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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries

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Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.

Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.

It'd be way easier to build a few nuclear plants than it would be to build an equivalent constant energy source from solar+wind and batteries. The nuclear plants would also consume far less land area.

Damn, so we’re left with nothing, because nuclear is by far the most viable moving forward.

You need solar and batteries for peak loads, not just solar

In many places in the world, peak load does not occur during daylight hours, especially during winter

And yes, further north the days are longer but the solar capture efficiency is also much lower

True. I'm biased by living in a place where the peak load does happen during daylight hours (because that's when you need to run the A/C) and where heating usually happens via gas. Electric heating would indeed shift that dynamic (though municipal water heating would shift it the other way).

This right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.

Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.

Why would fusion reactors magically appear when the entire field of nuclear energy production is, in this scenario, essentially dead??

Not sure why pursuing fusion needs building fission reactors for energy production.

Because nuclear engineers, plant operators, radioactive mining facilities, and other types of workers that will be needed across both, need to be employed from today until fusion reactors are made.

Because the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then

Reactors need ongoing maintenance, repairs, replacement.

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