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Comment by elhudy | Hacker News Reader

>The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country.

Apologies to everyone for the upcoming tangential rant.

Am I the only person who is exhausted with news outlets disingenuously comparing the US to all other individual countries as if that is a fair comparison? A quick google search shows there are 108 reactors operating in the European Union, which is 16 more than in the US. Yes, this also means that the US has more reactors operating per person than the EU.

But why can't news outlets just say that? Why do we default to comparing the absolute number of most things in the United States to individual western countries? This was at its worst during COVID but it seems to have stuck. It makes for a completely misleading narrative.

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> Am I the only person who is exhausted with news outlets disingenuously comparing the US to all other individual countries as if that is a fair comparison?

It's certainly a fair comparison: they're comparing countries to countries. It may not be a helpful comparison, because no two countries are equivalent in all ways other than the number of nuclear reactors they have.

But, if the point they're making is that no other country would have as much of an effect on air quality by shutting down nuclear power at the national policy level, I think it's fine. Your statistic is also useful, but since air pollution crosses borders, I think talking about absolute rather than per capita is also fine.

I guess what I'm saying is that this didn't bother me.

I see what you're getting at but I still disagree, for a couple of reasons.

First, the sentence itself doesn't strike me as lending itself to the idea that "the point they're making is that no other country would have as much of an effect on air quality by shutting down nuclear power at the national policy level". If the author wants to portray this point, why don't they actually say so in the article, instead of indirectly alluding to it? The sentence in question strikes me more as an exaggerated fun fact to grab the reader's attention and make them gasp, than as a way to set the context of the situation.

Second, the nuclear reactors are shutting down due to rate-setting policy issues on the *state* level, not the at the federal policy level. So it becomes again a disingenuous comparison, because each state can take their own individual course of action to prevent shutdown (or not). The "US" as a whole, that is to say the federal govt, is likely powerless in this situation unless they can get a bipartisan bill passed which is unlikely. Even if passed it's just kicking the can until the rates issues are fixed.

Over half those in the EU are deployed in France too. For the US to match France’s 80% electricity generated by nuclear energy, we’ll need to deploy about 300 additional equivalent reactors. I my opinion, this a good thing: 1. The per unit reactor costs will plummet if we build 300 identical units 2. France enjoys the lowest per capita CO2 emissions for electrical generation than any nation in the world. America should match them.

All those reactors might have been great in the 80s, but with cheap solar and wind available, it makes no sense to sink that kind of money into a more expensive solution.

France is also in the middle of experiencing a huge amount of maintenance costs due to many of their reactors coming up to critical age milestones. But it's often hidden under the massive layers of obfuscation due to being masked under the total French energy budget.

> but with cheap solar and wind available, it makes no sense to sink that kind of money into a more expensive solution.

Partially true. In geographies like New England that aren’t very sunny or windy nuclear makes more economic sense, and in all geographies as a hedge against long bouts of unusual weather.

> In geographies like New England that aren’t very sunny or windy nuclear makes more economic sense

I guess you don't realize that much of New England's power already comes from renewables. Remember they get hydro power from Quebec. Maine gets 2/3 of its power from renewables.

Which leads to my second point: your power generation doesn't need to be right next to you.

And in any case, off shore wind is plentiful, and New England isn't the Arctic, it still gets plenty of sun year round.

https://sponsored.bostonglobe.com/future-forward/the-gradual...

Nuclear is a terrible technology to use as a hedge against inclement weather for power generation. The cost is all upfront, so you really want to be running it at 100% basically all the time for it to be at its most cost effective. Only running it when renewables aren't generating is incredibly costly, we'd be better off just overbuilding renewables + storage and having plenty of redundancy in the grid.

True, but you just won't find the necessary storage capacity to run solely on renewables — you'd need a miracle battery breakthrough or a miraculously convenient landscape close to population centers to build tons of reversible water reservoirs.

You need your baseload to come from a steady, highly available, weather independent source. Nuclear is basically this only carbon free solution ticking the boxes.

That depends on where you live, and 80% of the worlds population lives in places where overbuilding enough storage _with current technology_ is still cheaper than nuclear.

For that last 20%, building more grid connections towards the equator is again still cheaper than nuclear.

Also, the overbuilt solar and wind solution is better in other ways. It gives extra, dispatchable capacity which can be used for things like extracting CO2, and making hydrogen. Those will be important, and made fuels could be storage mechanism.

It is likely better to use gas peaker plants for rare times without renewables and extract the CO2 later when sun is shining.

Some gas turbines can now burn (green) hydrogen. Germany deploys those beasts.

https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...

Alternatively just have 3 hours of storage and keep the gas generators hanging around for that one week in two years they're needed.

All the money wasted on nuclear can then be put towards electrification of emissions sources which are vastly more important than that last 0.5% of emissions (which will further increase the flexibility as it does so).

Not just maintenance costs but some truly eyewatering upcoming decommissioning costs as well as construction on new plants.

EDF already went bankrupt like, last week.

Even despite all of this France is expecting the % of electricity sourced from nuclear power to decline - new plants aren't being built fast enough to replace those aging out.

Humm, EDF need money thank for regulation that force the company to sell electricity at a loss. % of nuclear electricity may decline but not sharply.

"at a loss" is highly debatable: the 'Cour des comptes' (local Court of Accounts) officially published figures showing that the production cost was 22€ when this law was passed, and the fixed price is 42€... Not even counting the huge amounts of public money gobbled up by EDF since the very beginning.

> EDF already went bankrupt like, last week.

Because the costs thet sell at are capped, regardless of what it costs them to generate (and those costs exploded in some areas due to the war and the common European power market), which was the right choice to protect consumers from energy poverty.

> For the US to match France’s 80% electricity generated by nuclear energy

57% and trending rather sharply downward.

You're also thinking of Uruguay for that CO2 thing, or maybe Sweden.

what is france doing with all the waste? it's a country a little bit larger than california is with a bit more population... i suppose we could find a way to store all that waste in california somewhere since it is a big state with large swaths of land that are uninhabited.

my dream is to have the main reactors give a lot of the power and then have smaller reactors that use those waste products to turn them into shorter half-lived materials. if i recall correctly liquid salt thorium was something that was trying to do that and it also had the feature that it failed safe instead of a meltdown.

They recycle it. Then store the unrecyclable remains in three different facilities.

https://international.andra.fr/operational-facilities

Waste doesn’t take up much space does it?

It does not.

The problem is, we can see and measure it. If anything went wrong, it’d be clear who messed up, so it requires actual time and effort to do it right. That’s yucky. People like it more when the waste is invisible and airborne, for the wind and their children to deal with instead of them. This provides a better level of blame dispersion.

As they say, out of sight out of mind.

99% of nuc waste is low to medium life, low to medium radioactivity and is mostly recyclable. Russia does most of the recycling.

The total amount (from the beginning of France's nuclear energy production 50+y ago) of highly radioactive, non-reusable waste fits in a cube not bigger than the Eiffel tower, and the goal is to bury that in geological storage, but dumb politics are opposing this (for dumb reasons that were debunked a thousand times).

France is 40% larger than Califonia in area and population. Made it the biggest country of the EU (in size, not population).

As a non-north-american I can empathize, but I believe the main reason for that is simply these news outlets are from the US, so naturally they'll use that frame of reference. Down here in Brazil news outlets will compare stuff to Brazil.

The fact we are reading English news probably accounts for a good part of that bias.

> Am I the only person who is exhausted with news outlets disingenuously comparing the US to all other individual countries as if that is a fair comparison

They do this tirelessly with health, education, etc... They do it because this is how some people understand the world; a series of orthogonal comparisons thought of as one through false comparison. It's an exercise of marginalizing the readers understanding of competing arguments. Instead of thinking analytically about the arguments and the situation at hand, the reader is invited to think, "This problem is solved, and thus so should be yours."

What really drove this home for me is the book “HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS”. After reading that I see this crap everywhere. Highly recommend that book.

I'm ignorant in this area, but does Europe (EU) have a nuclear agreement to party in the space together? If every nation operates their nuclear facilities independently then it's not crazy to compare them directly.

There is EURATOM (ages old, precedes the EC/EU and is a founding "part" of it), but they aren't really running any commercial reactors, it is more of a political body for control and exchange of knowledge.

Probably because there are subconscious and conscious rationales for why they’re creating the comparisons and narratives that they are.

It’s also quite rare that a news story spends time talking positively about a subject, unless it is something emotionally charged (marine vet surprises family by coming home early) or is part of a submarine PR push by the subject of the piece (university researcher finds curse for cancer).

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