Hacker News Reader

Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Given the construction costs, the case for keeping existing, already paid-for nuclear plants open seems a lot stronger than building new plants that won't pay for themselves for decades. Who knows what the electricity market will look like then?

Solar and wind infrastructure is now mass-produced and competition is driving costs down. It's unclear what forms of energy storage will win, but I would expect it to be competitive as well.

View on HN

Except that's why we have so many power plants based 1950's era designs instead of safer, more modern plants.

“Safer, modern” plants in the US, the UK, and China are being scrapped because they’re not affordable.

Solar, wind, and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. So why build nuclear?

As far as I know scalable storage for base-load is not a solved problem. Has that changed?

Personally I find it hard to believe that we can live on renewabls until a european country goes 1 year completely on renewables (I guess Germany is probably the best candidate for that since they are going all-in).

If batteries and renewables are cheaper than nuclear, how is it not a solved problem? You still need to build the new renewables and the batteries, but it’s cost effective and can be done.

That is a good point and I don't know enough to answer (if you have any good info sources about this I would appreciate them).

Aside from the Tesla battery in Oz (which is more about stabilization rather than primary supply) I don't know of any large-scale battery storage systems.

I get the feeling that we are ignoring the scaling part here (We Just have to scale-up). Since the battery systems would need to be big enough to cover dips in renewable output in a worst case scenario (brown-outs / black-outs are not going to be popular).

Is there any info on how many / how big / how long to manufacture these batteries and renewables would have to be to cover an example country?

You’d need 0.6% of the continental US land mass for solar panels, and 1 mile by 1 mile of batteries to power the entire US off of solar.

This doesn’t include tens of thousands of EVs sold each month, which is rapidly increasing the aggregate amount of distributed energy storage available to the grid.

That’s not right. That’s only about 5 times the size of the gigafactory and there is no way that has nearly the capacity to power the entire US for 9+ hours of continuous darkness. You need to check your math...

Unless you meant a cubic mile of batteries, in which case that’s completely unrealistic to manufacture.

Because renewables are regional. They make exceedingly good sense in places like the US midwest or most of Europe where you can build solar / wind and have substantial availability. Solar, by contrast, is much less performant if you live somewhere with less sunlight due to any number of reasons - weather, smog, latitude, etc. Same with wind - it only makes sense to build wind where you get the most wind.

And the trick with those is that its not a zero sum. Even if solar would be viable somewhere less optimal panels are still going to go where solar is cheapest first. And then you are looking at the costs of transporting that power gradually towards areas of reduced renewables efficiency and/or storing it.

To put it even more generally, if the state of Maine were willing to build a fission plant but not buy solar, wind, hydro, etc LET THEM BUILD IT. You can manufacture all the solar panels and windmills you can while also building nuclear plants. The priority has to be shutting down all oil and gas plants as soon as possible by any means available.

No one is stopping anyone from building modern nuclear reactors except debt markets and utilities. The problem is that no one wants them (compared to other generation technologies).

Timoth3y in another thread explains it extensively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057

That’s wrong. Debt markets are reflecting the risks of the plants being stopped by orgs like the NRC, etc. The debt markets don’t favor it precisely because so many different parties can block new builds.

I disagree with your assertion. It's simply time value of money. As an investor, you don't want to wait decades for a higher risk low return that may never materialize, or the bond defaults entirely because your nuclear plant is shuttered for safety or political reasons. Could government insure the bond? Yes! But then they're subsidizing nuclear when that money could go into renewables and storage.

You didn’t disagree, you just affirmed it. The debt markets treat it as high risk precisely because so many parties can easily stop it.

Nobody refuses to invest in nuclear because of the negligible meltdown risk.

This touches on an issue, that renewables don't need to be paired with base-load plants (which nuclear has traditionally been), but with load-following and peaker plants.

Traditional nuclear power plants are base load plants, but any development in new nuclear plants should focus on designs that are better at load following, in order to complement rather than compete with renewables.

I agree that we should be investing in R&D, but what renewables have to be paired with is the technology that we have available to us here and now. If you want load-following energy then that means fossil fuel. If you want base-load then you have either fossil fuels or nuclear.

If we want to have any chance of meeting our climate goals then it seems like nuclear, optionally paired with renewables, is our only option.

No, storage is not cheaper. That’s a fantasy. If it were true they would be rapidly displacing all energy production in the US.

He was saying that renewables + batteries are cheaper than building new nuclear powerplants. This doesn't imply new renewables + batteries would be cheaper than continuing to operate existing power plants (most of which are not nuclear, and all of which have their capital cost sunk so it shouldn't be counted), which would be required for your inference of "rapidly displacing all energy production in the US".

Just 15 years ago the outlook was completely different, and investing in nuclear made way more sense than in unobtanium cheap renewables. Thus it can not explain why people stopped investing in nuclear 70 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com