Comment by a1371 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a1371 | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone comes in to make a strawman argument, I'm gonna say myself why people like me are not fans of nuclear energy (fission).

I have absolutely no concern about nuclear waste or a chernobyl. There is a chance of those, but it will be small harm compared to other fuels.

Here are the big problems:

1. *Timeline:* Carbon reduction is like life savings. Start in the 20s and you will be way ahead. This state of the art demonstration which could not have happened in a better environment, will come online in the 30s. Mass adoption is so far away.

2. *Hesitancy:* Related to 1, some conservation and reduction effort may be halted now because people would think nuclear will fix it.

3. *Proliferation:* This technology cannot go to most places it is needed because there is a risk of atomic bomb making. It can mostly be deployed in China, India, and the US, which is huge, but won't address energy poverty.

These are the top 3 for me. Still a welcome news and a good _Plan D_ to get us from 2°C closer to 1.5°C.

> 3. Proliferation: This technology cannot go to most places it is needed because there is a risk of atomic bomb making

Is that really true? The international community has various safeguards in place to allow the use of nuclear power without enabling proliferation of nuclear weapons. Ignoring a few governments which intentionally attempt to subvert them – and almost always get punished with sanctions for doing so – those safeguards work. Most countries which don't have nuclear reactors, it is because they don't think it is an affordable or worthwhile investment for them (given the capital cost, expected returns, environmental risks, etc). There are a few countries locked out of international nuclear energy markets due to sanctions, but they are very much a minority.

I am not sure if it is true in general. But Saudi Arabia is an example. It is considered a reliable US ally, and in the meantime there are tensions about nuclear power generation there. I'd think a lot of countries fall in that category.

The tensions are because Saudi Arabia doesn’t like the terms the US wants to impose. The US doesn’t want Saudi Arabia to make its own fuel, it wants them to promise to rely on foreign fuel processors only. Obviously that is motivated in part by proliferation concerns. But if Saudi Arabia had just accepted the terms, like UAE has, they’d probably have nuclear power by now, just like UAE does.

And the US wants to impose these rules on Saudi Arabia due to the Middle Eastern security situation (Iran, Israel, etc). It wouldn’t necessarily impose the same conditions on a country in another part of the world. And there are other suppliers with different rules, like Russia and China. If Saudi Arabia bypassed the US, that would have major negative consequences due to the US-Saudi alliance and the special security situation in the Middle East. But some other country in another part of the world could bypass the US with far less consequences

I think the Saudi situation demonstrates the challenges of nuclear power in the Middle East and Arab world. It doesn’t tell us much about the feasibility of nuclear power in other regions of the globe

Nuclear plants take a long time to build, but decarbonization also takes a long time. The world will not be fully decarbonized by the 2030s. We're going too slowly. That means that reactors coming online in the 2030s can still contribute to decarbonization. I wish that we were decarbonizing so fast that reactors built in the 2030s wouldn't matter, but we aren't.

You can see from my posting history that I am more bullish on renewables than nuclear but I'll take low carbon power of any kind until we've phased out all fossil fueled plants.

True. As long as we agree nuclear is not a Plan A, and it is not a silver bullet. Otherwise, it may cause hesitancy towards other impactful actions.

whats the silver bullet for baseload that's renewable? batteries or pumped hydro?

Hydro has historically been doing that pretty reliably. Most grid markets have access to some of it and the capacity can be conserved during day hours thanks to renewables. Add offshore wind, insulate buildings, and make utilities hand out more LEDs, those might just get us there.

Batteries are continuing to fall in cost and improve, and batteries+solar is now competitive with fossil fuels in some markets today.

We probably don't have the luxury of choosing. Solar and wind are intermittent. We probably need to both develop massive forms of energy storage and develop clean stable forms of energy (nuclear). The new nuclear in this article can output 150% for 5 hours as well.

> I have absolutely no concern about nuclear waste or a chernobyl.

Most people do, though. And it is one of the biggest political barriers for opening a nuclear plant.

I don't think most people do. Well, there is the usual NIMBYism, but the energy industry has figured out how to rally the public, even if it is for something disastrous like fracking.

I think the *idea* that most decision-makers and advocates are against nuclear because of those two reasons (waste & explosion), is holding us back from having a constructive conversation.

Just my 2 cents, I haven't done any academic work on this.

Japan has had really, really strong anti nuclear sentiment since Fukushima despite being very gung ho about it before.

Of the 54 reactors operating pre-earthquake, only 9 have been approved for restart and only 4 are actually operating. This is a huge operational risk for investors when billions of dollars of capital are at stake, so investors have piled into smaller, nimbler projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com