How do you measure "cheaper than nuclear"? How much is a life of a dead 10 year old cobalt miner worth in accounting terms? Whatever the price of a coffin is in Africa? What about the ecosystem destruction such mining causes, who is going to put the dollar figure on that?
I don't think we even have enough proven mineral reserves to supply sufficient battery storage to supplement the renewable aka unreliable grid, and hydro dams aren't always right nearby to pump the storage. Long haul transmission eats up huge chunks of generated energy too.
I don't get this weird fetish with fields upon fields of solar panels and windmills, vs a relatively very tiny building that produces gigawatts constantly for several decades.
Why is it better to destroy ecosystems, to destroy fields and kill birds? Just to assuage some irrational phobia around the same thing that's literally heating the Earth's crust?
FYI: plate tectonics affect the carbon cycle, help regulate the atmosphere, and thus ultimately contribute to keeping our planet's surface at a comfortable not-too-hot and not-too-cold temperature.
1. fields belong to trees, grass, animals, not to some ugly panels that were produced with millions of tons of toxic waste that was then dumped into the ocean.
2. windmills are ugly, kill birds, ruin microclimate.
3. Additional expertise in fission will lead to more capital, talent, and mindshare available to develop fusion further.
How would a spacefaring civilization get off from this rock and survive without nukes?
Colonization of planets cannot happen without them. Renewables is just the Sun, rebadged, nothing "renewable" about it.
1. Nigeria has 30 MILLION people that use it. Most of the usage is for cross-border transactions.
2. transaction rate limitations only apply to the settlement layer. retail does not need to use it, only very large transactions that need high settlement guarantees.
Lightning network has essentially unlimited tps, currently has close to 1 million (!!) live nodes, and even sub-penny transactions are perfectly viable because fees are even tinier or can be even nil.
If you truly do care about lives of 4 billion people on the planet, you should at least internalize these basic facts, as you are simply repeating misinformation: tps are low, no traction. it is simply not true.
An open and permission-less global monetary network that does not exclude anyone at all, is about as valuable to you as malformed viagra emails?
4 billion people today live under less than ideal circumstances.
Spending a fraction of a percent of global electricity is absolutely worth it. It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get.
Nigeria alone has 34+ million users. Just one country.