Comment by wolfram74
3 months ago
I would contend the coal lobby successfully killed terrestrial fission power. It would have been a good replacement in the 60s and 70s when solar was still underdeveloped but now solar has worked out enough kinks that it's intrinsic advantages (larger exposed construction surface allows for better parallelization, less significant failure modes allows for weaker regulatory environment, less significant scaling advantages allows for easier "right sizing" of installations, and others) are going to be hard to surmount.
No, solar still hasn't figured out how to replace the power demands of the grid. It can only supply daytime power (if that) and makes the grid more unstable requiring fossil fuel peaker plants to supply gaps in production. Grid batteries are still insanely expensive and remain production capacity limited, not to mention all sorts of other problems that will come up installing that much battery capacity. Solar is only cheaper than Nuclear when you ignore the battery requirements to make it a more fair comparison of ability - when you include battery requirements, solar is more expensive by a fair amount which is ridiculous when you consider that Nuclear has gotten more expensive since the 1960s which doesn't happen to technologies unless you stop producing (which we did).