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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>Nuclear isn't so simple, but has unique advantages

Its advantages are dwindling compared to solar/wind/battery/pumped hydro/demand shaping.

It requires gargantuan subsidies to even exist.

For instance, the nuclear industry in the US has barraged us with propaganda about how really incredibly safe it is and how overregulated they are but insurers will still refuse to insure a nuclear plant unless 99% of the liability for accident cleanup is placed on taxpayer shoulders.

Its main advantage is that it can mitigate some of the costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. This is realistically why the US, UK and France keep it but Germany doesnt think it's worth it.

These three elephants in the room: cost, accident liability and nuclear arsenals are invariably absent from media discussions about nuclear power in the US largely because of who drives the discussion.

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The thing is,

While Nuclear is not cheap, it will be cheaper than the effects from un-softened climate change.

While Nuclear is difficult to maintain and if an accident happens it is bad, but the damage and affected area can be easily calculated.

While Nuclear waste storage costs money and has to be secure for a long time, the chance that we as humans will be able to recycle the nuclear waste in 200-500 years is fairly high. On the other hand once shit hits the fans with climate change shit really hits the fan but with the quantity of New York City's total sewage from the last 5 decades.

The thought that we will be able to recycle nuclear waste in 200+ years is more reliable than any promise Elon Musk has ever given.

>While Nuclear is not cheap, it will be cheaper than the effects from un-softened climate change.

Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.

As far as I can see that answer may be yes in one specific circumstance - when you already have a nuclear plant with another 5+ years of life left. i.e. when the insane capex is a sunk cost.

In all other instances it only really comes close if you assume the risk of nuclear disaster is close to zero or if you pretend that the precipitous fall in solar/wind/battery prices didnt happen yet.

> Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.

I believe that’s the wrong question to ask. We need nuclear to be cheaper and more attractive than coal and oil (and later natural gas).

If grid scale batteries ever become a viable thing and cheaper than nuclear then that’s just great and eventually the nuclear plants can be phased out in favour of those.

In the meantime however we need to get rid of coal and oil, because that’s where the overwhelmingly most emissions are.

>If grid scale batteries ever become a viable thing and cheaper than nuclear then that’s just great

Ok. So, what if that already happened?

>In the meantime however

The meantime is past. Arguably it lasted until latest 2020 which was the last time grid scale batteries were expensive. 2014 was the last time solar or wind were expensive.

Meanwhile, if you tried to commission a new nuclear plant now it wouldnt be running until 2030 earliest and possibly later (hinkley point C will take 20 years).

A new battery/wind/solar farm usually takes a year and theyre still plunging in price.

If that already happened then that's great. It's the first I'm hearing about it but I don't work in the sector so that's fair.

Nevertheless nuclear energy is a steady and reliable source of large amounts of energy, just like coal and oil. By having a few of those, the grid operator can greatly decrease their need for grid-scale batteries, thus enabling more grids to deploy them faster, paving the way for more solar/wind.

This is not a competition between renewables and nuclear. They aren't enemies.

CO2 is the enemy, we must focus on that.

Point well taken about how long the nuclear projects take, that's why natural gas a bridge is important.

I want purely renewable energy just as much as you but I'm highly skeptical that it is possible or even desirable to build out all the capacity we need in just solar/wind/hydro in the short amount of time we have. Everything that helps, helps. Until the point where it doesn't and then that's the time to address that.

>This is not a competition between renewables and nuclear. They aren't enemies.

They kind of are. They are competing for limited investment and they are not complementary.

Nuclear power is not a "battery". It's an extraordinarily expensive way to produce a fixed amount of power whether it's needed or not.

You trade ~20% extra reliability for 3x the cost.

>I'm highly skeptical that it is possible or even desirable to build out all the capacity we need in just solar/wind/hydro in the short amount of time we have

Nothing can do it in the short amount of time that we have to save us from 2C.

Diverting limited resources to nuclear won't speed the transition up though, it'll slow it down.

I guess we just disagree then. I think we have plenty of resources to do both.

Government might better focus on clamping down on frivolous waste of resources such as cryptos (both waste of hardware, energy and most valuably talent).

>Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.

Hmm, I think one should also add other factors.

Space Requirements for Wind and solar. To generate the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant a lot of space is needed for Wind and Solar.

Resources to Produce Batteries, Solar Panels and Wind mills. Battery production requires a fuck ton of water. With impeding Water shortages this is suboptimal.

How many Solar Panels and Wind mills can we produce daily? Not just construction and installation on site, but also mineral mining for the Solar panels. And then how many factories can produce these, and can that be scaled up? How many construction workers are there and how many on site installation can be completed.

We need 1200 wind turbines to replace an 30year old nuclear power plant. Windturbine = 3mW, Nuclear power plant = 1.2GW

Just to cover our current demand of electrical energy we need a ton of wind turbines and solar panels. Than add to that every other industry that needs to switch to electricity, Transportation, Chemical Industry, Steel Industry, heating etc. This would quintuple our electrical energy consumption.

>We need 1200 wind turbines to replace an 30year old nuclear power plant. Windturbine = 3mW, Nuclear power plant = 1.2GW

Hornsea two provides as much as a nuclear plant, with vastly lower cost and built about 15x faster. It's 165 x 8 MW turbines.

It was planned, executed, built and brought online before Hinkley point C even laid the first brick at ~45% of the cost and a load factor of about 65% (to nuclears 80) due to the greater reliability of wind with large turbines.

>mineral mining for the Solar panels

You mean going to the beach?

> Its main advantage is that it can mitigate some of the costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal

With such arguments, there really is no point having a discussion. You know that's not the advantages I was referring to (since they're in the very next sentence you're quoting) and you're ignoring that completely.

I bring it up because while it looms large in the minds of policymakers and is a large factor in their decision-making it almost never gets discussed in the media.

The question of who insures nuclear plants (always taxpayers) is likewise something else that is always curiously whitewashed out of American media.

Most of the advantages other than the nuclear arsenal one, on the other hand, are repeated frequently and are very well known.

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