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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

It is extremely expensive to get significant amount of energy from roof mounted solar. Solar doesn’t shine all of the time. Storage is extremely hard. Japan does not have a lot of wastelands to spare on mass solar power farms.

Nuclear, on the other hand, just works, 24/7.

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Is storage becoming less hard with battery backup systems? And from a cost perspective won't these come down, and from a total social spending amount couldn't rooftop solar eventually be cheaper than nuclear plants, scientists, infrastructure, etc. that has to go into it?

Just to note I've been coming from the perspective that nuclear + "renewables" is the right approach, but wanted to learn a little more.

> And from a cost perspective won't these come down

No. Even discounting the explosion of prices of lithium, nickel and other materials needed in batteries due to wars and what not, there's already significant demand for batteries ( mostly to convert vehicles to EVs), which far outstrips supply. That's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future ( like a decade), so no, batteries won't continue to get cheaper.

Doesn't it take around a decade to build a new reactor? Just wondering if by the time new reactors are built, they're overtaken by cheaper battery storage and solar rooftops.

The US Navy has built hundreds of nuclear reactors in much shorter timeframes. There's nothing intrinsic about nuclear that demands such long builds. It'd need to be done at a societal level with some sort of standardization and mass industrial process. The French more or less did this for their nukes for instance.

The reason for long duration is regulations and inspections. Navy has a lot fewer constraints in that aspect.

And yet the Navy has a pretty good safety record.

As far as we know.

Battery storage is still hugely impractical on the scale required to keep a grid stable, even if we assume ( huge assumptions) that battery building capacity can keep up and be affordable. Also, batteries need to be changed due do depletion much more frequently than a nuclear reactor.

I'm thinking every house has its own panels, and its own batteries. Grid is optional. You'll have to be more careful about energy usage perhaps, and maybe personally invest up-front for enough battery and power storage. Maybe the grid is still connected and you can sell excess power, or connect in an emergency (maybe it's expensive?).

I do have very little reason to doubt that costs for batteries won't come down drastically in the future. If it doesn't, it might just be an investment you make when owning a home.

Just thinking out loud here.

Some current traditional reactor designs take 5 years. Some SMR designs from 500 days to 2-3 years.

In any case, let's assume for the sake of the argument, that our industrial goes up 100x in energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz...

Can you run that on batteries, that are fundamentally constrained due to ion weight, and therefore are ultimately capped(page 2): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/781/4/0...

Any significantly sized industry will require dense energy, situated nearby. There is a reason why China is building more nukes in the next 15 years, than the totality in existence globally today. Any other approach is Malthusianism.

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