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Comment by milar | Hacker News Reader

Please more. And next time without so much wasted time. We don’t have much time.

If folks really cared about climate change we would building lots of these. The fact that we aren't is evidence that folks don’t truly care about solving anything … just want to push their own narrative.

There are plausible environmental reasons not to proliferate nuclear energy

Can't even keep the ones already built open, like the one in Zion, IL.

I mean, in 60-s and 70-s, France and US were stamping out nuclear reactors like hotdogs, building them literally by dozens. And they were moderately cheap. I don't know what happened afterwards, but now building a nuke plant has become a nightmare.

My dad was apart of that building boom (starting at Hanford). In 1986 or so, he went from making $200k/year as a contractor to…< $40k/year in Mississippi as an FTE for a newly built power station there (after being unemployed for 2 years).

There was a strong push by the government to build, and when that evaporated, all activity just stopped over night.

There were huge evolutions in the designs for safety (because of some big accidents), which I think did make them a lot more expensive. I’ve also heard stricter requirements for things like cooling can contribute - i.e. needing cooling towers instead of just rejecting waste heat into bodies of water, which is quite bad environmentally.

Solar/wind/battery/hvdc is more than capable to providing gigawatts of power, cheaper.

Nothing close to nuclear

Yesterday in California nuclear produced 54 GWh of energy - that's pretty good except solar/wind produced 237 and batteries 11. And the growth of both is only accelerating.

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio...

So you're kind of right that nuclear isn't close to renewables..

Little ol Iowa has 12GW wind capacity! Around here thats > half our needs.

'Folks' can't just will the economics of a building a nuclear plant into favourability. maybe if the US had a much different (e.g. China) style of government where a half trillion could be invested into nationalisation of energy production and complete overhaul of the grid. Otherwise anyone with capital would have to be crazy to put $10 billion into a nuclear project that won't be online for a decade and already won't be able to compete per kWh with renewables, when you could instead spread the investment out across a bunch of wind and solar projects that will be online in a couple years. Maybe things will change once renewables have saturated demand and we've hit hard limits regarding storage.

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