Well if we weren't orbiting the solar panel would work pretty well until we crash into the sun

After that... Not so much

coincidentally, just saw a youtube short with more crazy shit

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/l3CFqCgmumw

they mix three salts together to control the melting temperature so it's still hot but not as hard on the equipment.

Fully agreed, though it's also something you really don't want done on too much of an accelerated timeline. Rushing the construction, when the fail-safes rely on it, and it will be an absolute bitch to fix later, is a poor plan.

Unfortunately the red tape has become far too risk adverse. E.g. the reactors china is now building were designed in the UK. The UK government killed 5 attempts to get them built through red tape and time killing. Eventually a Chinese scientist found out about the plans. (With permission) he contacted the Chinese government. Sufficient to say, those plans formed the basis for the newer Chinese reactors they are building out now. They are also exporting the expertise, since most western countries have had their skilled engineers reach retirement, before passing on their skills and knowledge.

In practice, you are looking at 5-10 years minimum, from site selection to power on.

It's relative harm. New nuclear is far cleaner than coal, and can slot into it's place in the grid. We should have done this decades ago, but the plans languished till china found out about them. (Much to the designers joy)

It's also not an either/or situation. As china is demonstrating, there is a limit to how quickly you can roll out renewables. Doing other, pollution reduction in parallel makes sense.

Taking nuclear off the table was the biggest win the oil barrons pulled off.

On a plus side, we will finally find out if fusion is viable in the next 5-10 years. The first over-unity test reactors, designed for sustained operation are being built.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

100% carbon neutral and will never be aff

• edit: needed a space

deep enough, below the water table. (if it even exists where you pick a location) no big deal. There's worse things down there already than moderately low level radioactive metals. It's not like we aren't fracking underneath peoples homes now. releasing dangerous gasses, causing earthquakes, yada yada. That's the other good part about the deep desert: it's already inhospitable enough that people don't gather there uniformly in great numbers. If you buy up some land and cordon it off, it's not really screwing with people. What if you put it deep in the Sahara?

When drilling is suddenly OK, then forego the nuclear reactor and go straight to geothermal.

Geo is a great idea, sadly they have trouble getting it to scale, and locating hot enough pockets proves elusive. If you're in volcanic areas, medium-sized geothermal is amazing. IIRC Iceland uses it to great effect but it doesn't work just anywhere. We can't drill so deep that it gets hot enough to make a difference; you need to find a spot where the crust is already thin.

Now that's not to be confused with geothermal at the house level for heatpumps, that is straight up awesome but works on a very different concept and can't really scale at all... well it would be nice if all these fucking datacenters would use that instead of evaporative loops. but that's a different story.

• edit 2 looking at the carbon footprint of concrete, you'd spend more carbon drilling the hole and getting the waste to the hole than the plug you used to fill it. and you'd be able to store decades of terawatts of energy refuse in that hole