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Comment by jdhn | Hacker News Reader

While I'm pro nuclear power, at what point do we say that nuclear isn't the way to go? The cost of solar panels and batteries are declining every year, and you don't have to deal with the terrible stigma that nuclear power has. Sure, new reactors are "zero emission", but will people actually want them to be built?

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I want nuclear power because I want humanity to be a space-faring civilization, and we can't do that with just solar panels and wind farms.

Why maintain the status quo with solar and wind when we can go far beyond it with nuclear?

This is correct. If we were to invest in a moonshot project for the future, my choice would be nuclear fusion.

Build those too!

Why wouldn't we build the more efficient one in terms of resources?

Solar and wind are great, but they don't provide continuous power. We need them, and nuclear.

We don't need continuous power. We need peaking power.

Nuclear provides guaranteed minimum power production, which is what you actually want. You also want a more diversified system than just eg solar and wind.

It's not acceptable to depend on renewables like solar and wind to try to fill that minimum guaranteed role. They are low on the guaranteed scale, whereas nuclear is high on the guaranteed scale. Grid scale batteries do not fill that role either, not under any scenario short of magic batteries that self-fill perpetually.

Paying the added cost for nuclear at 20-30% of total national energy production, is a reasonable price to pay for higher diversification and higher guaranteed minimum energy production.

We should also boost the grid and build nuclear in low-risk weather locations and distribute from there to everywhere else. Climate change is going to hammer the coasts, right? Perhaps a super hurricane knocks out solar and wind across multiple states around Florida. We bring the lines back up and immediately have nuclear power flowing in from weather-safe foreign states to re-start everything with (those out of state nuclear plants are already handling 20-30% of Florida's power in this concept; if rebalanced properly, they could handle 50-60%+ of all the now-lower power demands in the early re-start phase after such an emergency).

You can get high-concentration of power output capability in a weather-safe area with nuclear, in this model, which solar and wind can't even remotely come close to competing with.

> Nuclear provides guaranteed minimum power production, which is what you actually want.

No, you want power production that meets demand, aka peakers.

Baseline power is only interesting when it's cheaper than peak power.

Your point about weather protection is a good one. Which is best handled through over capacity and interconnection IMO.

The Sun is always shining somewhere on Earth. We have the luxury of a nuclear furnace about ~92 million miles away and not going anywhere. Build a Ultra-High-Voltage World Electric Grid as Bucky Fuller described 40+ years ago and we'll make better use of it as a continuous power source.

Another person who dismisses or is unaware of the existence of grid scale batteries.

Nuclear could help but it is so centralized it really puts all control in the hands of big corporate and government types, with cost overruns and bankruptcies funded by ratepayers and taxpayers. “Too cheap to meter” was a lie yet the same lie continues to be recycled when talking about the next promised generation. No thank you. I’ll take local control, local and individual ownership, and individual freedom and self determination thank you very much.

Build grid scale batteries too!

Yes! And when you talk about the widely promoted supposed shortcomings of solar/wind/etc., point out that there are good solutions!

When there is a cheaper and cleaner alternative to base load power generation

Big construction corporations and bought-and-paid-for politicians will continue to love nuclear.

I love nuclear power, I used to be a 'nuke' in the Navy, but it's not feasible at today's tech level. There's too great a risk of nuclear accident right now, even if it's very uncommon (risk = severity x probability, if severity is 10/10 then any probability is too high, IMO). Someday, if the financials are right (if profit margins are good enough), or if we need it more than ever (if profit margins don't matter), someone will come up with a guaranteed safe and reliable reactor design, much like Google invented a much better search algorithm or Uber came up with a way to overcome the taxi coalition (I don't support Uber or Google today, but their ideas were revolutionary). Once that 'revolutionary' new nuclear tech comes, if it does, then I'll back it. Today's reactor designs aren't proven, not tested, and cost too much, so for now I will support renewable energy, like geothermal, solar, wind, etc, combined with storage like batteries, dams, gravity potential energy solutions, etc.

They already have lots of passively safe designs, but I don't need to tell you the difference between a real reactor and a designed reactor. With the economics of the power industry I doubt a lot of work will go into IFR commercialization.

Yea, that's what I'm saying, there's no financially viable solutions, and someday if we can make one, or if we stop caring about the cost for some reason, then it'll happen. Right now, the problem is that the "safe" designs aren't tested well and they're generally not commercially viable due to cost.

What do you mean by severity being 10/10? The issues we had in recent times were fairly mild. As long as they're not hidden and acted on quickly, we seem to cope well. Sure, people die, but it seems like severity 10 only because it all happens in one go. Take the deaths from air pollution, resources transport, mining, production, etc. involved in coal/gas/solar/wind, and put them in one day at the same rate as we had reactor failures - that would seem even more "not feasible".

You still don't understand that it's not financially feasible, for many reasons. I love nuclear, I fucking operated nuclear plants, but until we have passively safe designs that are tested and proven, it's not an option. You're totally correct on the facts, but no one is willing to fund it, that's the fact that killed nuclear.

I was not questioning the financial part. Just the severity of issues.

The problem is that there's tons of deaths from accidents that we can't quantify due to cancer or the like. If we expanded nuclear, who's to say the deaths from mining nuclear materials, cancer, etc wouldn't outstrip those of wind, solar, etc.? Severity and probability are hard to quantify, and with the financial argument, I'm kinda saying that it doesn't matter anyways because no one will fund one of the most expensive forms of energy that has high enough risk profiles that you cannot even insure it in many places.

More people have died from mining accidents than nuclear accidents.

You don't need to sell me on nuclear, I was a nuclear electrician's mate, I know it works, it's just not cost effective for the safe designs.

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