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Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment.

Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.

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It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.

Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers.

Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design.

The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed.

Our children will curse us.

"Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs"

... what?

Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30.

Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY won't be competitive even with efficiency improvements with wind/solar in 10-20 years when any plant actually leaves the boondoggle funding phase and goes online.

Criticism 3: what design of plant? LWR/PWR/huge dome/solid fuel rod/oh shit it melts down in a natural disaster? Yeah uh, no thanks. If nuclear had gotten its act together about ... let's say 30-40 years ago and designed a reactor that:

1) meltdown proof

2) consumes almost all its fuel

3) scalable / easily replaced

Then we might be able to do it. Problem is, the entire nuclear industry was invested in solid fuel rod designs, the military loved it for the weapons isotopes, the politicos blocked funding for LFTR and other designs, the solid fuel rod reprocessors were making bank, there was probably other shadow industries like waste handlers/transporters on the dole.

So... nuclear is a no go. Solar/wind for now, use natural gas and existing nuclear for levelling until storage and solar/wind+storage drop to levels unattainable by nuclear/fusion/naturalgas/geothermal/hydro. Synthfuels for aviation. Long haul shipping can probably be done with swappable batteries and/or synthfuels. ... maybe... hydrogen if it's not the current trojan horse for hydrogen-from-methane being pushed by the oil companies.

Maybe nuclear can be competitive when solar/wind even out, and battery/storage finishes its incredible scaling and tech development. Maybe.

But the path forward is wind/solar, and maybe synthfuels and green hydrogen if the green isn't "green" like clean coal was "clean" coal.

Our children should already curse us. The science was there, and my and ESPECIALLY the boomers picked SUVs, big houses, moving to florida, and lots of cheap crap shipped 5000 miles from overseas labor over dealing with problems.

First of all, you don't wake up in the morning and have an idea that it would be great to have 5 nuclear reactors so that you don't freeze overnight. We more or less know how much energy we will need in 10 years. You just need to plan ahead.

Dams also need many years to build, but you won't say they are useless because of this...

Second, nuclear is price competitive with wind/solar. The way nuclear is competitive is because it allows removing dependency on fossil fuels and wind/solar do not. We can't afford using fossil fuels anymore because it does not matter if you get lower $/kWh if along we cause drastic climate changes.

Stop thinking in terms of $/kWh produced by the powerplant alone. To compare cost of nuclear vs solar/wind you would need to include humongous batteries that would be needed to smooth out output of solar/wind stations which nuclear powerplants do not need. We don't have the technology to build those batteries in sufficient capacity and so the price of solar/wind is currently very, very high (the price of us all cooking/freezing/suffocating/starving, etc.)

Humongous batteries or humongous nuclear reactor?

Which will be cheaper? Especially, what will be cheaper in 10 years?

Which will be online faster? As in, can be scaled out in 3-5 years?

With forthcoming 200 wh/kg LFP / LMFP, 140 wh/kg sodium ion, and various other schemes, I will heavily bet on batteries + solar / wind beating out nuclear. I don't know if you're engaging in FUD based on cobalt and nickel chemistries, or just are ignorant of the forthcoming Gotion/CATL production lines for high density LFP and sodium ion chemistries. Those aren't resource limited, they just need to build the factories, and factories are a lot better than nuclear power plants in timescale.

PLUS, storage + solar can be distributed to the home to reduce the amount the grid needs to move from a centralized generator, make the grid and homes much more resilient, and function as a backup battery store to grid storage.

I never see hydro listed on LCOE charts. I'm going to assume it's at the scale of nuclear which is already not competitive. Hydro is actually the best grid storage if you have a mountain and two big lakes or some similar setup. As I understand it, the efficiency is 90% pumping and then getting it back.

But climate change hasn't been a priority in most western countries (in most countries really).

Cheap, sustainable power is in the interest of most governments that haven’t been essentially paid off to stay on fossil fuels. But because the existing tech is more invested in various political campaigns and parties across most of the world they’ll keep progress from happening in areas of public funding. From our left you’ll get the anti-nuclear zealots and from the right you’ll get the anti-government spending zealots, so it’s pretty much a political loss until fairly recently with the EU designation of nuclear as an option to support nuclear of any sort. While climate change is serious and matters it bothers me deeply when I see older nuclear facilities shutdown while new coal power plants show up the same year. It really seems like backwards progress in much of the US in our energy sector anywhere that hasn’t had massive renewables investments.

Everyone around me seems to be fixated on gas prices and bigger vehicles. It’s pure myopia.

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