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Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

>with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists?

We already have many industrial disasters with dangers that need to be communicated to every human generation to come in the form of acid mine drainage and whatnot. Those releases (which would happen absent human upkeep of dams and tailings ponds) are also things that would absolutely wreck environments for hundreds to thousands of years if released.

Every mine you open has clean-up costs that never end; it would be wiser to minimize the amount of new ones. You'll need more of them if you go with the intermittent sources of power because renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required (and because they inherently don't produce power constantly).

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> already have many industrial disasters

All of them due too fossil energy. Hence the call to invest in already available renewable energy sources.

We don't need even more potential disasters.

> renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required

Nuclear energy needs uranium mines which by the way happen to be in countries that are, let's say, politically unstable.

The astronomical cost of nuclear waste management is killing any and all attempt to render the TCO of a nuclear plant in a good light, if done honestly.

> they inherently don't produce power constantly

Are you thinking of solar and wind? When we talk about renewable, we mean geothermal plants, biomass energy and what not. And of course water, wind and solar - the mixture is important so that we can smooth out spikes with those renewables which don't produce power constantly, just as you build multiple nuclear plants, because one plant doesn't produce power constantly.

The question is: Why should the money go into ramping up a very expensive technology with lots of risks, when we could invest in better, safer and cleaner tech?

It just doesn't work, you can't "smooth-out" renewables no matter what they try to make you believe. This month, in the EU, solar production was at around 3% of the capacity and wind less than 10% of the capacity, there's nothing you can do to counterbalance that.

Just repeating the same falsehoods doesn't make them true. Nobody ever said solar energy is supposed to be a major energy source in winter. However, solar power reduces the fossil fuel consumption over the year, significantly so.

Smoothing out currently requires burning fossil fuel. Over time that need will decrease, for one because of a build-up of capacity in solutions that complement each other, and partly because of storage solutions. Reducing fossil fuel dependence - measured over a year - is achievable and will reduce climate change. And this will actually work faster than a somewhat responsible buildup of nuclear power would.

I'm going to say another hard truth additionally to the previous one, the grid has to meet all the demand on the spot, every day of the year, on every hour of the year, on every minute of the year, it's not a supermarket. You can't just say essentially "we'll burn whatever coal and gas for a few months to make it work", that's not a viable solution and that's never been one regarding to climate change and fossil fuel dependence.

Additionally fossil fuel dependence isn't "per year" but every time you need the grid reliably, that's how an electric grid work.

And again, those storage options viable for that purpose might never exist for all that we know, it's in R&D stage. If you want to add R&D tech into the mix, I have even better than the magical storage, I could bring fusion tech and say that all our problems will be solved magically. Except I don't because it's not ready, exactly like the magical storage tech.

If people don't understand that that it's not a viable option anymore with climate change, the Ukraine war plus the Qatar & Moroccan scandals now, I don't know what else will. That's starting to sound like a religion-level of closing eyes at some point. Every time this renewable strategy fails, it seems everybody is doubling down instead of taking a step back.

Even if you are right (spoiler: you're just lying). Building out wind and solar is still optimal for the 90% of electricity emissions it can replace while we wait 30 years for imaginary nuclear reactors with imaginary fuel mined from imaginary mines enriched in imaginary centrifuges built in imaginary heavy casting facilities to save the day. Feel free to fund said reactors in addition to the renewables which can then be relegated to EV charging and electrolysis, but only after doing the thing that solves 90% of the problem in a third of the time for a fifth of the cost.

By using imaginary reactors to attack renewables instead you reveal your very obvious intent of delaying decarbonization.

You are shifting your arguments whenever convenient... Replacing fossil fuels is mostly to reduce emissions from energy production, not for geopolitical reasons.

Gas power plants are plenty reliable. And you can source your gas from multiple sources. Nuclear fuel isn't entirely without sourcing problems, either...

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