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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

You can easily heat houses with electricity, and, with more effort, you can convert most of industrial processes to use electricity instead of gas. The reason it hadn’t been done is that it was significantly more expensive than using gas. However, with gas gone, and with hypothetical abundant nuclear, this would not have been the case.

Arguing against nuclear because “electricity doesn’t help heat houses” is extremely strange, bordering on deceptive.

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Yes, all the gas usages can and will be replaced by electricity. Which will come from renewables. The 3 remaining German nuclear reactors won't make much of a difference here, but yes, those which are in any shape for it, should run e bit longer. Though one has to take into account, that the maintenance was set up according to operate them to the end of the year, so a lot of maintenance would be necessary for any longer operation time.

No where there is abundant nuclear visible, new build projects have vastly overrun any time and fiscal budgets.

> Which will come from renewables.

This is something solar/wind zealots often like to repeat, while hand-waving away the fact that those energy sources work when they want to, not when you want them to.

If you want a reliable, clean power grid, there's one option, and it's not solar and wind.

That is wrong. There are multiple options and the environmental friendly ones consist of mostly solar and wind.

Not really, no. You either need storage tech that doesn't exist and might or might not be possible, or you need to grossly overbuild intermittent sources everywhere and make megagrids, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Maybe those are possible. Maybe they aren't. We don't know. There is precisely one known working option.

In Germany, electricity from photovoltaic won’t replace gas for winter heating. That’s why nuclear is so crucial in Europe, where, unlike in US, photovoltaics are much less practical, due to weather and land use constraints.

Heat pumps are amazing, but it's a project where the time span is decades to convert half a continent. It doesn't solve this winter.

I firmly believe heat pumps and renewable energy is the future. But that can only become the solution in the time span of 5-10 years.

In the short term, you can use resistive space heaters. This is, to be sure, 2-3x times more expensive than heat pumps, but given the cost of gas, might still be worth it. Point is, nuclear helps, and a couple of extra gigawatts day and night makes a difference.

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