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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Mostly agree... though I think Solar tech still needs to improve a bit. Nuclear power is definitely needed for the grid, though preferably more inland in places less likely to be affected by natural disaster. I get why the NY plant was closed.

I also hope that the build and cost timelines can be shortened. I think the push for electric cars is a bit of a miss in this, only because the grid needs to improve dramatically before such efforts can be effective and are barely keeping pace with current demands.

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Ehh Indian Point (the NY plant) wasn't really a concern with regards to natural disasters. We get some occasional (very minor) earthquakes and a hurricane once in a decade or so, but I doubt the latter would do much vs many tons of reinforced concrete.

The plant definitely had issues -- some due to age (construction started in 1956!), some due to mismanagement, and some due to dumb regulations [0]. My chem class went there on a field trip in high school, and the guy giving the tour definitely gave off "engineer who has been overruled by management in very dumb ways" vibes while explaining that their waste silos were almost full because they weren't allowed to transport the spent rods across state lines so that they could be recycled back into fissile materials.

As an aside, the control rooms had a real "retro-futurism" look. Lots of manual dials and brightly-colored plastics [1]. Gene Roddenberry eat your heart out, etc.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center#Saf...

[1]: https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2016/02/12/indian-point-...

EV’s have a fairly trivial impact on the grid. Cars last 25+ years so even if everyone all new cars where EV’s we are talking less than 1% increase in total electricity demand per year. The grid has expanded dramatically faster at several points.

Even more importantly we can shift most of that demand to cheaper times of the day or even day of the week.

> Cars last 25+ years

This is not a truth universally acknowledged.

The average age of cars on the road in the US is 12 years. There aren't many 100 year old cars skewing the average, so that implies that most cars last over 24 years.

I'm not sure about most cars lasting 25+ years... that said, even a 25-30x increase in EV usage in the next 15-20 years is still a massive increase. And it's not even the total load, it's load to the houses, the charging stations, etc. A lot of homes are regularly facing brownouts and rolling blackouts in the summers as-is.

Average car in the US is 12.2 years old. To offset cars purchased yesterday someone needs to be driving a 24.4 year old car to average 12.2 years.

As to electric demand, “The average miles driven per year is 13,489 in 2021.” Efficiency varies, at say 4 miles per kWh that’s 3,372 kW per year, we’re talking roughly 0.38 kW bump that to 0.4kW per car * all 762,883 EV’s sold in 2022 and your up to 305 MW nationwide. Meanwhile this single reactor is putting out 1,100 MW so ~3.5 years of EV sales at the current rate.

Critically unlike watching TV people have a great deal of flexibility when can charging EV’s and therefore mostly use cheap energy Aka when other demand is low therefore minimizing risks of brownouts.

> Average car in the US is 12.2 years old. To offset cars purchased yesterday someone needs to be driving a 24.4 year old car to average 12.2 years.

12.2 was a year ago [0], 12.5 now [1], but you could also get to that with 9 at 13.9 years for each one today, instead of one at 25.

[0] https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/avera...

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/05/15/average-age-of-cars-on-u-s-ro...

The rate of new car production is fairly consistent. The only way to get 9 at 13.9 years is for 13.9 years ago cars to have been produced 9x as fast, or to randomly pairing things off which doesn’t tell us anything.

If we pair the newest with oldest car and work to the middle things don’t quite work due to antiques, the pandemic, and increasing production, but it’s close enough for 25 years to be a safe estimate.

> The rate of new car production is fairly consistent. The only way to get 9 at 13.9 years is for 13.9 years ago cars to have been produced 9x as fast.

Its not at all consistent, and the reason the average age has gone up is supply chain issues driving costs up and sales down for new cars.

I didn’t say constant, just reasonably consistent. Individual years don’t matter much here it’s the overall trend we care about and the trend shows nothing close to an 9x increase and decrease:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA (Note the graph minimum is 7.5 not 0.)

I think you have that reversed, solar is great, and nuclear needs to improve.

Nuclear is rather old tech, and the more we learn about it the more expensive it gets. It's not a good fit for modern economies, because construction is so labor intensive and difficult to automate. Plus, the industry itself is a managerial failure and can't plan or execute on those plans effectively.

Storage is a great complement to the grid, because it lessens the need for transmission. And our original "storage" on the grid, hydro, was put there to deal with the shortcomings of nuclear, if you listen to Jigar Shah (though he is far far more bullish than me on the ability of the nuclear industry to deliver in the future).

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