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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

Going niclear is such a FUD anti-renewables campaign, it is almost loughable people still fall it. New nuclear plants take decades to build, and are extremely expensive. So no, no significant nuclear capacity increase. All that campaign does, is making it harder for renewables, and thus easier for fossil fuels. Quite ingenious so, if you think about it.

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"Going nuclear" has been _the_ fossil fuel alternative for decades. It has been the only scalable, proven, safe energy base load generation competitor to fossil fuels. The competition between those forms of energy is going back way before the advent of windmills and solar panels.

The fossil fuel industry has a huge interest in spreading FUD around nuclear, and the few accidents have been maximally exploited to hamper the development of nuclear. All the while, it has been known full well that fossil fuels have devastating impact on air quality and climate. Air pollution from fossil fuels alone is estimated at killing >3 million people per year. A great many disasters involving oil and fossil fuels have occurred, killing many more millions.

Yet, we act like nuclear is the danger, but we're happy to accept burning fossil fuels in the midst of our societies and offer up millions of lives each year to satisfy the lords of the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry in 2023 loves nuclear, mainly because the capital costs are so high it doesn't represent serious economic competition with cheap fossil sources. There is a theoretical world where we come to a political consensus, then build out nuclear to France-like levels with massive government spending and intervention. But this requires political consensus that the fossil fuel industry (correctly) recognizes is unlikely in most countries.

The major exception to the above rule is China, but even that (massive!) government-sponsored nuclear buildout is only expected to reach <18% of electricity generation by 2060. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-27/china-nuc...

Thank you! To save some of China's face here: they also push(ed) wwind and solar like crazy. And coal, but that's a different issue.

They take A decade, not decades. You're the one spreading FUD. There are successful new nuclear projects built very quickly in EU.

The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green".

Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.

The Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, it is estimated to go live in 2028. It was laready two years late in May 2022, and already overshot the budget by 50% by then. As of February 2023, the delay increased by another 15 months (resulting in the 2028 go live) and costs increased again to now 32.7 billion pounds. And already in 2020, new wind and solar utility scale projects were cheaper per kWh than Hinkley, withbsolar becoming cheaper and cheaper every year (Moore's law is still valid there).

Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh.

Facts to found here:

https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f...

Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less.

And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).

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