Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

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I mean you get how nonsensical that argument is right? We don’t have solar cars either. Cars do not generate power. We’re talking about generation not consumption. We need electric cars for consumers and that’s orthogonal to how we generate electricity. The reason is that electric cars can take their energy needs equally well from energy generated by a coal plant, a nuclear power plant or solar. That’s why electrification is absolutely needed for climate change. It’s got massive difficulties obviously because it’s a huge load on the power grid (today’s grids wouldn’t be able to handle if everyone started driving electric). And electrification should also be used as a feedback mechanism where charging cars are used as distributed batteries to help solve the storage problem for renewables and that unfortunately isn’t happening on any real level.

I think we probably also need hydrogen fuel cells for fleet cars / trucking because they can eat the logistical and safety costs of storing hydrogen (hydrogen fuel cell consumer cars are a pipe dream IMO because you simply can’t have refilling stations scattered around everywhere - it’s massive explosion risk in population dense areas with untrained people dealing with it).

But if we’re talking about grid energy production, nuclear is the only real path for solving climate change. It sucks but that’s the reality.

I think you missed the point: without storage nuclear only gets to 70% of the grid, and 31% of the total energy demand. With enough storage to displace oil and gas demand, nuclear has no advantage. It's a pity that France never spent the money to migrate the non-grid portion of their economy to electricity, but that was probably a simple matter of the economics of nuclear never really panning out.

You get how automotive energy storage and grid scale energy storage are totally different right? Like a huge portion of oil consumption is automotive and shipping and that has 0 demands on the grid. Yes, we need storage solutions for portable energy and solar fails on that mark too (that’s why EVs are battery backed and don’t bother putting on solar panels to regenerate those batteries). So when we electrify automotive, energy requirement needs for cars are going to skyrocket. Solar can thankfully probably accommodate a huge part of that because we can time shift charging to happen during the day but that also means that a good chunk of solar energy construction is being dedicated to charging storage capacity we built and put into cars and not offsetting our already substantial and ever growing non-automotive grid energy needs.

I don’t know why you claim nuclear has no advantage if we’re talking about a country whose grid manages to achieve that only 10% of grid production is coming from fossil fuels. That’s a lot smaller storage problem to solve than the 60-80% that renewables has to solve (not to mention it needs to actually build that capacity which is going to take a long time because all the evidence is that that % mix by renewables grows very slowly over long periods of time).

You opened this thread with "I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem". Yet you are blind that in your canonical example of the effectiveness of nuclear, France, their energy is still mostly powered with fossil fuels. If France is the best example of success of nuclear I say it shows that nuclear is a failure as far as climate change is concerned. The French really tried in the 80s, but the outcome is a fairly nice train network with a 20% modal share, and more oil consumption today than when they started.

Now let's look to the future: solar is vastly cheaper and easier to install per TWh generated. It can be installed quickly and incrementally. Solar modules come in at around 1% of the cost per W of nuclear right now, and still decreasing, that's an enormous margin to work with: If you have a way to seasonally offset energy through efuels for ships and planes as you propose, and a fleet of EVs with 100kWh of storage, the effort to just solve the remaining grid fluctuations seems straightforward. Roughly speaking, without storage nuclear has no useful solution for transport, transport is the hardest part of emissions to mitigate, but any solution that uses nuclear derived electricity for transport will be far cheaper with renewables.

We have South Australia, which produced more low carbon energy this year from solar and wind than France did from nuclear, and without any significant storage as a counter example for your low carbon grid. It appears that the French model is harder to reproduce than the South Australian model, and the evidence is that it could be copied organically everywhere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7

You either seem to have a problem distinguishing grid-scale energy production from energy consumption or you're intentionally muddying the waters.

It kind of feels intentional because it'd be like me arguing that grid solar is pointless because ships still burn diesel. Like you get that at this point we need to get to negative emissions to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and carbon recapture is a really energy intensive process (you basically have to spend more to recapture than you spent burning in the first place & we've still today burn fucktons of fossil fuels).

Non-grid consumption is driven by many more use-cases. Even if you had 100% nuclear or 100% solar or 100% wind in the grid, you'd still see more oil consumption today than in the past simply because of transportation which even today is predominantly fossil fuel based. EV electrification will help bring that down & that's happening but you still have non-electric trains, planes, and shipping and we don't really know how to solve that for the latter 2 which are massive contributors (much more than cars).

In fact, if you look at your own graph, the share that is consumed by nuclear has a direct inverse correlation with fossil fuels. The same is not true for other fuel sources. If we get more solar, the percentage that fossil fuels takes up seems to be largely unmoved. If we get more nuclear, there's a direct reduction in fossil fuels. If we use less nuclear you see an uptick. The reason the numbers don't look as impressive for consumption is that there's a huge amount of fossil fuels being consumed that have nothing to do with the grid. But replacing fossil fuels in the grid is hugely important because otherwise your EV car would be an expensive toy and would be a marginal benefit to the environment (grid fossil fuel power plants are marginally better at generating electricity than your smaller car engine but it's like a small % improvement vs nuclear/solar/hydro/wind which all have 0 emissions generated per KWh).

It's fascinating that South Australia is the model you've chosen as "this can be replicated" when your talking about one of the most arid, deserted, and sparsely populated places in the world that has continuous sine shine year round. Like you get that's not actually a representative scenario right & renewables are hugely dependent on geographically specific conditions? Grid-scale renewables face substantial technical hurdles in addition to policy ones. Nuclear doesn't really have technical hurdles and faces much larger political and regulatory ones but given that the US has had a movement to impede civillian nuclear reactors globally, 32 countries are still operating 443 plants globally. We can always choose different policies and choose to build 5000 reactors even if we overbuild capacity and it costs us a lot of money. If we remain with the current status quo, solar will win in the long run, but that long run concerns me. Like I have doubts we'll get to 50% freedom from fossil fuels for production (not consumption - just production) by 2050 focusing on renewables like we have been. This is a problem because as mentioned all the investments we make in EVs are pointless if the grid itself isn't carbon free. It may make you feel good but it isn't solving the problem. And on the consumption side, we need to figure out how to switch all the largest ships to nuclear reactors cause I don't know what else solves that problem & that's a huge contributor. Plastics are another huge fossil fuel consumer and I don't know what to do there either. But none of that is relevant in the discussion of solar vs nuclear as a replacement strategy for existing fossil fuel dependence within the power grid.

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