Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmiel | Hacker News Reader

1. Renewables receive huge subsidies as well, especially in Europe. It is rarely being taken into account, but that's essentially what allowed it to become that cheap. The Nuclear would also be much cheaper if we were investing more in it.

2. There are countries that cannot rely on renewables because there's not enough wind or sun.

3. Renewables don't really work at the moment without stable source that can quickly kick in when there's no sun or no wind. The Nuclear energy is stable and clean. That combination of features is hugely underappreciated in favour of natural gas mostly for political reasons (at least in Europe). Natural Gas is not clean and won't prevent the global warming. Also Natural Gas and Coal have environmental impact and kill people all the time, not only when there's highly unlikely accident.

4. The small modular reactors (SMRs) may be the solution for a huge capital cost required for building a classic Nuclear Powerplant.

View on HN

I think the biggest 'externality' subsidy of renewables is exactly your point 3.

It's all well and good saying you can produce solar + wind en masse for 3c/kWh (even without govt incentives), but if you need to have a gas plant running extremely inefficiently to pick up the shortfall, I'm not sure you can say it is 3c/kWh.

I'm very pro renewables but think it is increasingly getting missed. You often see charts that solar/wind is significantly cheaper than nuclear, but never taking into account this.

A simple cycle gas turbine power plant is 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant. So even if you have to cover your entire renewable system with 100% CT backup, you still aren't paying as much as nuclear.

> 1. Renewables receive huge subsidies as well, especially in Europe. It is rarely being taken into account, but that's essentially what allowed it to become that cheap. The Nuclear would also be much cheaper if we were investing more in it.

Assuming that the investment in nuclear power from inception was equally matched in renewables for the same period of time, would anyone bother attempting to make this argument? The affordability of electricity from solar power alone would have likely have overtaken nuclear power long before the end of WWII. Nuclear (fission) power is mind-bogglingly expensive. The costs can not be handwaved away by suggesting it could be less expensive with even more investment into a method of power generation that is orders of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive renewables. Comparatively, we have barely scratched the surface of investing in renewables. If no one ever believed nuclear bombs were necessary, and instead of fission all that effort and cost had been put into developing fusion energy instead, we would have been building clean fusion plants for under $2B a piece by the end of the last millennium. Forget everything you think is wonderful about fission, forget all of it, and focus only on the economics. Then forget about it entirely and focus efforts instead on something, anything else, that is viable.

Wind energy also kills people, more direct deaths than nuclear power by any estimate, actually.

Windmills fall over and kill people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.

The overwhelming majority of accidents with nuclear energy happen in undeveloped nations.

> Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

> Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

> Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

The article you linked makes no claim about developed or undeveloped nations. And the data here simply marks 0.1 as the US death toll from nuclear, and 90 as the global average death toll including Chernobyl and Fukushima.

US is not the only developed nation, and Japan is not an undeveloped nation. I'm not sure I'd consider any country with the capability to run a nuclear power plant "undeveloped", including USSR in 1986 or Ukraine specifically, but this isn't an argument I feel strongly about. IMF data (seen on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country) would put current day Ukraine out of the list of developed, and I suspect the same for 1986.

Also, it's unclear if the death rate on wind is a global average. It's difficult to infer substantive information from the labeling on the data in this article from 8.5 years ago. There is no distinction between developed and undeveloped nations, for nuclear or for wind power. And the proxy you're using (US or non-US) is not listed for wind.

>I suspect the same for 1986

No, in 1986 Ukraine was one the richest and most developed states in USSR (Baltic states were close) and probably quite well-developed on the European scale. But since it became independent it gradually became the poorest country in Europe.

I would say that a sign of development is an ability to build reactors, not to run them. Today countries can easily order a reactor if they have sufficient funds for it and a certain level of political stability. A producer country probably will be even willing to give you a cheap credit to finance the construction.

You misapprehend the statistics I feel. — this is the number of deaths per trillion kWh generated, not absolute number of deaths. You cite it in a way that implies that Nuclear is to be multiplied with 5.5 to offer a fair comparison with wind.

I think you misunderstood my comment. My primary point is that what you wrote about nuclear re: developed vs. undeveloped nations is not supported by the article you linked, as the article makes no such distinction:

> The interesting thing is that nuclear power is at 90, and Windmills at 150, but only if accidents in undeveloped nations be included, if they not be, and only developed nations are included, then the death toll is 0.1 from nuclear.

The distinction seen in the article between the 90 and 0.1 numbers is global average vs. U.S. death avg. You cited those numbers and re-labeled them as "undeveloped" (for the global avg including Fukushima and Chernobyl) and "developed" (for US).

You cannot directly map "US" data to all developed nations, as this mapping does not include all non-US developed countries which should be included. Nor can you directly map "global avg" data to all undeveloped nations, as this mapping will include developed countries which should not be included.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com