Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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I agree about not shutting down nuclear but I also disagree about it being impossible without it (see: https://model.energy/ ) as well as disagree about "very few climate change activists support it."

It's supported by the official 2020 Democratic Party platform: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...

Renewables (as well as storage) have reduced in cost (and continue to reduce in cost) much faster than has been expected by groups like the EIA.gov. While I fully support nuclear of all sorts, it's likely not to have a massive impact beyond the ~19% of electricity it provides today. It just takes too long to build, and proving a new design that'd be faster to build would also take a while, so it'd be supplemental to the energy transition, not the primary power source.

This is much different from 20 years ago when even wind power was still much more expensive than it is today, when off-shore wind was an expensive science project, when solar was literally over 10x (EDIT: more like 20x) the price as well as battery storage. At that point, yeah, I would've agreed nuclear was our only option for a rapid transition.

Germany has 50% renewables in its electricity mix, France has 70% nuclear.

France produces 50 grams of CO2 for every kWh, Germany 400 grams.

If Germany hadn’t shutdown 11 nuclear power plants since 2011, emissions in the electricity sector would now be 50% to 70% lower.

I agree with your point that Germany shouldn’t have shut down their nuclear plants, but their emissions problem isn’t the 50% renewables, it’s the ~40% that comes from burning coal.

I believe the point being made was that if it had not shut down its nuclear plants it would not need baseload generation from coal. Nuclear for base plus renewables and some small amount of storage capacity seems to be the ideal mix for cutting CO2 emissions.

yes but the whole world isnt germany

> If Germany hadn’t shutdown 11 nuclear power plants since 2011, emissions in the electricity sector would now be 50% to 70% lower.

That's the thing where you're very likely wrong, as you ignore the political situation where all of this happened. Germany had a huge boost in renewables for a couple of years after Fukushima, which politically was closely tied to the (hugely popular) nuclear phaseout. This wouldn't have happened otherwise.

The alternative to the nuclear phaseout in Germany realistically would've been having no nuclear phaseout and much less ambition with renewables. Given that the German renewable energy program basically brought down solar prices for the world this would've very unlikely be a win even if you only look at CO2. The alternative of "Germany could've shut down coal earlier, keep nuclear longer and still have a massive development of renewables" is only theory, as that option was never politically on the table.

A new nuclear reactor design that is faster to build, smaller, and much safer has just been approved in the US (after 500 million dollars spent just on the paperwork for approval). Check out NuScale Power[1]. The reactors are small at 60MW electrical output so that many of the large capital cost and scaling issues of nuclear power are much less of an issue. The reactors are built at a factory and shipped to the power plant.

[1]https://www.nuscalepower.com/

Yep it just takes will and educated folks to realize that nuclear is a better contemporary solution right now. The NIMBYs have killed it though. I think California will have to become an ash pile first before people will consider it.

Has anyone built one of these advanced modular reactors?

I remember that news. Good news! But have they built one, yet? And how long did that take?

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