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Comment by purerandomness | Hacker News Reader

> the only clean energy source

Saying nuclear energy is 'clean' because it doesn't cause CO2 emissions is like saying arsenic is the only healthy food because it doesn't contain sugar.

You set up a false dichotomy between nuclear energy and "solar and wind", as if that's the only possible renewable energy source.

My point is: Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy you can produce, no other energy source has you paying for waste management for 20000+ years.

Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions so that we a) smooth out spikes b) have simple energy storage solutions c) don't have to pay the guy printing new signs saying 'caution, radiation, don't enter this cave and please don't hold this site hostage in case of civil war' for some 20000+ years.

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You can have other metrics if you want like human deaths / kWh but again nuclear also has the best metrics here. Additionally, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity, there's no denying that.

> Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions

Like what others? There's none. (If you care about CO2 pollution of course)

> b) have simple energy storage solutions

Have you missed the part where I said that this storage tech doesn't exist?

You can't mention technologies which don't exist and claim that we should use them. Deployment of tech isn't R&D.

As an example, the solution being used in the real world seems to be an increase of coal and gas if you look at what Germany has done on the past month

Bullshit metrics calibrated on a past that doesn't matter. The past risks don't predict the future risks, especially not if the intention is to scale up nuclear power by a factor of ten or so. I don't even think the risks will scale linearly, because that scale-up is impossible with the current regulatory posture that is keeping the risks down.

There are already energy storage solutions. To ignore those, to claim categorically those will not improve, seems to be a particularly "convenient" argument.

There's no storage solution which can be used for winter for a whole country right now, that's a hard fact.

Maybe they'll improve yes (or maybe not) but that's called R&D, not an available solution and you cannot count on it.

Storing energy for the winter will only be a problem at the very end of phasing out fossil fuels. At some point some gas plants may only run during the winter. But there are also biofuels for example.

And there are for example solutions around pumping water into a lake. That sounds like it will work long-term. You make an abysmal job argueing for nuclear power just because not everything works perfectly already. Scaling up nuclear power to the scale required to replace fossil fuels would take decades. Unless the risks are ignored and enhanced extremely, like you seem to be proposing. But there is zero political appetite in the electorates of the world to invest billions into a technology that takes decades to come to fruition, takes more decades to recuperate the investment and can literally blow up in your face any time, especially when some neighbor is angry at you.

All the water storage options are pretty much at full capacity everywhere in the world and for a good reason, it's relatively effective, easy to build and the tech is old, that won't help for renewable deployment because you can't build it much further.

I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have its downsides, it's just that it's one of the only realistic option with the current tech. Renewables really aren't up to the task as we see it now in Europe.

Additionally since you're talking about finance, usually external costs aren't counted in renewables that's why they falsely appear cheaper, Germany for example already spent around ~2x the cost of the whole French grid and is still very far from the transition from what France achieved.

Biofuel is actually a good example, since you mention biofuel as a potential backup strategy (I don't think it will work just because of the scale anyways but that's beside the point, let's imagine that in theory it could work). The costs of creating all this additional infrastructure isn't usually factored in the renewable strategy either, but it should.

> can literally blow up in your face any time

I don't think you have an understanding on how it really works, it's not a bomb...

> All the water storage options are pretty much at full capacity everywhere in the world and for a good reason, it's relatively effective, easy to build and the tech is old, that won't help for renewable deployment because you can't build it much further.

Yup. Pumped hydro is aall taken and there's none under construction. Just look at this map of projects under development https://professional.hydropower.org/page/map-pumped-storage-...

> I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have its downsides, it's just that it's one of the only realistic option with the current tech. Renewables really aren't up to the task as we see it now in Europe.

It really isn't because every potential Uranium mine on the planet would have to be under development right now for it to be remotely relevant. And even then it would take far longer.

> Additionally since you're talking about finance, usually external costs aren't counted in renewables that's why they falsely appear cheaper, Germany for example already spent around ~2x the cost of the whole French grid and is still very far from the transition from what France achieved

Citation needed. Be sure to include the costs of enrichment, reprocessing, and colonial mining activities. Additionally Germany ate a bunch of the first mover costs. For a valid comparison you'd include the manhattan project.

> Yup. Pumped hydro is aall taken and there's none under construction. Just look at this map of projects under development https://professional.hydropower.org/page/map-pumped-storage-...

You got to be joking here, look at the very few ones "under construction" ones in Europe and their actual capacity, that's pretty much what I said. Nothing here will help for a winter spike, those won't even cover a full day of bad production.

> It really isn't because every potential Uranium mine on the planet would have to be under development right now for it to be remotely relevant. And even then it would take far longer.

That's kind of taking the consumption of a 60s car with the known petrol fields of the time and doing a multiplication, it's bad maths and bad economics.

> Citation needed. Be sure to include the costs of enrichment, reprocessing, and colonial mining activities. Additionally Germany ate a bunch of the first mover costs. For a valid comparison you'd include the manhattan project.

Those costs are included in the nuclear but not on the renewable part sorry, to get a full comparison you would need to add maintenance, waste management, backup costs and diplomatic & environmental costs for renewables which I don't think anybody is counting now.

> You got to be joking here, look at the very few ones "under construction" ones in Europe and their actual capacity, that's pretty much what I said. Nothing here will help for a winter spike, those won't even cover a full day of bad production.

It's still doubling in under a decade. And that's just the pumped storage. Not all hydro. "You might need backup 5% of the time, stop and wait 30 years instead" isn't the slam dunk you think it is. Weirdly it would be the optimal thing for the fossil fuel industry though.

> That's kind of taking the consumption of a 60s car with the known petrol fields of the time and doing a multiplication, it's bad maths and bad economics.

That's assuming modern 65MWd/kg reactors. And that's just to meet the first one or two fuel loads. It's not some far future scenario where exploration has time to pay off -- the mines need to be being developed today. At the tail end of those reserves, the raw Uranium alone costs more than half the present day all-in cost for solar or wind.

> Those costs are included in the nuclear but not on the renewable part sorry, to get a full comparison you would need to add maintenance, waste management, backup costs and diplomatic & environmental costs for renewables which I don't think anybody is counting now.

Waste management, backup, diplomatic, and environmental costs are not included on the nuclear side either. And O&M alone is enough to pay for the renewable generation in a good area and a backup gas plant to sit idle.

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