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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter.

You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time your ready to start selling energy, maybe no one wants to buy it at any price that ever returns a dime to you or the other investors.

Why don't you just go flush your money down the toilet today and save yourself 10 years of your life.

Until nuclear solves that issue... the rest of this just doesn't matter. These were the questions of last decade before solar/wind and batteries scaled up.

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1. It's slightly less than 2x, not 10x.

2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.

3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.

The Netherlands has plenty of space for on-shore wind, what it doesn't have is sufficient space for them to get away from the NIMBY's. Hence building them off-shore.

Off-shore is of course a great way to have the benefits without the drawbacks. The Netherlands is quite full already and we should be careful with the small amounts of nature we have left. The added cost isn't a huge thing when your factor in it's clean energy without long term waste like nuclear.

Of course it has a huge drawback: opportunity cost.

If you look at two recently constructed wind farms in The Netherlands[1][2] then by a conservative estimate the offshore one costs around 5 million/MW compared to 2.5 million/MW for the (mostly) on-shore one.

That conservatively gives you a cost difference of around 1.5 billion for building it offshore. Or around 1 million EUR per the 150 turbines that make up Gemini.

So yes, I agree with you about the importance of preserving nature. I just think it's a better investment to place 150 relatively low-footprint turbines around the country and use the 1 million leftover EUR for each one to expand the public land around them into a park or outdoor area.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_Wind_Farm

I'm very sceptical about the claim that offshore wind is more expensive than nuclear. Licenses to operate offshore wind parks are auctioned in Germany, with interested parties bidding on the amount of subsidies they'll receive. Those subsidies are now usually negative, i.e. the companies pay extra to be allowed to build there.

Meanwhile, even just running nuclear reactors is barely profitable, to the point that the federal government had to bail energy companies out twice by limiting liability and taking over most of the costs of demolishing old plants.

The Netherlands are thinking of building 10 nuclear reactors. https://fr.businessam.be/les-pays-bas-songent-a-construire-1...

I wanted to check up your reasoning. Actual calculations can be pretty complicated so I relied on a real world example: the largest solar array project under construction in the world, Australia's Sun Cable.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/14/just-a-m...

A few numbers: the projected cost is $20 billion. The nameplate capacity is 10GW. The most efficient solar plant in the world (located in Arizona) has an efficiency of about 30%, and I think we can assume similar efficiency for the Australian one, which translates to a 3GW average output, assuming it includes enough giant batteries to stabilize the output. The size of the array, in one of the most favourable places in the world by climatic conditions, is 150Km^2 (more or les the size of Amsterdam). Note that in the Australian desert we can assume the cost of the land to be almost zero.

Always according to WP, the cost of nuclear per GW should be about $6 billion. So a 3GW nuclear power plant should cost about the same as the 3GW (in average output) solar array. The difference is that the power output of a nuclear plant is steady and entirely predictable, it occupies a minimal fraction of the space needed by the solar array, and it can work anywhere in the world- from Australia to the coldest and rainiest regions. Transferring the Sun Cable project from the Australian desert to Germany is simply impossible due to the climate and the cost of land; while it's perfectly possible to build in Germany ten or twenty 3GW nuclear plants.

im glad someone did their due diligence than pulling out facts from their butts.

There's a significant risk of that price difference expanding to two orders of magnitude. There is a lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively). At a 100x cost differential, things are going to be brutal for investors with sunk investments in legacy power generation. We're talking electricity prices dropping to tenths of a dollar cent per kwh. Considering solar bids are going out for 1.3 cents right now, that could happen relatively quickly.

IMHO nuclear could actually work but it will need a much more ambitious agenda than merely matching price levels of already too expensive gas plants. Fusion is the interesting thing to keep an eye on. Perpetually decades out but it at least offers the right orders of magnitude improvements we actually need; on paper.

> lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively)

Can you back that up? Last time I spoke to a guy working on solar, he said a 1% increase in efficiency is considered a great achievement.

I'm talking mostly about cost. Technical efficiency is a nice to have but we are not short on square meters generally.

In any case, I've read several articles lately that are talking 10-30% efficiencies through in the context of various research projects. Some of those things indeed sound a bit wild/far out but not implausible. Most of this is early research. But generally what we have in the market today is not even close to being the final answer or even close to the theoretical limit of what is possible of stuff people work on in labs right now. I'd call 1% a distinct lack of imagination or ambition.

Cost is a whole different matter. Economies of scale and new processes & materials can accomplish a lot. E.g. organic molecules printed on any surface even at a reduced efficiency could end up being so dirt cheap to produce and deploy that it still ends up cheaper per kwh.

If somebody produces something half as efficient but 20 times as cheap, we'd still get 10x more energy for my money. You get cost improvements in all parts of the production process, installation, and operation. IMHO the combination of new solar cell types, ways to produce them, and ways to do that with cheaper materials can over time certainly get us to an order of magnitude cost improvement; if not far more.

The building costs are high because noone builds them. It's always expensive when each project is a "first" for the people involved.

> once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind.

Ah right that must be why electricity costs in Germany are so high and so low in France LOL

France strongly subsidised their plants due to the side effects to their nuclear weapons program.

Comparing nuclear (available 24/7) with solar without storage (available only in during the day only in some seasons) seems tricky - of course the solar will be cheaper. It doesn't cover all the need though.

And storage is mostly unsolved problem at scale. Nobody in the world ever built GWh size battery.

So supporting solar means you're either suggesting going with stuff that doesn't exist (and might as well go with fusion then, right?) or you're basically supporting fossil fuels.

Most of demand isn't absolute need, the rest is just dynamic pricing and adapting consumption to it by eg intra day shifting of heating/cooling/charging loads.

Can you back these figures up? No, you can't. Long-running nuclear plants like France's are much cheaper to operate and maintain than wind/solar. Wind turbines get decommissioned after 10-15 years around here (typically because government funding expires and they can't compete on the energy market), solar is better but still needs expensive storage capacity to make it competitive in availability.

Unless you assume France's nuclear plants are still benefiting from taxpayers' funding decades after they were built, the market has proven that nuclear power is far cheaper than wind and solar.

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