This is true. I am mostly pro-solar and mostly anti-nuclear, but if we decided to build a huge multi-national plant to combat/reverse global warming and it needed obscene amounts of energy to operate, I think that might be a perfect task for nuclear. The same doesn’t hold true for AI data centers though. I hope those guys have to generate their power by daisy chaining potato batteries.

That’s an interesting way to look at it. If it’s not just about the power and the cost, there are actually a lot of other factors that we have glossed over.

Solar is cooperative and local while nuclear necessitates centralization. In a nuclear future, large nuclear generating corporations are the sellers and we are the buyers. In a solar future, we pool and exchange our power depending on current production ability and current electric need… comrade.

I had heard of lake batteries over the years, but never a weight battery. Thank you for teaching me something new today!

You know what else I haven’t heard of in a while? Thermal solar, where they use a parabolic mirror array to concentrate the sun onto a small tube full of water pushing a steam turbine. Even the plain steam could be used for heating and more. Steam can absolutely be concentrated under pressure (more of a capacitor than a battery since the temp won’t hold, but it does provide stability). The steampunk future from comic books is at our finger tips only we will generate the steam using the sun rather than big factories of iron and steel.