You seem to be misunderstanding friend.

I’m all for building as much wind, hydro, and solar power as possible. It is the cheapest option.

I’m not arguing against that.

People here seem to think that money spent on nuclear is money NOT spent on Wind/Solar/Hydro/Storage/etc as if there’s a fixed budget for all energy transition projects. That’s not the situation.

Insurance and financial institutions are losing big money on climate change disasters, and they are getting data from their actuaries and climate scientist, saying it’s going to get massively worse. There is rapidly growing interest from “big money” private sector investors, In any technology that might solve the climate crisis.

There’s more money investors wanting invest in wind, solar, or hydroelectric projects, than there are projects to invest it. The limiting factor isn’t money.

Believe me, no one would be happier than me to be proven wrong that we can build enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric to get off a fossil fuels by 2050.

But if you extrapolate the current data and the current trend lines, they don’t come anywhere close.

If we also invest in nuclear, we come closer.

It’s not a question of viability it a question of time.

Can we replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar power only? Absolutely.

Can we do it by 2050? Not without a miracle.

From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.

There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order and it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.

At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 months so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.

People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.

But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital with non-energy related investments and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.

Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.

Solar has been growing exponentially for the past decade or so, wind has not. Wind has run into supply chain limitations on rare earth metals such as neodymium and isn’t growing exponentially anymore.

It’s doubtful that solar will continue growing exponentially for the next 20 years but even if it does, that only gets us to the point of enough capacity to displace the ~17.9 PWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023.

To get off of fossil fuels we need to change everything else that’s burning fossil fuels too. That means every vehicle replaced with an EV, every gas furnace replaced with a heat pump. As we do that it’s going to 2-3x electricity demand.

The world burned 140 PWh worth of fossil fuels in 2023, and we only generated 1.6 PWh from solar power. That 1.6 is up from 1.3 PWh in 2022. A lot of that 140 PWh was wasted heat energy so we don’t need to get that high, but we still need to generate something in the area of 60-90 PWh of electricity annually to eliminate fossil fuels.

~4/5th of our energy still comes from fossil fuel, we have a long f’ing way to go. Even with the current exponential growth of solar we don’t get off of fossil fuels within 20 years, and that’s assuming global energy demand doesn’t increase.

Don’t take my word for it. Extrapolate the data yourself. Your rose coloured glasses aren’t helping.

We can’t manufacture and install enough solar farms and storage to get us off of fossil fuel within 20 years and more importantly available investment capital isn’t the limiting factor.

Investments in nuclear power are not taking money away from investments in solar.

We can do both, and it gets us off fossil fuels sooner.