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Comment by kuzehanka | Hacker News Reader

> It's always about cost

As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant.

During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done.

Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource spent or per unit climate change impact, and that fact will increasingly override dollar costs or public perception as the the climate gets increasingly hostile.

Until the crisis becomes apparent, I am sure nuclear will continue to be a mostly ignored option across europe and the west while political forces dominate the issue. China on the other hand isn't bothered by public sentiment[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-lik...

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That isn't true about war and it certainly isn't true about public utilities. People went to jail all the time for overcharging the government during times of war. Money is a way to measure value and it always matters.

As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.

One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.

just claiming that without any numbers and without scenarios to back it up will convince no one.

You'll need to answer real practical questions like the UK currently faces: who will build the proposed reactors and who will pay how much for it. It's not like this is an easy question, just check the news the UK from the past few years, with Hitachi and Toshiba giving up.

France's state owned nuclear industry builds another plant in the UK - with a proposed cost of 20bn pounds... The decision for this reactor took almost ten years.

the energy density would be a factor if we had any actual space issues. But the area needed for solar and wind is not what is the problem. I agree with you that it is an emergency where not enough action is taken, but even then why not go for 100% Renewables (with Battery, Power-To-Gas, Power-To-Liquid etc. as storage) when that is cheaper than nuclear.

Three reasons.

1: It's not actually cheaper than nuclear. The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China). Discounting this cost makes nuclear the dominant option. Factoring for lifecycle costs pushes it much further ahead. Fun fact: there is currently no way to recycle photovoltaics whose useful lifespan is 20 years.

2: Use of landmass. Deploying wind or solar consumes landmass which must be cleared of flora/fauna. The landmass required to power a nation via these means is not at all negligible. This is contrary to managing climate change for obvious reasons.

Geothermal power stands as an exception here and should absolutely be deployed over nuclear where permissible.

3: Excess capacity. The climate debate is converging on the fact that we are past the point of no return and we need to actively sequester carbon out of the atmosphere to get back to a healthy scenario. Ignoring the specifics, this basically means that we need to 'un-spend' all the energy that we have consumed over the last 50 years via fossil fuels. While still meeting the growing energy demands of civilisaion. We need to be producing a huge excess of energy for this strategy to be viable.

Renewables are nice, but pragmatically they are not nearly enough to dig us out of the hole where we have found ourselves.

| The majority of the cost associated with nuclear is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China).

An engineer in Shanghai costs $20K/year. You can't point to the cost of nuclear in China and pretend it will reflect the cost in the west.

> is regulatory compliance and political rather than practical in nature (see: China)

Any opposition to the the energy policy in China will see themselves in a labor camp. That's a cheap way to deal with it.

If you think that nuclear is cheaper in China than in the West, then part of the reason is that it has other hidden costs.

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