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Comment by naniwaduni | Hacker News Reader

Depends whether we're discounting nuclear as "alternative", really.

History has shown that nuclear is politically brittle. It has to come from the top, with government support. And with left-leaning parties opposed on environmental boogeymen grounds, and right-leaning parties uninterested because it competes with their god-given oil money, you’re left with a very tough political knife’s edge to walk on.

And so solar, wind, and hydroelectric need to bring the future.

Oh hey have you seen that environmental groups financed by oil money are against power lines to connect the eastern seaboard with the Quebec grid composed of 98% hydroelectric power?

Eh. That kind of highlights for me how “odd” it is that converting things to electric feels very new, but could probably have been developed out much more much earlier.

Why? Multiple studies have concluded that renewables can power 100% of grids, and they seem to be scaling from a manufacturing and installation basis much faster than nuclear.

Renewables failing to pan out could have seemed plausible in 1997. Nuclear as a reaction to an oil shock had already panned out two decades earlier.

What? The nuclear buildout in the US that started in the 1960s collapsed in the 1970s. The oil shock and energy crisis led to changes, like reduction in growth in electricity demand and widespread introduction of cogeneration (due to PURPA) that ruined the market for nuclear power plants here. It didn't help that the costs in that first buildout had been way over what was promised.

France never wavered on building nuclear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

It’s odd to say never when you can see on the chart there was a twenty five year break in any new capacity.

Their new reactor designs have been going over budget and having startup problems like many other modern nuclear builds.

Just outright cancelling their breeder program sure sounds like wavering to me. What that action implies is that France doesn't consider it likely that nuclear will grow enough soon to require breeder reactors to be built, which means they think that nuclear is not going to be what solves the CO2 problem (which would globally require so many reactors that burner reactors alone would exhaust economically available uranium in less than a decade.)

Not if you discount hydro electric. We have to store the wind and solar and then be able to use it. We have the water pump idea where they pump the energy into water that is released at night in Virginia. We hear of melted salts as a means to create steam after dark.

Nuclear is really our only viable solution to get rid of carbon based energy, but that ship has sailed in most of Europe and no one is ready to finance a new plant in NA.

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