Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't have taken Cowen's and Thiel's money as part of the Emergent Ventures grant. I'm not at all aligned with this "American" liberal way of thinking.

Let me make the argument against nuclear in terms "they" (and many here on HN also, like it seems) might understand: Costs. Nuclear is and will increasingly be more expensive and complex to build and run than wind and solar.

The costs of energy storage, solar and wind are dropping with every watt of capacity installed. The cost of nuclear is not.

Here's the source: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Let me address some arguments I read in this thread: Yes, I know that the sun is not shining at night and there's not always wind blowing, but we will soon have cheap enough batteries to store the energy and solve the intermediacy problem. Yes, one (but by far not the only) driver of nuclear cost is regulation - but guess what - it's fucking necessary to regulate it. No, nuclear is not the only way out of this climate mess (consider 15+ year building times for nuclear power plants). Yes, there might be some interesting small scale applications of nuclear, especially in space exploration, but we all know that this is not the point here.

The costs are high because noone is building. It's because of all the building that solar is low. If you started building npps the costs would go down a lot.

France built out nuclear and the costs kept rising.

Not every learning curve is positive.

Wrong according the parent comments' source.

> Not every learning curve is positive.

It should be, if it's not then someone is fucking up and that fuck up needs to be fixed, rather than giving up on the entire project.

If you look at the data in the link I posted above, it shows exactly the opposite. Nuclear gets more expensive per capacity built.

From your source, it's not as simple as you state:

> One reason for rising prices is increased regulation for nuclear power, which has the important benefit of increased safety. A second reason is that the world has not built many nuclear power plants in recent years so that supply chains are small, uncompetitive, and are not benefiting from economies of scale.35

> Both of these reasons explain why the global average LCOE price has gone up. But for nuclear there are large differences in price trends between countries: Prices and construction times have increased significantly in the US and the UK, while France and South Korea were at least able to keep prices and construction times constant.36

> Michel Berthélemy and Lina Escobar Rangel (2015) explain that those countries that were able to avoid price surges are countries that do not stand out in regulating nuclear power less, but in standardizing the construction of reactors more.37 Learning, after all, means transferring the knowledge gathered in one instance to another. No repetition, no learning.

> This is in sharp contrast with renewables in particular. While nuclear technology is not very standardized and gets build very rarely, solar PV modules and wind plants are the exact opposite, very standardized and extremely often built.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com