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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

The difficult thing is all types of power have their own externalities. Dams flood large areas of land in normal operation and can potentially collapse. Wind power is intermittent and can have 'calm spell', takes up a large area and is generally just really big. Nuclear has difficulties around permanent waste disposal, and possible risks of accident and proliferation.

All of these factors and more (except cost) are on different scales and dimensions, so comparing them requires human value judgements - inevitably people disagree.

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Nuclear power also have calm spells. France is enduring one, with over 50% of their nuclear capacity stopped due to manteinance and other issues (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/a-french-nuclear...), and are expecting blackouts in the next winter if neighbors cannot provide.

Yrs, but that is planned maintainance which can be coordinated with industry and neighbouring countries. You cannot plan for when the wind stops blowing, plus the wind is likely to have stopped in neighbouring countries too. Countries which use primarily wind rely heavily on neighbours with hydroand nuclear.

Planned manteinance? Half power installed under manteinance, some of them for cooling corrosion and leaks, at the same time, in the worst moment in maybe 10 years? And fearing blackouts in six months. Worst planning ever.

As soon as storage for intermitent sources is economically competitive with gas (not nuclear, it already is), nuclear as we know it is done.

I can do this too! Let me try:

As soon as we start building more NPPs thereby training a workforce for building NPPs building costs will go down 10x and renewables as we know it is done.

Nah, doesn't work the same if costs are historically rising. But cost of eolic, solar and batteries are steadilly falling.

Dams are also uniquely vulnerable to climate change, since drought can affect their power output.

And local factors--people just assume that if necessary they can drain the reservoir (or greatly lower the level) to run the turbines to cover for a lack in solar/other output, but in the US as soon as you put in a dam you'll get home owners and property owners around the newly created reservoir fighting tooth and nail to maintain high water year round for aesthetics and recreation.

There are ways to minimize this of course, like building giant storage tanks, but dammed rivers are going to (usually) dwarf man mad retention pools.

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