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Comment by r0m4n0 | Hacker News Reader

What is the alternative though? I think it’s fair to question a decision but if people put their foot down when they don’t see the answer as good or clear enough then you end up with the status quo. This is the same thing that happened with housing (and building projects in general) in many larger cities. If all the housing projects are squashed for some decent alternative reason, you end up with the alternate reality which is potentially worse. City’s that have massive sprawl, people relying on cars for travel, unaffordable housing, etc.

In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I’m not sure you can scale “clean energy” at the rate we are moving.

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Clean energy is scaling far faster than gas. Coal is dead. Nuclear takes 10+ years, and the US industry is so small that it can not scale to meet future needs.

Look at what was deployed last year, in GW terms:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#:~:tex...

but note that gas produces at a capacity factor of ~50%, and solar at 25%, so scale solar down by half to better compare gas to solar.

Batteries are also here in great force. The average cost of battery-backed solar is cheaper is comparable to gas, and cheaper than new nuclear.

The main barrier to new solar and batteries are grid expansion to ship the electricity places. Putting a datacenter next to a proposed site for building solar + batteries that's waiting for its turn to get connected to the grid would probably be the fastest way to scale, if fiber can go there.

The main problem with renewables is their capacity factor (amount of time they can produce their max capacity). In the US this is ~24%, in Germany I think it's ~12% (can be wrong here). The reason for nuclear here is that it has the highest capacity factor of any form of energy (see EIA.gov).

Those numbers sound about right, but the real problem for solar in Germany is how it inflates the cost, and the intermittency. The capacity factor is just a readout of those problems.

Germany is one of the major economies with the very worst solar resources in the world. So it might actually make a lot of sense for them to build a bit of nuclear instead of stringing HVDC from Spain or Italy or wherever is sunnier. Or not, it's a very tricky projection! These costs are changing quickly, and any nuclear build is a bet not only on the current costs of technologies, but a bet on the future 30-60 years of costs.

The world added 600GW of solar last year, and is adding at a 1TW annualized rate. We do not have the capacity to add any other power source at that rate.

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