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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that for much of the current generation of politicians in power, particularly in Germany, all thought about nuclear power has been frozen in time since 1985.

Furthermore you have bought-and-paid-for members of the establishment like Gerhard Schröder who have a vested interest in shutting down nuclear power plants.

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I'm from Sweden, and we've also been shutting down reactors, but Germany is the biggest offender in Europe on this particular issue, I hope Germans are raising hell about this at home just like I try to over here.

Sweden is planning for super energy intensive green steel, the Northvolt battery production and recycling facility, huge datacenters for Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Facebook, and on top of that a rapidly accelerating electrification of private vehicles. To cover this they are planning to expand hydro, but the estimates I've seen are for an additional 600MW which is literally nothing in context (green steel alone is estimated to need 9000MW) and will do fuck all for the new requirements from the above, it's fucking looney tunes.

I personally think the environmentally best short-term solution would be for all the shut down but technically still usable reactors, in countries like Sweden and Germany, to be turned back on while we construct new safer and more future proof ones.

I should buy a UPS.

The German reactors have been run in maintenance mode. They cannot be switched on again

We could've partially solved the problem with steady construction of wind farms which were politically held back in the last 10 years.

Wind generally can't provide base load due to its sporadic nature. They really aren't substitutes until we get cheap energy storage

This. We need nuclear to keep the base load green. Wind and solar need batteries to be base load providers. Building out both battery and renewable infrastructure at the same time is a tall order.

Yeah this is what most people are not getting in this whole debate. That and the fact that it's really costly to transmit electricity over long distances, even at extremely high voltages.

The best solution is a bunch of smallish nuclear reactors spread out over the continent for base power production, wind/solar/hydro (is wave electricity a thing? I remember it was discussed a bunch of years ago in relation to green production) wherever those make sense, and high voltage transmission lines to allow load balancing.

But we don't have that, and it takes a long time to build so we should get started now, but instead they will say "oh we should have built that 20 years ago now it's too late"... :(

The surprising thing is that with a rare exceptions (like in Finland) people who have money to invest don't believe that investing in nuclear power will actually make them a profit.

We know the price of CO2 will just go up and up. We know how hard it is to create a base load with wind/solar and storage.

Yet nobody with money believes it is worth investing in nuclear.

Of course, looking at Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, Flamanville makes it very clear why nobody wants to invest in nuclear power.

I think the biggest reason is public opinion (by idiots who don't know what they are talking about and just think nuclear bad because they've been conditioned to think so by decades of misinformation) driving politics in the wrong directions possibly meaning that any plants built may be forced to shut down before they've been operational long enough to offset the construction costs and become profitable.

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