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Comment by hncurious | Hacker News Reader

Revealed preferences don't match that rhetoric.

- People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way.

- Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things.

- Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts, bought a huge property on the Martha's Vineyard coast in 2019.

- There is little to no push to improve the water supply in preparation for droughts, not even in California.

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People don't act rationally, that should come as a surprise to no one. Look at the number of people who are overweight, sedentary and/or smoke even though they don't want to die of cancer or heart disease.

Alternately, you could consider all of the people who don't think nuclear is the solution to climate change. Are they irrational?

Probably they are. Although I'm not convinced that nuclear is the cheapest solution to climate change.

Cool. I wonder how you think calling people names advances a civil discussion? Good that you're open-minded on the topic.

I think that people don't act rationally outside of theories taught in Economics 101 classrooms is commonly known. I don't mean it in a derogatory way, being irrational is just part of human nature.

How many good discussions have you had after calling the other person's position irrational?

To me it seems it's the only realistic solution ( more realistic than the grid scale storage required to make renewables only work for most countries). What does cost have to do with it? We either want to fix the problem before it renders a big chunk of the planet inhospitable and who knows what else ( e.g. the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest this summer ), or not. Money shouldn't be part of the conversation, like it wasn't in Chernobyl ( though to be fair, it did nearly bankrupt the Soviet Union and being about its downfall).

If you're right that it's the only solution then of course cost is not that important. Many people don't think that it's the only solution, so cost is important.

Well another completely wild solution would be to make end users responsible for storing electricity during non-generation hours. I.e. "each home having a battery device." I just made this up now but thinking about what the end result might be...

encourages:

  - more people to buy electric cars that can also act as a whole home battery
  - even more research dollars in storage/battery tech
  - distributed power grid
  - resell electricity to grid (or maybe even local neighbours)
  - short-term power outages are handled by design
  - people think more about their electricity usage
  - people may be more likely to generate power at home

downsides:

  - unnecessary extra cost to end users
  - might be less efficient then centralization
  - certain markets/peoples will not be able to easily access stored electricity?

If we continued to build nuclear rather than retire them then we wouldn't have any issues today except cars and air. What do you mean "not most cost efficient", there are no other options we know of today. They are all based on future tech we don't have, like being able to store wind or solar etc.

Do you really want to bet the future of earth on the chance that we find a solution to those problems before climate change really becomes a huge disaster? I wouldn't, I would build what we know works. And since many are saying that we are already heading for a disaster, we can say that your bet didn't pay off, the chase for viable solar and wind failed and nuclear was the only viable option.

We have the technology to store wind and solar: batteries for very short durations, electrolysis (optionally followed by a Sabatier reaction to make Methane) for longer duration. Both are quite expensive, but so is nuclear. I don't know which option is cheaper overall.

Nuclear is massively cheaper as long as you build it in scale 20 reactors at a time, like France did in the 1970s or China has been doing for the last decade.

The capital cost of any battery, flywheel or pumped storage is higher than the $30-50/MWh energy of a nuclear plant, without even having built any PV or wind generation.

Depends on the kind of nuclear doesn’t it? Thorium isn’t popular because it’s not useful for uranium enrichment. Efficient solar would be ideal, but the mining and harmful externalities would be best done away from the earth.

(just to drop the links again... You can deploy untold millions of solar panels while waiting for a nuclear plant to come online, and they will be considerably cheaper as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy )

I think the steelman pro-nuclear argument is that if we seriously wanted to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd have to build so many reactors that they become faster and cheaper to build. They also don't require expensive seasonal storage like solar panels and wind would in most of the world or expensive HVDC lines from always-sunny areas of the world to the areas requiring seasonal storage.

So it might be possible that nuclear in the end is cheaper than renewables. Personally I'm not sure about that, but I'm not an expert in the field.

I would expect that companies that sell electricity are the experts in this field, and they don’t appear to be jumping on the nuclear bandwagon. I don’t have anything against nuclear, personally.

And then during the night we do... ? (We should also probably mention the fact that unlike nuclear, decommissioning and recycling costs are not included upfront, so you should budget for those too).

Solar on itself can only be a very small part of the solution. It needs storage most localities don't have the budget, place, technology to build.

"The differences in outcomes for different assumed discount rates are dramatic — for example, NEA LCOE calculation for residential PV at 3% discount rate produces $150/MWh, while at 10% it produces $250/MWh.[15] LCOE estimate prepared by Lazard (2020) for nuclear power based on unspecified methodology produced $164/MWh, while LCOE calculated by the investor for an actual Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland came out to be below 30 EUR/MWh.[16]"

> People are not migrating North in droves

Yes, because - you might be surprised to hear - people actually like to life where they are born and raised and require catastrophic hardship (such as the Syrian civil war) to actually start a migration.

Also: because climate has gotten a bit warmer, _a lot_ fewer people freeze to death.

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