think people like nuclear because, over the last half century, CO2 emissions per capita have been drastically lower in the places nuclear has a larger energy share, like France.

Nuclear made a lot more sense back when solar panels and batteries were less mature.

With how insanely cheap solar and batteries are getting, it doesn't make much financial sense to build new nuclear plants anymore (for grid generation, they're still great for things like military ships).

Which is an argument for the Messmer plan half a century ago. Now what we spend our money on for the 2026 version of the Messmer plan.

Geothermal needs to enter the chat as well.

I'm not anti-nuclear (if it's "done right"), but the economics of it are not very competitive. I think it's a technology we should not abandon (I'd love to see SMRs find a way to be viable and secure).

I would love the idea geothermal, I'm just not aware of a lot of places in the US that can take advantage of it :/

Iceland on the other hand....

There's a lot of development in leveraging fracking tech, Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), as well as some other wild shit like using masers: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-newberry-volcano-marble-f...

There's plenty of geothermal in the US to be tapped into, we just need to invest more in it. It then becomes the perfect baseload utility.

Enhanced geothermal systems could expand geothermal power generation - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67204 - February 19th, 2026

Map: https://www.nlr.gov/docs/libraries/gis/high-res-images/geoth...

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