Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

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I was "pro-nuclear" from like the 90's until 2017. Every year since then it has made less and less sense. The cost of wind, solar, and batteries has plummeted, and the curves continue to bend in the right direction. The cost of nuclear has "increased" in that the last several projects have been total failures and the companies that build them have gone bankrupt. The curve points in the wrong direction.

The kind of massive overhaul/re-de-regulation it would take to bring back a nuclear manufacturing capability and functioning market in america today would be much much harder than simply running HVDC between the grids and building twice as much wind.

It just doesn't pencil out anymore. It used to. But even optimistically going forward I don't see it. The curves have crossed.

edit: here's a source for all the downvoters https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

  Nuclear: $118 - $192
  Solar + 4hr: $102 - $139
  Wind:  $28 - $54

You can literally build 3x as much wind and have it cost about the same as nuclear.

Not to mention the capital costs of building a nuclear plant far excede renewable new-builds. Why spend 20 billion and deal with the costs/risk associated with 50-year financing when you could spend a few tens of millions and throw up a few smaller renewable builds where they're needed and start seeing returns on invetment in 2-3 years rather than 15.

The cost of building a plant with old technology is high. That's because it's been over-regulated and because it's old tech.

Newer plant designs will be cheaper to build and simpler. They will need to be regulated differently as a matter of course because they're fundamentally different designs.

What you're saying here is that building a 1960s nuclear power plant design with modern regulation is expensive, which is true, but that's like saying that driving a 1955 Ford Thunderbird is expensive when compared to a Tesla S. That's true, but you're comparing apples and rocks, here.

Which newer plants? I'm still paying for the cost over-runs at Vogtle here in Georgia which is a 'modern' plant. Granted, Westinghouse went bankrupt but Wind/Solar builds don't have the same risks concentrated in a single manufacturer.

Sure, we have some research reactors which use (the now meme'd by armchair scientists) thorium reactors but we need power today, not in 2035. Why pour billions into unproven technology when we have proven technology that gets cheaper every year. Additionally, Lazard just put out their LCOE report for 2019 and for the first time new-build unsubsidzed wind can be cheaper than the marginal costs of a fully paid-off nuclear plant.

There are designs that are new or newer that have only been implemented at small scale, or in a single test instance.

Molten salt reactors, traveling wave designs, even thorium energy amplifiers.

You're right, though, we need new reactors now, which is why we're looking toward the designs already tested.

It's true that no significant research has been done for decades and no new designs approved for commercial use, but that's something that can be changed, and changed quickly.

In any case, we don't have a choice... it's renewables+nuclear or renewables+a cut in standard of living for the world... or else climate change we can't survive.

Again... we're not substituting nuclear for renewables. That wouldn't work any more than substituting renewables for nuclear. Neither one is enough on its own.

It sounds like you need to do more research.

It's not a matter of what power is cheapest, it's a matter of what serves the needs of the population without generating fuel for climate change.

Renewables aren't enough, period, because of their variable nature, and "running HVDC between the grids" won't fix it. It's not that simple.

Says you. The professionals disagree:

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmi...

  Studies of existing systems and projects under development
  demonstrate that HVDC can be effective in mitigating these
  impacts [intermittancy] on non‐dispatchable generation.

They can aid in mitigation of present limitations, IE they can move some power from areas with renewable energy available to areas without it. Even that paper states they're only part of the strategy, however.

There is a huge difference between mitigating the present uneven implementation of "non dispatchable" renewables and in providing sufficient capacity and stability to power literally everything in the world from renewables by shipping power from point A to point B using any technology at all.

The problem is that whether you take renewables in individual installations or in aggregate over a region they're still variable sources of power. The storage capacity to turn renewables into 24/7 power sources at a scale large enough to supply all needs doesn't exist.

Using small scale energy storage widely would require a completely different power grid structure that doesn't exist yet.

Given the needs of our civilization and the prerequisites that we don't have time to build out a power grid centered around distributed energy generation and storage before irreversible climate damage happens, our options are limited.

Renewables aren't enough on their own, simply because they aren't constant.

I'm coming around to a similar viewpoint. But I'd say it it's looking bad for building new nuclear power plants, we certainly want to try to keep running our existing nuclear plants until we get rid of all of our base load fossil fuel power plants.

What is the cost of storage for a week's worth of power for a city the size of New York?

lol a week

How much solar power do you get when a blizzard rolls through?

Or how about Miami when a slow moving tropical storm shuts down wind and blocks solar for a few days? You do know wind turbines get shut down when the wind is too high, right?

Yes a week. More even. Just look at the data on Germany's renewable production last month and you'll see are multiple multi day long periods of little production:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&yea...

Now consider seasonal differences and you're going to need even more to compensate.

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