Your intuition is flat out wrong. Building new nuclear takes too long. "Just fix the nuclear regulations" is a vibes-based statement. Even China built 100x as much solar as nuclear in 2025. Wouldn't they "lower standards" to build more nuclear if it made any economic sense?

As for

> those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create

You've swallowed Big Oil propaganda and are choosing to parrot it without thinking. The actual truth?

"Every year, [ICE vehicles] consume over 17 times more tons of oil (2,150 million tons per year) than the amount of battery minerals we’d need to extract just once to run transportation forever. Even when including the weight of other raw materials in ore and brine, one-off mineral demand would still end up over 30% lighter than annual oil extraction for road transport. And unlike minerals, oil products are promptly burned in internal combustion engines and must be replaced each year, forever

Admittedly this is about minerals for batteries. But solar panels are also recyclable.

Source: https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_b...