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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Planning a nuclear plant, getting the necessary permits, fighting challenges to those permits from NIMBYs etc takes at least a decade. Constructing a nuclear plant takes another decade. So the earliest expected benefit would be in 2040. Also nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build. On that time frame and with those capital expenses basically any other solution would work just as well with much less opposition.

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Well yeah but the problem is that since energy production needs to be constant, the only real alternative to nuclear is coal,gas or hydro. Nuclear and hydro is the only option that doesn't lead to extinction due to global warming

- Gas is already a big improvement over coal, so it's not all that bad as an intermediate solution

- If we count hydro as an option we also have to include wind with pumped hydro storage (which comes with the same problems as hydro: geographic requirements and ecosystem disruption).

- Wind/Solar with Li-Io storage is technically a possibility and likely will become cost effective within 20 years.

- Within 20 years better grid-scale storage for use with wind/solar might become widely deployed, like molten salt. Especially if we would be willing to spend equal amounts of capital as would be required for deploying nuclear

- Energy consumption could be much more closely coupled to solar/wind availability by changing electricity prices from a fixed price to a dynamic price coupled to real spot prices. We already shift electricity use into the night by charging industrial consumers less for off-peak use, the same strategy can be used to shift consumption anywhere to any other time of day.

Intermittent power sources can be combined with storage and peaker plants to cover base load. Gas plants make nice peakers, and while not ideal, they are certainly superior to coal (less pollution, 40% less CO2) and allow the eventual transition to power-to-gas solutions.

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