Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking
I&#x27;m not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin.<p>So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it&#x27;s not because the technology can&#x27;t be safe. It&#x27;s because humans ultimately can&#x27;t be trusted with:<p>- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;<p>- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);<p>- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;<p>- The failure modes are awful; and<p>- Dealing with the waste.<p>Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I&#x27;m not sure we&#x27;re seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.<p>As for fusion power, that&#x27;s more murky. I really hope there&#x27;s commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I&#x27;m not yet convinced there will be.<p>Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the &quot;mess&quot;.<p>Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don&#x27;t have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).<p>I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I&#x27;ve seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night&#x2F;day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).