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Comment by go_elmo | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with you regarding the political dimension, the technical, especially regarding safety may not be underestimated regarding cost implications. But the right political setting could imply cheap, mass produced plants, e.g. SMR's. The problem is that were too late, would take several decades to scale up to where we we should be already...

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I'm not sure I follow this. Nuclear power is significantly less deadly than coal and that's just talking about accidents in power generation. If you include general death by radiation pollution, that difference grows more disparate (coal energy production emits an enormous amount of radiation into the atmosphere as pollution).

Why compare against coal? It's all about to be phased out simply due to the cost of the steam side, which nuclear shares. Compare against wind and pv.

Will do. Nuclear energy is 10x less deadly than rooftop solar per Twh and 4x less deadly than wind.

Solar kills! Maybe we need to mount a campaign to shut down this deadly and dangerous form of energy generation. I will start working on the posters and clickbait web site, you gather the activists to organize a protest.

China is shifting their entire coal production to nuclear. America is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with? Coal. Wind and PV cannot handle the load requirements so you end up having to build coal anyway.

I’m not against wind and PV. I’m just realistic about where the energy mixture has to look like to actually accomplish the goal of sustainable energy production. The earth can’t handle us dithering yet more on this argument.

The United States is not replacing nuclear power with coal. Coal-derived electricity has declined dramatically in the past 15 years while nuclear power has declined slightly. See this chart of US electrical generation from 1950-2020:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

Fossil generation peaked in 2007, as did generation from coal.

Coal plus gas generation in 2007 was 2913 TWh, composed of 2016 TWh from coal, 897 TWh from gas. In 2020 gas generation was up to 1617 TWh and coal was down to 774 TWh for a total of 2391 TWh (-522 from 2007).

Between 2007 and 2020, renewables grew from 353 TWh to 792 TWh (+439 from 2007).

No, the US is not replacing nuclear with coal. It is shutting down nuclear that is aging out, but all energy growth in the past 20 years in the US has been renewables and gas. Mostly gas. The US is drowning in cheap natural gas from fracking and because of this switch away from coal it is one of the few major western nations to actually reduce its CO2 footprint over the past couple of decades.

I hope you realize that natural gas production produces methane instead of CO2. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas.

> I hope you realize that natural gas production produces methane instead of CO2. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas.

Natural gas is (primarily) methane, but burning natural gas converts methane into CO2 and water.

My bad. Natural gas still emits 50% of the CO2 that Coal does, so it's still a very significant emitter of CO2 as compared with nuclear. That's ignoring the methane leaks inherent in transporting natural gas.

Almost. Youre right & I agree - I meant the dev cost to guarantee spill freedom etc which causes billions in costs for development.

This is not correct. China has built 24 1GW Gen III plants in 15 years.

No other solution can provide that much baseline power in 15 years. None.

China can also build anything they want where they want and sell power for state guided prices which is not possible in e.g. europe where people oppose. Also solar is much cheaper already which makes such investments uninteresting for power companies.

What is the cost of 1GW of reliable solar (i.e., with storage and/or over-provisioning such that we have similar reliability to nuclear)?

You'd need both overprovisioning and storage.

Storage for 3 months

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/sse-says-low-wind-dry-condit...

> Storage for 3 months

The parent comment said overprovisioning and storage. With enough overprovisioning, you'd need storage for half a day at most (keep in mind that the parent thread was talking about pure solar with storage, not wind). The question on this sub-thread is: what would be the optimal (minimum cost) balance between overprovisioned solar and storage, and what would be the cost of that solution (the question was about 1GW, but it probably scales almost linearly), with similar reliability to pure nuclear (I'm assuming this pure nuclear scenario is overprovisioned too, since it has to deal with refueling pauses and the occasional electrical faults)?

(Of course, except for very small isolated networks, a real-life solution would not use only pure solar and storage; adding other things like wind to the mix would probably decrease the cost while keeping the same reliability.)

This is not correct. In winter months, solar produces one tenth the power it does in summer - and even that is on average.

One cloudy January, and people would live in the dark for a month.

It's even worse. If we want a zero emissions future, we would want electric heating...

The issue with wind is that lulls in wind and solar are often correlated. In reality you'd need somewhere are 3x provisioning and a day of storage.

“Too late” relative to what? We don’t have an alternative. It will similarly take decades to scale up renewables (we need some combination of economical grid-scale storage and massive over-provisioning).

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