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Comment by xroche | Hacker News Reader

It is somehow addressed, but with unreliable wind power sources that ca'n't be controled:

> We’re closing coal plants and building wind farms and it all just has to add up in the end. It’s not a one-to-one

And of course this won't cover the loss of energy, so let's pretend we can do that through "energy efficiency"

>You can make up that power by the way you operate the rest of your facilities or having energy efficiency savings so your customers are using less

Tl;Dr for the energy side: Smoke and mirrors.

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But you can place a lot more wind farms (at higher total capacity) than hydro, which is dependent on environment.

I don't understand the anti-wind sentiment in this thread. Yeah it's not ideal, but neither is hydro or nuclear. But all of them combined and mixed, they can make up for each other's shortfalls.

Would you mind explaining why nuclear is not ideal?

It takes 10 years to build

10 years? You're being generous here. Flamanville has been under construction since 2007, so at least 15 years for construction itself, and anything from 5-10 years for planning, acquiring land, relocation...

The best time to start building a nuclear power plant is 20 years ago; the second best time is today.

No. The best time today is used for building out absurd amounts of renewable power - use geothermal for base load and wind/solar for peak load.

No, the best time is to spend the first mover costs on renewables in the 50s through 70s instead and then never build nuclear (or in the 1910s instead of spending them on coal and oil). The second best time is to build renewables now that those costs have been paid over the last 20 years.

The long timelines and high costs of nuclear in the US have very little to do with the limits of the technology.

Mjhay is correct. Anti-nuclear activists have successfully managed to use the government to stop nuclear energy construction for decades. It is entirely a political problem, not a technical one.

I can give two reasons:

1. A wind farm is built by a private company in order to make a profit selling cheap electricity. A nuclear plant is built with vast amounts of taxpayers money to sell expensive electricity.

2. Nuclear is not dispatchable. That means you need natural gas turbines, hydro or batteries on your grid to provide it. Something that's glossed over by the nuclear fans.

> 2. Nuclear is not dispatchable.

This is not an intrinsic limitation. Naval nuclear reactors can power up to meet demand very rapidly. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't built like this for various reasons, including gas turbines just being cheaper for this purpose.

Naval nuclear reactors use HEU and are horrifically expensive even compared to civilian ones.

Additionally when your capital and fixed O&M costs are higher than renewables with the same net power + batteries, then the costs of your peaking energy skyrocket even further.

Far better to build less nuclear + storage. And then realise that the generation doesn't need to be nuclear in most places.

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