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Comment by mbruce | Hacker News Reader

That is a shockingly biased and simplistic comparison. Sort of like deciding on the answer and picking a few “facts” to support it.

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So what is missing/wrong in the article?

(btw, I submitted not because I agree with it – I am not knowledgeable enough on the matter – but because I thought HN could add some interesting comment on it)

Even if we presume all points are true, they fail to bring up any of the positive points of nuclear power and they don't have anything to compare it to. How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm?

A proper comparison needs to take a look at positive and negative of all possible solutions. For example that "clean" hydropower has massive consequences for the nearby environment. Or that we cannot be 100% reliant on wind and solar power, since they are unreliable (there might not be any wind for example). Which means we need to have other alternatives (hint: not use coal as a fallback!).

> How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm?

From the article: "Utility-scale wind and solar farms, on the other hand, take on average only 2 to 5 years, from the planning phase to operation. Rooftop solar PV projects are down to only a 6-month timeline"

That's hardly equivalent.

1. Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation

I guess we should stop doing everything that takes long based on this. How do you define long? Compare to what?

2. Cost

Nuclear energy is the cheapest source of energy once you take into consideration all the aspects of an energy grid. This is why Germany is buying energy from France instead of building renewables only.

3. Weapons Proliferation Risk

Most nuclear power plants do not consume or produce plutonium.

4. Meltdown Risk

Passive safety systems are the norm. The safety requirement to any new nuclear power plant is to have a potentially life threatening accident with 10^-6 probability. Meltdown is not a realistic scenario of non-Chernobyl type power plants (90% of power plants).

5. Mining Lung Cancer Risk

So does mining coal. We can make mining much more safe.

6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution

I guess producing a wing mill does not need to use any energy and the production does not have the same impact as producing a nuclear power plant. Not sure if the author understand that this applies to anything produced. In fact producing renewable power plants probably produces much more CO2 than a nuclear power plant because of energy density. He fails to mention that.

7. Waste Risk

This is actually a solved issue, there are special nuclear power plants that sole purpose is to "burn away" nuclear waste by producing elements with less half time.

"To recap, new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh (between 2.3 to 7.4 times depending upon location and integration issues)."

This is extremely stupid observation. Leaving out crucial facts (like having base and peak power plants) and comparing apples to oranges.

It is actually full of lies. Cost as the problem of nuclear energy? 1 KWH produced by nuclear power is roughly 3-4 times cheaper than produced by renewables. This is excluding the impact of renewables on the grid. Weapons Proliferation Risk??? Most of the nuclear power plants do not use or produce plutonium at all. Nuclear weapons are produced in very specific facilities that have a huge energy consumption. This article is a classical propaganda to avoid the unavoidable use nuclear power for clear energy.

Humanity needs these energy sources that we can use in space and on Earth to have a relatively small plant that produces a lot of energy without CO2. Yes there are challenges but we did not stop using fire because it produces smoke. We made burning safe over the last 400.000 years now we should make nuclear energy safe.

In the UK the contract for hinkley c nuclear station was signed at something like £90/GWh, which everyone seems unhappy with (CFO of edf resigned saying it would bankrupt them, while opponents are saying it's too expensive).

Meanwhile we have new offshore wind going in at £50/GWh

If cost of nuclear isn't a problem can you contextualize those figures? Is it a fair comparison, net of subsidies etc? I'd like to know.

You cannot talk about energy like that. What is the chance that 1 GWH is going to be produced? With a nuclear power plant you can have guaranteed energy, with renewables there is a chance that you get energy. You continously need to balance consumption and production. You can only control non-renewables. This is why building wind farms require the same amount of production is built using gas turbines for the worst case scenario. The £50/GWh vs £90/GWh is for the happy path best case scenario. I hope it makes sense.

is the £50 not based on annual average days with sufficient wind to generate (which I presume has fairly low uncertainty, though if it's not generating when you want then either storage or transport is needed)

update: the £50/MWh and £90/MWh are both commercial bids that will have factored in probability of generation to the best of the bidders ability. the companies making them will fail if they go hugely wrong. (though in the nuclear case taxpayer might be left with cleanup)

You are correct that the non-constant nature of wind means you need to cost in some storage, or transport via the grid (generally it'll be windy someplace or other). But probability of generation is not the issue.

Correction: parent post quotes £/MWh not £/GWh :)

The article provides a source for the estimation and you don't. And the reasoning why the source is underestimating the true costs sounds plausible to me. Given the harm meltdowns can cause, why is there no mandatory insurance?

The article provides sources to support his claims and leaving out 60% of the whole picture.

Key questions:

- what is providing base load coverage?

- what happens when it is cloudy or the wind does not blow?

- what do we use to balance out consumption and production?

- where does this cost counts towards?

- how much land do we need to cover with solar and wind to produce enough energy for the whole country?

- what happens in a blackout situation?

I can go on and on. This article is a super simplistic one sided propaganda piece to make people feel great about renewables.

Base load is an outdated concept that will become less and less relevant. Nuclear energy is unsuitable as a complement to renewable energy because it takes on the order of days to start or shut down a nuclear power plant. The key requirement is dispatchable generation, which in the short term means natural gas, and in the long term various forms of energy storage.

Nuclear is acceptable as a stop-gap technology until generation is fully switched to renewables, but its days are numbered.

What scientific breakthrough made it outadated? You do not require to have a base load production?

Nuclear is the only energy type that works in space. If humanity wants to go to the stars instead of going on Facebook we need that technology. Ironically solar power is actually collecting energy produced by nuclear fusion.

But what does "safe" really mean? Systems fail in unexpected ways; Chernobyl was operated in an improper way, which feels somehow "unfair" wrt risk assessment, but so it goes. Nassim Taleb suggests that we should minimize the maximum possible damage instead of trying to make precise risk assessments; looking at things this way, nuclear energy does not seem a very wise bet, because of the consequences of the worst-case scenarios. Burning things is not harmless either, but has a different risk profile.

The risk profile of climate change is sadly getting more and more clear.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

> Estimates of reduced life expectancy as a result of radiation released are highly uncertain and vary from 4,000 people in a United Nations study up to 200,000 in a Greenpeace study.

Worst hydro disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

> According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. [...] Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people.[...]

Best candidate for next hydro disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam (Apparently, it's stable now, but ...)

> In February 2016, the United States Embassy in Iraq warned of a "serious and unprecedented" danger of the dam collapsing and suggested that plans for evacuation should be made, as the cities Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, and Baghdad could be at risk in the event of collapse, and that up to 1.5 million people could be killed due to the ensuing flash floods.[...]

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