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Comment by throwaway5959 | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear would be more expensive than the solar, wind and battery storage tech we’re building out now. Please do some research before you comment on posts here, this isn’t X.

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Renewables don't scale and don't have the energy density to satisfy the demand that would require replacing fossil fuels. It's not even close. We don't know when that new battery tech will be ready, it could easily be another decade or more... so the real question is do we want to risk climate change more and more, or should we use nuclear to replace fossil fuels immediately while the renewable tech matures.

California gets most of its electricity from renewables, a small amount of nuclear and the balance is natural gas and imports. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

Even in summer CAISO admit it's only getting 47% from renewables. YTD from the December report is 35%

https://www.caiso.com/market/Pages/ReportsBulletins/Renewabl...

Only 47%. lol OK. Let’s check back in five years from now and see where CA is at.

I’ve explained here before how the cost of installations like tesla megapacks we have in CA + solar is still significantly cheaper than nuclear. With a much faster ROI.

Nuclear makes no financial sense in CA.

Plus no radioactive waste to manage for thousands of years, which no one seems to factor into the cost.

Cheap solar is a meme. Zero solar farms can provide their sticker output overnight after an overcast winter day. Most can't provide their sticker output all night after a sunny summer day! Of course, these shortfalls can't result in blackouts, so instead we simply keep extra backup capacity on standby. The studies never price this in, but you can rest assured that the energy companies do.

Thankfully, California's main problems in the southern California region is the need for electricity to run air conditioners during the day, so that's not the worst problem. Nuclear would be better but there are other problems with it that make it unviable.

California's own regulations will soon be adding a lot of evening/night-time demand [0]. Surely it's a problem that a huge amount of demand will be coming online just as solar output is falling to nil?

Nuclear plants have been powering France for 50 years, of course it is viable!

[0] https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/us/cal...

Nuclear is only expensive because we've spent decades bureaucratically strangling it with red tape.

The technology exists to safely do nuclear at low cost. We just need to remove the billions of dollars wasted in intentionally-bad regulatory processes that were written into law to prevent nuclear from being successful.

There are only a few countries that can deal with their nuclear trash in a semipermanent solution and those never had much and are relativ save from problems that could happen.

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