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Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

Build more nuclear power plants since wind and solar do not provide dispatchable baseload and batteries don’t scale enough.

No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.

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Baseload power comes at the expense of renewable power, the latter of which is much cheaper, much faster, and less riskier to deploy than nuclear. Peaking gas plants are much quicker to build than nuclear and should tide us over until grid storage (of all kinds) catches up – which looks to be around 1-2 decades at current scaling and about the lead time for a nuclear power plant

> No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.

The dollar density is also huge.

Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.

All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.

> Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive

I heard that might be a regulatory problem more than anything. Doesn't change the reality, but it's US-specific.

I don't think I'm anti-nuclear power. The only thing that works against nuclear, in my opinion, is the time it takes to build. A lot of solar and wind and battery can be built in the decade (if not more) that it seems to take a nuclear power station to be built.

Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?

Why does it take time to build though? Is it a technical reason, or economic and regulatory reasons? If the latter, we could probably go faster if as a society we prioritized it.

I think nuclear power should be expanded.

I don't think nuclear power centrals should be rushed.

I have heard the argument that the standard nuclear plant have the inefficiencies of any large building project, like building a big bridge. You never get the optimizations of mass production that you get in a factory that produces tens of thousands of solar panels or lots of wind turbines. I guess that is what SMR is trying to solve. I don’t know how that is going.

50 years ago France build more than 50 reactors in a decade.

This is not pertinent, for many reasons: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...

Nuclear is seriously unfriendly stuff. Just read up on all the lessons (and coverups) the US nuclear industry learned about making nuclear fuels. The metals involvsd are toxic AF and unforgiving of any stupidity. We have a ton of regulations around this because businesses of the past just dumped things like mildly radioactive tailings to blow around in the wind.

Japan's average build time is apparently 5 years[0]. It depends on the regulatory environment and the expertise available.

[0] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

You don't need dispatchable baseload and batteries do scale enough. If nuclear was cost competitive, I'd support it, but it's just not. Look at how much renewables China is building vs. nuclear, if you think this opinion is somehow political in nature, it's not.

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