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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in San Diego. I have seen a very encouraging amount of solar deployment on houses there. But there is still a massive potential for more residential solar.

When I visited my brother in Ft. Worth I saw almost no residential solar. I also noticed that there was a massive supply of wind blowing around the neighborhood.

Is it really not feasible to harness solar and wind better? Maybe it requires moving to a more distributed system with suburbia becoming much less dependant on the power companies.

To me you just really need to be sure it's not feasible to do it with solar and wind before you get too serious about reviving the nuclear power industry.

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The urgency of needing to deal with climate change mandates we do both renewables and nuclear.

We have the resources to push hard on both sides.

There's this idea that we should prioritize resources on one or the other. In my opinion, we have plenty of resources such that we'll reach diminishing returns (due to employment/skill/geographical/material bottlenecks) if we applied all of those resources to one or the other such that there's nothing lost by investing in both.

As an example, at very least we can address the siting constraints of nuclear by installing any new reactors at existing sites and maintaining and upgrading existing reactors. Solar and wind can both saturate an area and reach diminishing returns (see: duck curve) and require curtailment such that the resources become much less economic than you think they would be. And curtailment is not a totally bad thing, either.

So absolutely it's feasible to add more solar and wind (even to the point of curtailing a lot of it), but there's no time to waste by not also pursuing nuclear. We have more money than time (and costs of nuclear, if scaled out, are exaggerated).

> We have more money than time (and costs of nuclear, if scaled out, are exaggerated).

Getting the money from the taxpayer or energy consumer is the number one obstacle to all of these things. The costs of nuclear if anything seem to be underestimated: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

The cost of nuclear is maximized when we're speaking of one site. That's why I mentioned scale out of nuclear. You're not going to get a beneficial learning curve unless you're building and siting lots of power plants with the same contractor(s).

Even with inflated costs, however, the extremely high latitude of the UK and its need for wintertime heat mean that the amount of renewable curtailment needed to ensure sufficient carbonfree wintertime energy make nuclear still cost competitive in a carbonfree scenario.

Generally speaking, no halfway competent investment in carbonfree energy should be opposed, IMHO. We don't have time to fight such internal battles when we're fighting anthropogenic climate change.

I think you have the onus of responsibility backwards. Nuclear power's ability to achieve the amount and type of energy production appropriate for today's energy usage patterns is proven.

We should be determining the feasibility of scaling solar and wind energy production, creating enough multi-scale storage, and long distance load balancing, and demand shaping before winding down nuclear.

I think it's obvious that we need to do both. Nuclear plants have a lifespan of ~50 years. Reaching and sustaining zero carbon lifestyle isn't a one time occurrence, it'll be an on-going journey for centuries. We'll have plenty of opportunities later to drawdown nuclear.

Given the lead time required to bring new nuclear generation capacity online, it probably makes more sense the other way around: before you get too serious about letting the nuclear power industry die, you just really need to be sure it's feasible to replace it with solar and wind.

(I don't love that nuclear reactors, as opposed to the turbines that generate electricity from the steam they produce, should be in the hands of industry at all; having a profit motive involved in such a safety-critical set of processes is a recipe for disaster. Given a choice between for-profit nuclear reactors and not-for-profit ones, I'll take the second every time. But given the criticality of reliable baseload supply to so many of the processes that support the style of societies on which we've grown so dependent, if we have to choose between for-profit reactors, with all the attendant problems, and no reactors at all - we may very well still be better off with the former than the latter.)

I'd like to point out that nuclear generates power via steam that spins a turbine. It's how you create the steam that's different.

As far as for profit reactors vs. non-profit, do you have any examples of this? The ones I'm aware of (in the U.S.) are utility owned but tightly regulated.

That’s the steam to which I’m referring, yes. The best example I have of nonprofit reactor operation, and the safety culture which such a paradigm can support, is the US Navy; while nuclear-powered submarines have been lost on two occasions, neither loss resulted from a reactor accident, and indeed the US Navy has never had a reactor accident. [1] I’m not the first to suggest this model could be productively applied to civilian power generation; I remain uncertain why it seems so uncommon for other “Atomkraft? Ja, bitte!” folks to do so.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun...

> having a profit motive involved in such a safety-critical set of processes is a recipe for disaster

The empirical evidence of Chernobyl is a small sample, but points in the opposite direction.

Chernobyl had a different perverse incentive, in that perceived failure to perform under a command economy such as that of the Soviet Union could be and often was individually punishable.

The simple answer is that San Diego has a great amount of Sun exposure, not every state does.

Also, you may be on to something with smaller distributions of power generation, but know that a large amount of solar fields are owned by utilities and this may be happening already to some degree.

Ft Worth is fed by a massive supply of cheap wind energy from West Texas as well as natural gas and coal plants. Roof top solar isn't that viable here. Not many people want a $20-30k installation on top of a $200-400k house and the energy prices just aren't high enough to substantiate it.

Mostly right. Thought installation is more like $10-20K these days.

What's the insurance cost in Ft. Worth?

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/fort-wort...

My relatives have had to replace their roof twice in the last 15 years. What's the hail-proof solar cost?

I've been a Fort Worth resident for nearly 4 years.

Anecdotal, but my old neighborhood (far south - near Crowley) had tons of residential solar (relatively speaking - probably 1/6 of the homes). It was a new development with no mature trees. TXU actually has a pretty attractive [residential solar program](https://www.txu.com/savings-solutions/renewable-energy/solar...) that lots of my neighbors took advantage of.

I've since bought a house built in the 60s. My new neighborhood (Ridglea) has lots of mature trees. There is no way solar would work here. My roof only gets sunlight for a couple of hours a day.

A big problem is solar installations aren't seen as equity items in homes through Texas and indeed the southeast US the same way they are on the west coast. I'm not sure why this paradigm exists though, considering these homes come with essentially free energy utility for the lifetime of the panels. You'd think that would be a major selling point, but it isn't.

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