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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

If this helps China ween itself from coal faster then it's a huge win for the entire planet.

I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now.

Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier.

Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.

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China installed more renewable energy in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history.

It is also building more coal plants than anyone else.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

Yes, and that's great. But coal is still king and the enemy of coal is our friend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

It shouldn't be an either or equation. It should be yes, and.

Yes, globally we are using more coal now than ever.

And fossil fuel usage is still increasing.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...

You know, if parts of your country are as south as the Sahara desert, it just makes a lot of sense to install solar. Just like solar makes a lot more sense in the US than in Germany, which is more to the north than all parts of the US except Alaska and the most northern parts of WA/MT/ND/MN.

I am as pro-solar as can be, and am thrilled by the decreased costs and increased installation.

I think every building where possible should have solar on it. Carports, agrivoltaics, etc. It's a no-brainer in addressing climate change, reducing energy costs, and more self-sufficiency.

But not all the world has such solar profiles and there are also (addressable) issues with solar (storage, grid integration). This isn't a "pick one" problem. It's about feeding an energy hungry planet without cooking it, and every non carbon source should be embraced.

The problem with this logic is that solar + storage is still cheaper than nuclear.

I don't think that's generally true, especially if you build nuclear as cost effectively as China does.

China is building vastly more solar and wind than they are solar. And nuclear construction has slowed down noticeably as wind+PV has accelerated in the past few years.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2023 report outlines China has having an extensive expansion of both nuclear and renewables driving a decrease in China's coal use mid this decade.

It also asserts that China is behind 30% of all new nuclear power builds (under construction).

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uncertainty-is-key-i...

https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/execut...

(D/L full 355 page PDF) https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/42b23c45-78bc-4482-...

This gives a picture of the current rate of deployment, may not include the current year which was even more extreme. https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/661dc49b524b0dd9f1ad...

That provides nothing of substance without an attributed source for the raw data.

Taken at face value it shows 40TW or so coming online every four years or so, although the graph was created by an inummerate *.

* Here's a good question for you: why (on earth, why!!) would anyone put a continuous spline through additional power stations coming on line (very discrete, very burst data)?

If it's all the same to you I'll stick with the IEA assessment.

Agree the chart the author chose is awful.

An aot comparison is that China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor.

https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718

I have no doubt that China's renewable energy additions outweigh its nuclear additions - that's covered in the IEA report I cited.

The claim made above that I responded to was:

    And nuclear construction has slowed down noticeably

which I've yet to see supported by a credible reference.

Even if the awful chart is correct in it's raw source data it only addresses recent nuclear power coming online and not the amount currently under construction ... which may be more, less, or about the same as past construction.

If it helps I'm ambivilant about nuclear V solar other than pragmatically recognising that renewables need a small constant baseload given human consumption (which is a whole other discussion), however I'm always alarmed about figures thrown about with no credible cited data .. and awful awful charts make me queasy.

China’s new reactor construction has slowed in recent years, and their deployment of wind and PV has surged. I’m fascinated by this because I think it’s going to be one of the most important stories of the 21st century. I’d be fascinated as well if things were going the other way.

This is the point of the chart I grabbed from a collection of thirty similar charts, solely because it illustrated the same trend with slightly more recent data. You can verify these facts easily yourself in less time than it takes to post to HN, from any number of sources (which will also give you the number of reactors under construction, etc.), there’s no need to pose easily-answered questions implying that maybe the trend is incorrect due to other factors, when you can easily satisfy your curiosity about those factors with a few minutes of research. TL;DR: more intellectual curiosity, less noisy argument.

> You can verify these facts easily yourself in less time than it takes to post to HN

But can you?

Is the source official chinese stats, independant IEA auditors, the people that put out the nuclear red book .. do you even know, that is the question.

> China’s new reactor construction has slowed in recent years

Is that construction or completion (I trust you understand the distinction).

Is that in total (global nuclear reactor construction by china) or local (just those within China's mainland boundaries).

> the chart I grabbed from a collection of thirty similar charts, solely because it illustrated the same trend with slightly more recent data.

Read that back to yourself and ponder how that sounds.

TL;DR: more intellectual clarification and honest revelation of raw data, less unsourced random opinion | charts.

Exactly. You should use the IEA data about Chinese mainland reactor construction, because China’s civilian reactor construction plans are very public and reactors are big enough to see from space. Go review that and stop posting and downvoting here unless it says something substantively different than I explained in this thread.

> Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier.

Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...

China is also building enough renewable power than their grid expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2 emissions [1]. At the same time the utilization factors of the coal plants reduce each year.

This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source.

Renewables are cheap energy.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...

Honestly the hate for nuclear isn't understandable at all.

It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).

“Land use minimal” seems often to exclude the exclusion zones in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Which isn’t nothing.

Chernobyl 4000 km2/1600 sq mile, Fukushima 800 km2/300 sq mile.

https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is large because it was predominantly rural wilderness to begin with and no one cares to demand that more of it be opened up or cleaned up or otherwise have anything done with it.

The Fukushima exclusion zone is currently 143 sq miles, and half of the original Fukushima exclusion zone (a radius around a plant situated on the coast) wasn't on land. Based on the difference in capacity factor between nuclear and solar, a solar farm with the generation capacity of the Fukushima nuclear power plant would require approximately the same amount of land as the height of the Fukushima exclusion zone (including the parts over the sea), and about twice as much as the current exclusion zone.

Needless to say there are several hundred other nuclear power plants that have operated for decades and have no exclusion zone, even before you consider newer designs that reduce or eliminate the possibility of that failure mode.

Fusion power research in the EU is going to cost something like 100B euro for ITER + DEMO. No useful amount of power production is planned for decades.

Meanwhile, that money could have purchased solar + wind that would provide something like a third or even half of Europe’s electricity needs! That’s not even factoring in ongoing cost reductions over those same decades.

Fission has the same problem: it’s expensive power in the distant future versus cheap power available now.

Fusion power research is research. It's not meant to produce electricity but knowledge.

It is meant to procure electricity. That’s the entire point. The stated purpose of ITER+DEMO is to develop new power generation technologies!

Power generation technologies, not power itself.

The same argument can be made for any r&d, in lieu of spending on alternative technology that already exists. Should we have stopped spending on mRNA vaccines to pay for more socialized healthcare? Or more efficient batteries for better public transport?

No one knows the answer to any of these questions because the outcome of r&d is unknown. Some known unknowns but also unknown unknowns. So we do both/all the things to some degree and optimize the degree as we learn more. Alternatives are mostly not mutually exclusive.

Edit: formatting

More to the point, research is valuable for the indefinite future, whereas some particular power generator is only valuable during its operating lifetime.

Powering half of Europe for three decades sounds like a lot until you compare it to powering all of humanity for the next hundred thousand years.

Are we foregoing solar+wind in Europe because that money was diverted to fusion research or is it due to other reasons?

Indeed, that's a false dilemma. I could just as well have argued that the money has gone to bailing out banks, or to funding the war in Ukraine, or whatever. Not to mention that money itself is a social construct; it is created by banks and/or the state. If a (sovereign) state wants to, it can print money. Of course this has risks, and sometimes results in currency devaluation (not as frequently as some believe), but it's another way in which one can't claim that "country C invested this much money in A instead of investing in B".

Money is not fungible in that way when you are talking about 100B EUR of R&D, which is what I was kinda alluding to about expense.

Luckily we have people looking into the future and invest in things that bring us new tech.

Yes, we’re all very lucky China is investing in solar power instead of blowing taxpayer money on science fiction.

for me it's distrust of private companies to take public safety seriously even with regulatory oversight. the costs of failure are bigger with nuclear.

Human health cost of global warming isn't exactly cheap. Delayed costs are still costs. It's just my generation and my kids who have to pay while my parents generation reaped the rewards and profits up front.

I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.

You're also reaping the advantages produced by the boomer generation in technology, medicine etc. to which they themselves did not have access (or had, but much later in life).

In any case, it's disappointing to see how people are so quick to jump at any opportunity to stereotype and hate a group of people, this time not identified by their skin, but their date of birth...

That bit is obvious. The next generation benefits from the innovations of the previous generation.

But boomers knew about global warming, and refused to do even the bare minimum to help curb it. (More highways, gas guzzlers galore, effectively ban nuclear, anti sustainable urban development)

Even the one positive assertion comes with asterisks. The boomers oversaw a lengthy defunding of federal programs while wealth kept accumulating at the very top of this nation. So the resulting economic benefits haven't been all that useful to the rest of America.

Ofc, no individual bears the sin of an entire era. But we need to recognize the inherent selfishness of that era nevertheless.

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