The research in nuclear is still been done very actively. My country is putting hundreds of millions per year into nuclear research. But even the new technologies are not competitive. The infrastructure and maintenance required for nuclear technologies is vastly more expensive than solar. The thorium hype is moot because nobody ever demonstrated a working molten salt reactor. And even if it works it is still very expensive, suffers from corrosion and produces radioactive waste that is expensive to dispose of. Nuclear technology is old. All the physics behind it is more or less known for 60 years. Very smart people had a lot of money available to come up with something during that whole time. I don't expect any ground braking innovation in that field any more.

> Does wind power really reduce the speed of the earth?

You can measure that by yourself. In my location the if you average over all wind directions during a year you clearly get very west wind bias. That is the amount of Energy you take from earths rotation.

> I saw the most beautiful farmland in Italy this month smothered under sterile black waves of solar panels.

Of course it is stupid to put solar panels on farmland. But there are so many desserts in America that America alone could power three globes only with solar power. Only half of the roof of my house is covered with solar panels and I would easily get through the summer. If I populate the rest of the roof I would get through the winter if there was a possibility for cheap storage that lasts half a year.

Also I find wind farms in nature equally disturbing.

"The rotation of the earth does have an effect on the direction of the wind, but it does not create it. Wind is primarily driven by differences in air pressure. These variations in air pressure are due to temperature differences caused by variations in solar energy received at the surface of the earth."

Use of wind energy has zero effect on the total angular momentum of the Earth + atmosphere. It might cause a glitch as it ramps up and reduces average wind speed, but after that conservation of angular momentum ensures it cannot cause any further change.

The transport of angular momentum from the Earth by radiation is very small, and the change in that due to changes in wind is even smaller.

Really though, it baffles me how people can bring degrading postcard quality into a discussion with stakes of a few billion human lives with a straight face...

The externalities of large scale solar PV are not just bad, they're impossible.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_re...