Tell it to the US Council for Energy Awareness. The existence of Bell Labs was a bit of an aberration as AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly. They had a consent decree with the government to release innovations into the public domain so AT&T would not be broken up as a monopoly. In fact, since 1913 it had official recognition by the government as the natural telephone monopoly, until of course its breakup in the '70s.

Solar R&D was hardly private. You’re completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division. I only haven’t mentioned things like the Atomic Energy Commission because that seems obvious, not that there is no solar analogue for these things.

When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation’s largest installer and purchaser.

Amazon is still the largest purchaser of solar. If the implication here is meant to be that solar’s biggest supporters are private, no state or federal department ever came close to being the largest installer and purchaser of nuclear power plants because there are absolutely no public-sector nuclear power plants. All builders are private. Westinghouse of Nikola Tesla fame has been the top builder for a very long time and was bought out by private equity (thanks to a bankruptcy, sure, but that bankruptcy can be blamed on Bush’s rugpull shortly after announcing long-term nuclear funding, the Great Recession, and Fukushima).

This is also to say nothing of

The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.

And yet, my point is, even they’re still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear! I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.

for one thing, it’s exactly what your argument about corn ethanol is

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28903948

There are zero public-sector nuclear plants in the US.

not sure what that means. large traditional reactors are a lot more efficient, especially at scale, though more costly due to historical and current lack of subsidies.

I have been searching and providing you with sources. Give me a source that compares any of these other definitions of energy I haven’t yet covered between nuclear and solar. Per land is the only one widely accepted and what an expert will assume the title says.

Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D.

You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true. Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites. (PV was initially discovered privately, but so was nuclear.) Solar was considered a notorious money loser to the point where it was only deployed for spaceflight. It was only after 60 years of public R&D that private commercial solar became variable in the 2010s.

We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands

This I’ll concede. In fact, in the US, it’s worse than “public lands”: it’s often indigenous reservations, so land the US doesn’t even own and sacred sites.

I’ll note that despite this being indeed a very big issue, nuclear land use is still two orders of magnitude less than solar for equivalent energy generation.

Virtually all of its generators are public projects. […] Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels.

Not true at all. In FY 2016 alone, US subsidies were just 415 million to nuclear, compared to 3036 million for solar (https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf Tables A3, A4). That’s nearly an order of magnitude. Nuclear is operated by companies just as solar is.

Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research. Nuclear only got 40. I am simply saying we should give it the fair chance before you can say that there really is no potential.

i am very divided over SMRs, but large traditional reactors have been proven many times over, and in any case investing in unproven tech (by any government but the US) is what led solar to be this good now in the first place

this is true. I’m not saying that we should stop efforts to install solar to install nuclear instead. as you say replacing the 12 million ha of corn ethanol with solar would produce nearly three times the US demand of 4200 TWh/y (with the averages from the chart above, you have 12 million/1000=12000) i’m for solar. however, i’m also saying that the us could meet nearly 300 times its entire electricity demand just by putting nuclear reactors on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol. we don’t have to debase nuclear for solar

what is your standard of evidence? you’ve moved the goalposts three times now. first it was “define efficiency”, then “by the definition solar is better”, and now this which i still don’t understand

what does this even mean

you know how usually you look at statistics and assume they’re per capita? that was my mistake, though replace per capita here with per unit

Yes, so nuclear uses 100 times less land for the same energy. The unit is hectares per TWh.

I agree with this; I think the “universal” argument and subsequent infighting is propped up by the oil lobby to slow us down. I just think it’s important to highlight how efficient nuclear is. We should be using both good tools to solve this and part of that is knowing how good both are so they’re not unnecessarily ignored.

Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized (by nearly everybody but the US and Russia) to heck. This is like saying trains aren’t profitable because of how much the US subsidizes roads. Even then, nuclear ROI is still better in the long term, it just comes slower.

I mean, the literal meaning of efficiency would be the capacity factor (how much energy is actually extracted out of the inputs over how much energy the input contains) which is very measurable. I’ll concede that that is unfair, but even then there’s the extremely accepted measurement of land use per unit of energy:

(Solar is represented as CSP, concentrated, and PV, photovoltaic)

Edit: energy over land use→land use per unit of energy

headline is clickbait. here’s the only thing it relies on:

According to new reporting by the BBC, photovoltaics will account for 10 percent of the world’s power generation by the end of 2026, a threshold which will see solar energy officially surpass nuclear fission.

Compared to nuclear energy generation — which has stayed largely flat over the past 26 years globally — the publication notes the volume of solar energy being generated has exploded, increasing some 2,700 times over across the same period.

so it’s saying that nuclear usage share is so low that solar will very soon generate more power than it, not that solar panels are now more efficient than nuclear

yes, the VPN providers

is AI karma-farming on Lemmy too now?

i think we’re talking different definitions of compromised here. the end result either way is bad actors have all the certs. what credentialing system does your voting system require of the authorities?

wait how would that work? don’t LG TVs use a random CA that likely isn’t eMurdha?