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Comment by m0llusk | Hacker News Reader

This is denial of basic spreadsheet realities. Solar and wind power generation are already cheaper than nuclear and much easier to build and expand. Not only are nuclear plants more costly to build and operate, but the nuclear waste is piling up and will need to be dealt with in some way eventually which will cost a significant amount of money.

Nuclear is not the solution to getting off fossil fuels primarily because it is too expensive but also because confidence has been lost. The public were promised power too cheap to meter and ended up with a mess of unknown expenses and risks. If nuclear advocates had been more cautious and careful then public opinions would be more reasonable but that is not what happened and we have to be realistic and move forward now as quickly as possible with the tools we have.

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You shouldn't compare nuclear power to solar and wind but to gas, coal and oil.

> Not only are nuclear plants more costly to build and operate, but the nuclear waste is piling up and will need to be dealt with in some way eventually which will cost a significant amount of money.

You could just put it in a stable place and that's it. People seem to forget that the worst case with nuclear waste is that they "spill", doing exactly what the other fossile fuels are doing in the first place (poisoning everyne that's breathing them).

> If nuclear advocates had been more cautious and careful then public opinions would be more reasonable but that is not what happened and we have to be realistic and move forward now as quickly as possible with the tools we have.

I think it's mostly due to unreasonable people that always had an axe to grind against nuclear power for some reason, probably because of the intersection between ecologists and pacifists/people against nukes.

“For some reason”

I can tell you the reason.

The larger problem with nuclear is that it is prone to central control, taking away self determination and individual freedom of ordinary citizens in how energy is produced and paid for.

Other options like fossil fuels (gasoline, propane, etc.) but even more so solar, wind, and small scale hydro, all coupled with batteries as needed, offer much more freedom and personal choice about how people get their energy and how they pay for it.

The nuclear industry has lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and large corporations all enlisted for profit and control. These players colluding together have even managed to get the government to make the industry and exempt from liability for nuclear accidents!

As I see it, nuclear projects tend to be magnets for corruption, huge boondoggles, and don’t account for, much less pay, their full long term costs. And on top of that they force consumers to bear the cost in many ways, through taxes, lost property values, capture of government, and resulting opportunity costs.

The topic of waste is important, but it’s almost a red herring compared to the scale of the above control problems.

Hmm, surely the oil industry has more and better lawyers and lobbyists? Generally the problem with nuclear has been that building old-style reactors is expensive and unattractive, while trying new approaches is caught between regulation that wasn't designed for them, and popular opinion that wants everything to be better without actually making any changes (at the level of power generation or personal reduction, really).

> Hmm, surely the oil industry has more and better lawyers and lobbyists?

True but the distribution of energy and the whole setup is entirely different as related to the issues I mentioned.

Regulations surely have held back updated nuclear tech, I agree, and some of this may have been inflicted by the older entrenched owners of the older tech, and their lawyers and captive politicians, at the expense of newer nuclear startups.

If I had to rank things I’d say that solar, although not viable everywhere, is my favorite.

That's a really good point that I never though about, thanks for bringing it up. That's one more thing to like about solar power, wind and hydro, or even gasoline in case of emergency. But my problem with fossile fuel is the large scale like coal burning plants. There is also the problem of cars, but I think you could find a middle way by forbidding gas-powered cars in the cities. If we're going to have something large-scale, I'd prefer it to be nuclear than other fossile fuels, and I'd prefer it to be renewable than nuclear. Consumers are already paying the cost of fossile fuels by dying of air pollution every year.

> nuclear projects tend to be magnets for corruption, huge boondoggles, and don’t account for, much less pay, their full long term costs

This is the point for me. Capital intensive projects with massive safety concerns and massive environmental liabilities are a recipe for regulatory capture and corruption, because they need to work hand-in-glove with the state to succeed. This is the formula that has led to accident after accident at chemical plants all over the world, some of which have been far more deadly than even the worst nuclear accidents. Civil servants need to be on board, or the project fails, and once they're on board, they tend to overlook malpractice.

> This is denial of basic spreadsheet realities.

the people who make this argument seem to always leave out that we don't have cheap (and clean) battery technology capable of sustaining entire grids for days at a time.

When you sustain entire grid, you don't need batteries.

We didn't use to have batteries, yet we use electricity - yes, over grids - all the time. When we add to always-on generators (fossil, hydro, nuclear) sometimes-on ones (solar and wind), we employ the fact that for large grids it doesn't happen that Sun is not shining everywhere at once and wind doesn't blow everywhere at once - at least this is a reasonable model, continent being at night notwithstanding.

The bigger you have a grid - and you can get effects from relatively small ones - the less batteries you need.

Won't nuclear waste decay to safe levels long before the fiberglass windmill blades that last twenty years break down into something that no longer takes space in a landfill? Not to mention the significantly lower volume of waste.

This is like saying I don’t need an apartment because i can cheaply live at the office during weekdays 9-5.

> because it is too expensive but also because confidence has been lost. The public were promised power too cheap to meter and ended up with a mess of unknown expenses and risks.

1) Newer reactor designs are less expensive, especially small modular reactors

2) The promises you're talking about were made to the public in the 1950s, and those people are now so old they won't see the results of deciding whether to use nuclear power more or not, anyway. The people whose "confidence has been lost" are rapidly dying off of old age. Younger people have in general a more realistic view of nuclear power. It's not perfect, but it's not the boogeyman that hippies were taught to fear.

>we have to be realistic and move forward now as quickly as possible with the tools we have

Exactly! And the only carbon neutral tool that we can use that is sufficiently powerful technology to power our industries at their current level is nuclear. So, we have to move forward with it.

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