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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I hope this goes well. I can't help but to think about what kind of society lead us here [1] and how can we avoid in the future. I'm looking at you, California, with a stern gaze.

> Opposition to nuclear power increased when President Richard Nixon called for the construction of 1000 nuclear plants by the year 2000.

Gee...only if we did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Calif...

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To be fair, California is one of the worst places to put nuclear reactors given how earthquake prone it is.

The movement in California is against nuclear power in general. It reverberates across the nation through its influence.

We can only hope so.

At some point the anti-nuclear movement should have to admit they were completely wrong.

40 years of trying to avert climate change and we are still waiting for the windmills and solar, with no way to store enough electricity so we can stop using fossil fuels.

40% of global electricity is still from coal

When we get all our power from renewables and storage at a tiny fraction of the cost of nukes, I will not wait for nuke boosters to admit they were wrong. I will blissfully ignore them.

I definitely wish every home in America, warehouse, etc had solar on the roof.

For whatever reason, we haven’t gotten to that point. Still not cheap enough?

I was hoping Musk’s solar roof would be the start of something big.

At any rate, in 2060 maybe we’ll have incredible batteries, solar energy everywhere, but we’re already way behind schedule.

All this waiting for renewables has cost us years. It’s unlikely that we are going to avert significant climate issues.

I always read the price for solar has gone significantly down in the last ten years.

But I guess that only applies to the US or the industry.

Here in Europe for an average size roof, it’s 20k € like it’s been for the last ten years.

There are a couple of things at play here. First of all, and most importantly, the quality of the panels you are getting for your 20k€, and thus the total amount of power they'll produce over their lifetime has gone up dramatically. Secondly while the cost of the panels has come down slightly, the cost of getting people to install them hasn't, and that has on the whole increased. If you where to install the solar panels as part of of either building the house or replacing/repairing an old roof that needed fixing anyway then it will be significantly cheaper.

Surely you can buy them from Tblisi like we do.

Last I checked, a pallet of 45 350W panels FOB a US port was US$7200. Ought to be less on the Black Sea or the Danube.

But really your regional utility should be buying them.

As much as I like renewables, their cheerleaders are really bad at math.

There are people bad at math everywhere, nuke promoters not less so. Recent experience in Finland, what, $8B for a plant quoted at $3B? Vogtle 2GW quoted, what, $5B, spent $15B but not delivered, estimate $10B more to complete?

Quotes for nukes never include the cost of 10 years of coal while they are being poured.

That should be clear by the end of the decade. As the projected 2030 annual production is equal to the total installed solar capacity today.

It's really going to reverberate if a quake induced nuclear disaster occurs.

It's against nuclear everything. The dominant anti-Diablo Canyon group is called Mothers For Peace, which really tells you everything you need to know.

Only in proximity to fault zones, mostly near the coast.

Building near the coast is pretty useful to get access to seawater for cooling. You could build near the coast and not near known faults, but that doesn't prevent faults from being discovered later as happened to Diablo Canyon.

>useful to get access to seawater for cooling

But discharging that heat directly into seawater adversely affects sea life. This is what causes bleaching death of corals in warmer waters.

It's likely that if DCPP was to be relicensed they'd have to build cooling towers.

The environmental impact studies alone would likely take years, especially because Mothers For Peace, the Surfrider Foundation, the local Chumash band, and every other group under the sun would tarpit the project. They hate nuclear like Everytown hates guns, and no amount of logic will change their minds.

FWIW, I think the damage is done and DCPP shouldn't need to put in cooling towers — the output cove has different sea life than the ocean just a bit beyond it and has for decades. However, I don't make the rules.

Maybe Nixon meant safe reactors instead of meltdown-prone LWRs.

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