If you point this out on social media, of course, a bunch of people will immediately mob you and say “Nuclear is better than solar!”. That’s wrong, of course. Nuclear’s compactness makes it useful for some niche applications, but its high costs and lack of a learning curve means that when land is available for solar, nuclear simply isn’t... See more

What’s going on here is, fairly obviously, some combination of simple old-guy aesthetic NIMBYism (“those massive solar fields”) and right-wing culture wars. The latter has been caused by decades of Americans seeing energy technology as being fundamentally about climate , rather than about energy itself . In a post back in December, I wrote the... See more