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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Sure, maybe that happens. Only an irrational culture would squander an obviously great energy source.

But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants.

More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forg...

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I don’t dispute the land constraints, it’s the economics you can’t argue with. Solar and wind at utility scale are below 2 cents/kWh and falling. Nuclear cannot compete with that in any configuration.

You can make roof installs safer (process, hardware), utility installs on the ground are already safe. No one has any place to store nuclear waste, no one will insure it, and no one wants to tie capital up for decades in nuclear generators.

Nuclear, like coal, is a wonderful fuel if you can foist all of the externalities on someone else.

The Solar and Wind kWh production doesn't take into account having to store it, which costs additional money. Nuclear didn't become expensive all on it's own... it became expensive after 60+ years of not building new Nuclear plants in the United States and keeping only a few outdated first-generation plants...

Modern Nuclear plants are very safe, and very cost effective... and can ramp up or down energy production on demand. Plus, they can be built wherever people want... not just where sunlight or wind patterns are suitable.

Solar Roof Panel installation is dangerous because people fall off the roof...yet, that alone has led to more deaths than Nuclear energy production.

The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.

Nuclear is safe, and cost effective. Particularly when considering modern approaches to reactors and spent fuel recycling and storage practices. We, as a nation, are just irrationally afraid of something most people simply don't understand.

> The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat.

I think this is especially impressive considering the losses of the USS Thresher [0] and USS Scorpion [1]. Despite their loss, there was still no significant containment breach.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)

For every MW capacity of wind the states around me put in a MW of nat-gas. The reason obviously being that the wind doesn't blow all the time. As for solar, it only really produces 4 hours a day and a cloudy day can cut production in half or more.

The only serious solution to our energy needs is nuclear. Everything else requires magical thinking.

This just seems like common sense though? There isn't a conflict here that I can see. Use renewables to eliminate some carbon, add natural gas plants (which are cheap and quick to build by comparison) for leveling. Dump coal. Then build nuclear which take a decade or more to replace natural gas plants.

And those natural gas plants produce less emissions than coal.

But it's not squandered, just the opposite. Using nuclear (or any other fossil fuel) when you can use a renewable source seems to me like eating the emergency rations on a regular weekend dinner. It only sounds sensible if one doesn't expect us to be around much longer.

Uranium isn't a fossil fuel, and you're going to run out of land to build solar and wind power collectors on long before you run out of uranium.

Fair enough, I meant "non-renewable". I don't think that comparison makes much sense; available land limits the power, not the energy.

How do you store the energy for later? Lithium batteries? What makes lithium more renewable than uranium?

Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.

> What makes lithium more renewable than uranium?

Lithium doesn't get depleted.

> Even so, on the long run, power and not energy is what matters. By definition, you need a net power surplus to build up energy stores, because you need to generate energy faster than you are consuming it, and power is merely energy over time.

How does this contradict my argument?

> How does this contradict my argument?

You said that available land limits the power, but not the energy, available via renewables. If power is what you actually need rather than energy, that point is irrelevant, isn't it?

Lithium can be extracted from the ocean cost effectively if we had to. It’s effectively limitless.

The same is true of Uranium, we will never run out.

https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

Renewables are better than nuclear, but nuclear is much better than combustion power. We desperately need to drop coal, and it's gonna take a long, long time to reach 100% renewable.

except nuclear doesn’t produce pollution on a scale close to fossil fuels. 90 reactors are producing %20 of our electricity right now without emitting air pollution (although I’m not sure about the energy used to mine/transport uranium)

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