Hacker News Reader

Comment by MSM | Hacker News Reader

Do you see nuclear as a stopgap between coal and renewable, or do you think that 100% renewable is not going to be possible?

I'm with you as being pretty pro nuclear, but if I'm making a plan to spend $16T, why even bother with half measures; just go straight for the future ideal.

View on HN

Nuclear is the "future ideal". Non intermittent power means no need for complex and costly energy storage. Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated, and scientists have found cost-effective ways of producing it (not quite as cost effective as mining at the moment, but enough to supplant it once the mining capacity is exhausted).

Why bother with energy storage if we can just deliver enough capacity to meet peak demand 24/7 and use the excess energy to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere during non-peak hours? If we don't just want to stop emitting CO2 but actually reverse climate change, then we need truly immense amounts of energy.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

2. https://newatlas.com/nuclear-uranium-seawater-fibers/55033/

Not only that, but modern nuclear technology, especially closed cycle breed reactors of various types, not only produce far less waste and more energy per unit than the old-school enriched uranium reactors, but the waste is safer, and they can be smaller, far more geographically diverse, and cost a fraction of the equivalent for the same output in renewables when infrastructure and maintenance is fully taken into account.

You can replace all current nuclear generation in the US with solar and batteries in less than 2 years, for a lower cost (nuclear generators take at least 10 years to build, and almost always go over budget; some are never finished and abandoned [See Duke in Florida, ratepayers got soaked on a nuclear plant they gave up on]). Your point is spot on.

Nuclear lost (for commercial generation; edge cases like the Arctic circle and marine applications are still valid). It’s time we get over it and build as much solar, wind, and batteries as we can, and get Americans trained to deploy these technologies. Anything else is deck chairs on the Titanic. Drive out fossil fuel use through any means necessary.

Do you mean, replace just the nuclear with solar in 2 years, but keep the rest of the infra (Coal and other source of power generation) as is?

If so, it can only mean exponentially more coal/gas power generation to supply power during peak demand. How does that help?

Coal is going away regardless due to it not being competitive against natural gas, no solar required. I’m saying nuclear should stick around until it’s the last base load left, but not bother building one more nuclear generating unit. Safely extend operating licenses whenever possible.

Batteries and their lower costs will meet us at peaking needs in 3-5 years. There are hundreds of GWs of battery manufacturing capacity coming online over that time frame. Every million Tesla EVs is 10GW of controllable battery storage load on demand (example used only because I’m familiar with their presentation on it, and have seen it’s orchestration demo).

I agree

Natural gas burns fairly clean and will likely be supplanted by as better gridscale storage technologies reach the market (which will happen now that demand is there). Coal is on its way out anyways because it can't compete with natural gas. Coal is more expensive than natural gas and the plants are more expensive to operate and can't react to demand as quickly (you can turn a gas valve faster than you can light coal). Coal will silently vanish as existing plants reach the end of their life and no new ones are built.

You are arguing that we should keep burning (400.000-1M years old technology) instead of using nuclear fission (70 years old tech) because natural gas burns fairly clean?

I feel like all the waste created from those batteries (since wind and solar can't meet peek demand) will ultimately be worse for the environment than any waste created by modern nuclear technology. If you compare the waste created by the two at the scale needed to cover peek demand, nuclear actually creates less.

Yes, batteries can be recycled[1], but from what I've seen, many of the efficiency figures are grossly overstated (or absolute best-case scenarios rarely seen in practice).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling

Nuclear only lost because the government picks winners and losers. Wind and solar are getting subsidies. France manages to produce its electricity at 1/10th the cost as Germany, while also emitting less C02 because of its investment in nuclear power.

American nuclear plants tended to be one-off projects of unique designs. This is drastically less cost efficient than what the French did, design a handful of standardized designs and do serial production.

France heavily subsidizes their nuclear fleet operator (EDF), and continues to own 85% of the company. No one wants to wait decades for ROI on funding a nuclear power plant, and no one (besides governments) will insure them from black swan events.

Everyone gets subsidies, provide them wisely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Fra...

And we're heavily subsidizing wind and solar - it's just as much of a black swan event. The market will always pick the most cost effective power generation: fossil fuels. And for what it's worth, ~70 billion Euros of debt in order to bring a country like France up to ~70-80% nuclear electricity generation is dirt cheap compared to this $16 trillion dollar plan.

If the government is going to pick our power source, then there's little justification not to choose the source that is more cost effective and does not require complex energy storage.

The main reason I see why democrats stay away from nuclear power is twofold. One, nuclear plant operators are typically traditional power companies and thus Republican donors. Democrats don't want to give contracts to the people that fund their political opponents. Second, the cost efficiency of nuclear power in the long term mens that it won't result in as many jobs. The reality the emphasis on the phrase "Green New Deal" is on the latter two words. These plans are promising 10-20 million jobs. These are federal jobs programs with the word "green" prepended to them.

Just wait for the first blackout caused by careless implementation of renewables.

Ehh, so install some battery storage. It’s not like we’re going to reverse course because of mistakes made along the way.

Maybe it depends on the country. USA have enough heavy sun areas to go full. But in France people think it's gonna be just too irregular to be the main generation.

“Europe Could Power The Entire World With Onshore Wind Farms Alone” (2019)

https://www.sciencealert.com/europe-could-power-the-entire-w...

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/id...

I’ve also seen a proposal to transmit electricity from Northern Africa solar generation to Europe, but nothing has come of it.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161129-the-colossal-africa... (2016)

nobody wants to depend on another continent for energy, let's be realistic

The point was there’s enough renewables everywhere. You don’t have to rely on another continent if you don’t want to. No more energy geopolitics.

It’s absolutely silly to keep arguing against renewables. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in an hour to power humanity for a year. The wind blows almost everywhere.

I mentioned something about irregular sunlight being a problem in some countries.

I didn't do the math, but some dudes (officially half pro nuclear) say that you cannot run industries on "maybe sun will power your furnace today".

It’s certainly not sustainable. We can’t handle the radioactive waste we already have unless there are some massive overhauls.

Does nuclear waste really take up that much space? My understanding was that it's negligible for the amount of power it provides.

Handling it takes money and effort no one wants to spend. John Oliver covered the situation a couple years back [0].

[0] https://time.com/4908330/john-oliver-nuclear-waste-last-week...

Why then would people "want to spend" money and effort on handling the waste created by batteries? Let's be fair about the stick we're using to measure people's environmental altruism - it cuts both ways.

It seems like an objective fact that we cannot handle nuclear waste, at least in the US. IMO you have to consider the political situation as part of the whole system. If we as a society cannot deal with having nuclear waste repositories in our backyard, it is irresponsible to create more nuclear waste.

This argument amounts to: "People freak out about nuclear waste. Therefore nuclear waste is bad even if it's not bad."

It does not. Nuclear waste is incredibly easy to safely store. Dig a deep hole, encase the waste in concrete, and bury it in a remote location (or in a location already poisoned by nuclear weapons testing). There are digs in Finland and Yucca mountain that have enough capacity for generations. And if that's still not enough room >98% of waste can be reprocessed. France does this, and their total volume of nuclear waste in only a few cubic meters.

The hypothetical scenarios in which nuclear waste can contaminate humans are borderline hyperbolic. Yes, if society collapses and all records of disposal sites are lost, and if some future civilization digs a mile deep in a location with no natural resources, and if they crack open a nuclear waste casked, and if they manage to do all this without knowledge of radiation then they will be irradiated.

> There are digs in Finland and Yucca mountain that have enough capacity for generations.

All we need is safe transport across large distances? It's not something we're very good at..

No, it's actually quite simple. Encase the waste in concrete, and ship it in a shipping container [1]. The concrete caskets have enough radiation shielding that it is not dangerous to stand near them. Burying the waste is really just a safeguard against potential long-term leakage.

1. These concrete caskets look like this: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w2/images...

Meanwhile,

> An average of 1,390 containers have been lost at sea each year over the past three years, [...]

To be more explicit, that is 1,390 containers per year out of all shipping containers shipped in a given year. That's a fairly low failure rate. And most waste doesn't need to be shipped overseas, just within continents.

And besides, losing one (or even dozens) of these caskets at sea will not result in any noticeable increase in radiation. Multiple nuclear powered summaries have sunk with fuel still in their reactors.

The point remains: nuclear waste is a non-issue, and it is extremely difficult to use it as an objection to nuclear energy in an intellectually honest manner.

You are right, we cannot handle the nuclear waste from coal power plants. As far as nuclear waste from nuclear power plants go we can handle those very well because the volume is significantly less and there are very strict rules how to handle it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com