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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Each dollar diverted to nukes from renewables brings climate disaster nearer.

The big booster of nukes today is Big Fossil, because each nuke project started represents at least ten years of solid sales of NG, or worse, while construction is delayed again and again. With any luck, it will be cancelled before completion, and none of those dollars will have gone to panels that would immediately displace their product. Certainly none will be refunded.

No nuke has ever been built with money not coerced from somebody.

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Renewables are not a viable solution to energy needs on their own. It is not possible to heat houses or power a grid during low-wind periods in winter or at northern latitudes for sustained periods (weeks to months) with wind and solar. Nuclear can act as a zero carbon base load power. And we need to be making those investments now, or we'll be stuck with fossil for a lot longer than 10 years.

I'll also add that renewables were made possible by massive government subsidies while they developed enough economies of scale to compete with other power sources. High carbon tax with subsidies for ALL zero carbon energy, including nuclear, are the way forward.

“Renewables are not a viable solution to energy needs on their own”

Why has this been explained repeatedly for decades, yet still not understood?

We’ve basically squandered half a century trying to stop climate change because people don’t like nuclear power

Because it is wholly false.

It’s 2022 and 40% of global electricity is from coal. We just hit 10% from solar and wind.

Here’s Carl Sagan from 1985:

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

He said China would use all that coal and they did.

We lost decades of time. Now we need a few additional miracles.

And instead we have people proposing we do nothing at all while they try to build nukes.

not exactly sure what this is referring to. Please add a little substance to which someone can respond.

Think we’d all like to see much more wind and solar. And wouldn’t it be nice if we reached 10% EV usage in 5 years?

"Usage" is a bit vague but we're already at 10% EV sales worldwide since it doubled for each of the last couple of years:

> Growth has been particularly impressive over the last three years, even as the global pandemic shrank the market for conventional cars and as manufacturers started grappling with supply chain bottlenecks. In 2019, 2.2 million electric cars were sold, representing just 2.5% of global car sales. In 2020, the overall car market contracted but electric car sales bucked the trend, rising to 3 million and representing 4.1% of total car sales. In 2021, electric car sales more than doubled to 6.6 million, representing close to 9% of the global car market and more than tripling their market share from two years earlier. All the net growth in global car sales in 2021 came from electric cars.

You'd think EVs and Nuclear would be a great pairing but it's unusual to see someone praising both. A somewhat weird place to be in preferring nuclear to gas (and renewables) but not EV to ICE.

Money is fungible. A dollar split between pouring concrete for a nuke and paying for coal in the meantime is a dollar not available to spend on immediately much more productive solar.

Solar and wind are cheap. Mostly due to scale. A scale we could have reached faster if people didn't keep repeating false things like:

"Renewables are not a viable solution to energy needs on their own”

You should check out graphs of renewables deployment (minus hydro which has been steady for a while) it makes reaching 10% wind/solar a lot more hopeful than you state it. The growth is staggering.

> There are now 50 countries that have crossed that 10% wind and solar generation mark, and seven countries hit that milestone in 2021: China, Japan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Argentina, Hungary, and El Salvador, according to the report. Three countries in particular have shown a particularly fast transition, with Vietnam, Australia, and the Netherlands having moved 8% of their total electricity demand over to wind and solar from fossil fuels in only the last two years. These countries set a precedent, Jones says, to show other policy makers “there are ways to do this and not worry about keeping the lights on.”

I think it is important to have a mix of energy sources, and nuclear is a reliable option that is carbon free and doesn’t depend on the weather.

What brings climate disaster closer is that we have lost the ability to effectively build large complex projects such as nuclear plants.

Solar and wind farms are going up all over. Failures to bring nukes to completion don't seem to have affected those.

Construction of Solar and wind farms amounts to pouring the exact same concrete foundation over and over and installing equipment manufactured elsewhere. It is so simple in comparison.

Each dollar spent on solar or wind brings climate and energy disaster nearer. Nuclear is the only way to go. At the moment there's no other technology that can support exponential energy requirements from our civilisation. Solar can't provide that. Wind definitely can't provide that. We can see right now what it means when country relies too much on solar/wind energy. Look how Germany's grid is unstable last couple of years, and it'll only get worse with increased dependence on unreliable energy sources.

Germany's grid is not unstable.

The funny thing reading this is that the last power outage in Germany I can remember was in 2009. While I also spent 2 years in between in Canada, where I experienced 6 power outages.

I'm not sure if power got more unstable in recent years, but as long as North America sticks to above-ground power delivery, I'm sure the effective stability here is way better.

Imagine if the United States didn’t get 20% of its electricity from nuclear power for the last several decades

We would have saved enough to build out 100% solar.

Imagine if we had initiated building out 100% solar decades ago, triggering the PV cost collapse in 1990 instead of 2010.

This article is not about constructing new reactors.

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