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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

Conservationists need to really make peace with the fact that the only way out of climate change involves building a very, very strong nuclear energy portfolio. This is difficult for people because it requires engaging in politics because these things are only as safe as they are well maintained. But actually, we do a surprisingly good job in America at keeping our nuclear plants running rather well, and we should be investing in many, many more.

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> Conservationists need to [...]

Nuclear boosters need to start showing numbers proving this point instead of taking potshots on HN. Nuclear needs to be worthwhile on a balance sheet before anyone is going to take it seriously. Even now, it's cheaper to build out wind and solar. And the new technologies are rapidly getting cheaper.

Show numbers.

Wind and solar, no matter how cheap, are never going to be reliable sources of baseline power. They fluctuate, and something needs to keep producing power when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.

Can't you build batteries to account for fluctuations?

"Baseline power" isn't all that useful. What we need to complement renewables is a reliable source of dispatchable power that can be turned on and off, preferably quickly. Nuclear ain't it. While it's possible to somewhat increase or decrease the output of a nuclear power plant, it's slow, operationally complex, and increases the already formidable costs of nuclear power. It's also not terribly common in the US due to licensing restrictions.

The assumption that baseline power is necessary seem like an unwarranted assumption to me, an idea that is unquestioned because that's the way things are done now. Maybe adequate provisioning of sufficiently uncorrelated, variable power sources combined with some storage is enough to replace all baseline and peak power sources. Maybe this can be done with less expense than nuclear + peaker plants. I haven't seen any nuclear proponents defend the necessity of the baseline power concept with an actual analysis showing that alternatives can't work though.

We know that having a fairly constant source of baseline power works because that is what we are currently doing. The onus to prove that some combination of wind solar and batteries costs less and will deliver sufficient power across all use cases should be on the wind / solar advocates. We know nuclear plants work because they're currently in use all over the world.

Why demand numbers from others when you can't provide any yourself?

Adding nuclear to wind/solar doesn't eliminate the need for peaker plants or batteries because nuclear can only provide baseline power.

These technologies aren’t exclusive. You need wind, solar, and nuclear for a carbon-free replacement for our grid.

Nat gas is still one of the “cheapest” forms of energy, but you wouldn’t hold that against carbon-free alternatives right?

And once more, that "and" is just an assertion on your part. It needs analysis to be true.

Compare: "For a balanced diet, you need grains, fruits, and beluga caviar." That's insane, because you're not looking at the whole space of solutions.

Again, find a balance sheet where someone tallies up cost per megawatt-hour of various technologies given existing tradeoffs. This stuff has been done. Nuclear doesn't even remotely come close, which is why the industry is trying to sneak around with legislation and steal government dollars that should be going to more effective solutions instead.

Look at the cost of energy in France where 75% of energy is produced from nuclear, it is 26% lower than the EU average. Everyone agrees it is much safer to pursue zero carbon solutions in the long term. If carbon emission goals are going to ever be met nuclear will be a big part of it because it is the only replacement to coal/gas that can fill the same role without restructuring infrastructure. Solar/wind do not fill the same role, their lower price reflects the uncertainty of production and can only reduce demand for nuclear to some.

I absolutely guarantee you that number you're showing is the cost to operate the reactors, not to build them. We're talking about building new reactors, not shutting any down.

Oh I see. In that respect there is hope that mass produced small modular reactors would bring down mfg cost by increasing volume. I don't have numbers though.

Solar produces something like 90% of all the power it will generate in just 4 hours per day. Wind is intermittent and hard to predict. I live in one of the biggest per capita wind power states in the US, and on some days the nat-gas/coal plants are taking almost the entire load. If we relied only upon renewables, we'd either have people dying due to the brownouts or dying because they can't afford electricity.

> If we relied only upon renewables

Strawman. No one is talking about "relying only" on wind/solar. The point is that if you have $100M to spend on power and infrastructure, and have the choice of one medium scale reactor that will come online around 2027 or about 4x that capacity in coastal wind that can be operational next year (and yes, the price delta really is about that big), and you actually care about climate and not an argument on HN, you build out the cheaper option because at the end of the day that's going to make a bigger difference.

If at the end of the process we're trying to decomission the last 10% of legacy gas plants and need carbon-free options for peaking and buffering, sure, we can talk about building some expensive reactors.

Here, Bill Gates has done the math: https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=520

TLDW: Batteries are several orders of magnitude too expensive to solve the reliability problem or make things like steel and concrete.

There are really innumerable problems with using solar or wind (or even hydro, for these reasons) to serve a society that requires stable power generation. And we haven't even gotten to the environment impact of producing, and then throwing out!, battery tech at scale.

I am a conservationist! I hang out in and around these communities and I am disheartened to see my comrades being anti-science and often straight up luddites.

Are you really trying to say that it will be cheaper by kwh to use solar / wind than nuclear? This is easily disprovable by simple googling.

Here's a giant study that shows that by 2050 you could cover 1/3rd the US total energy requirements using JUST nuclear in 169 square miles. The same with solar would require 1500-4250 square miles. Do you think this is reasonable? What about the environmental impact and labor costs of decentralized generation and maintenance of literally thousands of miles of solar panel.

Here's an MIT study on how we basically cant solve our immediate problems without a strong investment in nuclear: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-mit-energy-future-nuclear.html

The "numbers" on this, as you ask for, are really well covered. We need to have a diverse energy portfolio of renewables: no one worth listening to will contradict this but the simple fact is that by all accounts you can't generate the required amount of energy in the next 10-20 years without nuclear. Nor should we!

Apparently i forgot to link the first study i referenced: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi...

Nuclear fanboys (and I'm one) need to make peace with the fact that we've regulated them out of existence. Building a new nuclear plant takes more time, costs more per MWh, and involves more risk than current solar + batteries. I think nuclear had great potential, and if we'd been innovating on it for the last 70 years like we have in other fields it would be competitive. But we didn't and it's not, and it's probably late to change the momentum on that. Batteries are now advancing rapidly and I expect the future to be solar and wind with energy storage as the bulk of our energy production.

Can you link me to some support of the claim about batteries? I'm always depressed with what i perceive as total stagnation on that front. Last i checked the way they store power grid-scale electricity is literally to pump water up hill then let it back down when they need it. That's how bad our battery tech is.

Some recent utility scale battery project news:

"NV Energy Announces ‘Hulkingly Big’ Solar-Plus-Storage Procurement"

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nv-energy-signs...

"‘Cheaper Than a Peaker’: NextEra Inks Massive Wind+Solar+Storage Deal in Oklahoma"

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nextera-inks-ev...

"GlidePath Took on Storage in Texas. Now It Wants to Add Batteries to Wind"

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-took-...

This is what I'd describe as a 'narrowly rational view'. All other things being equal, x leads to y. In this case - political, economic and social conditions remaining in roughly the same range as they have since the post war period. This is quite frankly a wildly unsupported assumption - when compared to the span of human history, or even taking the 20th century into account (rather than merely the post war period). The idea that we should build devices which will become deadly (and indeed irreparable) under conditions of economic collapse, pandemic, conventional, let alone nuclear conflict, is utterly irrational. Over a long enough time line, all else is never equal. In the case of human culture and civilisation, that time line - i.e.: the duration of a stable society, let alone a stable post industrial society - isn't particularly long at all. And we have no good reason to assume that our current high volatile, tightly couple global economic system and political order will fare any better.

And lets say you believe that we are for whatever reason living in some kind of stable 'end of history' period; need I remind anyone that California is home to the San Andreas Fault, which is long overdue to produce the so called 'big one' >7.0 mega quake.

Nuclear power plants do not "become deadly (and indeed irreparable) under conditions of economic collapse etc" outside of comic books.

The power source that might apply to is hydro electric dams. Those dams won't stand forever without active maintenance, and the flood wave can sweep away entire cities.

Indeed. The best example is Banqiao Dam failure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Its failure in 1975 caused as many as 230,000 deaths. The death toll of this disaster was considered a state secret until 2005 when it was declassified.[4] According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province[13] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people.

It's the example nuclear proponents always cite, but it's a terrible example. Banqiao Dam was a dual-purpose dam, for downstream flood control as well as power, and the immediate cause of its failure was that they didn't allow enough water out for fear of downstream flooding. Its flood control role was apparently so important that the government had to rebuild it despite the previous failure and its death toll. Also, I don't think it'd even be possible to build a nuclear power plant with the level of technology at which Banqaio Dam was constructed; it was an early-50s dam made of clay, back when the two nuclear powers were just starting their first experiments with nuclear generation. That's probably a good thing too, given the quality of engineering involved.

The idea we have some kind of choice between disasters like the Banqaio Dam one and nuclear power seems like a false one on every level.

The Banqiao dam is by far the most catastrophic failure, but there are many other examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

>The idea we have some kind of choice between disasters like the Banqaio Dam one and nuclear power seems like a false one on every level.

That is broadly the choice though.

> these things are only as safe as they are well maintained

If safety is the main concern that people have, we could also use a design like the Candu reactor that doesn't need enriched fuel sources.

Of course, the other environmental concern is storing spent fuel. But, that seems like an acceptable problem to manage considering the impact of climate change itself.

I mean, we're currently generating 37.1 billion tons per year of toxic waste[0] from our fossil fuel plants which is presently threatening life on Earth.

[0] It's linguistically odd that CO2 is both "toxic" and a "waste product" but not really considered "toxic waste".

We absolutely need nuclear energy. 1) Nuclear is the safest form of energy generation (measured in death/per mwatt) 2) Once operational it is always on and will substitute for solar/wind when those are unavailable 3) Energy conservation long term is not an option - quality of life correlates with amount of energy consumed 4) imagine, what if, energy were so cheap that desalination is profitable in CA.

Someone pointed out recently that nuclear is only as safe as its operator - the Us Navy has never had a reactor accident for instance.

Still the dangers are Chernobyl and Fukushima - uninhabitable areas where no one can go for generations.

Turns out, Chernobyl is pretty safe right now. Could be cleaned up with a Troop of Scouts with trash bags. Its the FUD surrounding 'nuclear' that keeps people out.

Have you watched the show? The effort that was made to clear that are up was above and beyond what most people would consider reasonable.

Not the reactor; the town?

The ground being removed, the mass extermination of animals (although people have said its exaggerated in the show). Supposedly the cleanup was immensely expensive

that is not true. read about thorium reactor scenario with malicious operator - someone has an excellent Quora answer on this

Really? I actually grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work on the plant (e.g. have been going there e every day for more than 30 years)

Don’t believe everything you see on HBO shows. And no, radiation isn’t contagious and can’t (and did not) bring down the helicopter

Are you saying te use of thousands of people to clean up that region is an invention?

We are currently having some parliamentary inquiries in Australia to start a nuclear program. I have always been against talk of nuclear on two main grounds [0,1] (but against decommissioning existing plants).

However a local economist has argued (and costed) for a way to make nuclear viable in this country. Tldr: a carbon price.

https://johnquiggin.com/2019/08/23/what-price-nuclear-power/

[0] Time/Cost (in aus, this means 30yrs+ & tens of billions). Though in CA, this may be considerably less, it is unlikely to be as cheap short term as renewables or gas.

[1] All the mines and dumping grounds in oz are in the middle of sensitive habitats or traditional owners lands.

> But actually, we do a surprisingly good job in America at keeping our nuclear plants running rather well, and we should be investing in many, many more.

No we don't.

The federal government didn't even mandate earthquake impacts for nuclear plants until 'after' the disasters in Japan.

Nevada is still used as a dumping site that is overfilled with leaking nuclear waste. The Republican senator put a hold on Trump nominees until the DOE promised to eventually ship out some nuclear waste a few years after they illegally shipped the waste in.

I found out the former after a PG&E outreach at my university that California was alone in most states over mandates on seismic fault planning for the nuclear industry. PG&E was trying to save the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. I felt that was a very pathetic overview of US regulatory framework. The latter was recently in the news (2 months ago?).

> Conservationists need to really make peace with the fact that the only way out of climate change involves building a very, very strong nuclear energy portfolio.

Disagree, your opinion is 10 years out of date from the facts.

Solar and wind prices have collapsed well below nuclear and coal.

Battery tech is advancing to be competitive towards baseload costs. Samsung plans to ship a graphene battery in cell phones. Makes me very curious towards how graphene can be used for battery plants.

Renewables are already competitive in Australia. Despite lots of sun and coal baseload costs in Australia are very high due to industry and government corruption.

https://www.inverse.com/article/51515-tesla-s-battery-has-al...

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