alt Hacker NewsIt's nuclear fission. It's always been nuclear fission (well, at least since the '50s) and it will continue to be until we commercialize fusion reactors. Everything else is nice to have but it's like NIH syndrome.
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It could be but the US and EU have so far been unable to build commercial fission reactors without going 2x+ over budget in time and money. China is having success but even they are not projected to have nuclear account for more than single digit percentages of their generation.
Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.
Ive been very pro nuclear my whole life, but a part of me is disheartened by the mega projects that commercial fission deployments have become (even if the reasons are bad) that’s a problem that nerfs traditional fission. If nuclear remains both political, extremely bureaucratic and requires public investment, it just won’t be the solution, and not because the tech or physics is bad, but the decision makers & investors can no longer organize large infrastructure projects effectively (except maybe China). This is not unique to nuclear.
Having smaller scale local power generation, whether it’s SMRs, solar, wind or geothermal, there’s a huge advantage in terms of economy, investment, and politics.
Geothermal is fission, and wind, solar, and batteries are fusion at a distance. In both cases, the failure scenarios are benign vs traditional fission generation. It's fine to keep striving for fusion humans control, but the problem (global electrification and transition to low carbon generation) is already solved with the tech we have today. It took the world 68 years to achieve the first 1TW of solar PV. The next 1TW took 2 years. Globally, ~760GW of solar PV is deployed per year (as of this comment), and will at some point hit ~1TW/year of deployment between now and 2030.
Geothermal is a great fit for dispatchable power to replace coal and fossil gas today (where able); batteries are almost cheaper than the cost to ship them, but geothermal would also help solve for seasonal deltas in demand vs supply ("diurnal storage").
https://reneweconomy.com.au/it-took-68-years-for-the-world-t...
https://ember-energy.org/data/2030-global-renewable-target-t...
I also love geothermal for district heating in latitudes that call for it; flooded legacy mines appear to be a potential solution for that use case.
Flooded UK coalmines could provide low-carbon cheap heat 'for generations' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860049 - November 2025