Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

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Meanwhile in Italy, the whole renewables discussion is gaslighted by "we should actually consider nuclear" and "wind turbines ruin the panorama".

I'm not against nuclear per se, but it's like this part of italians don't realize that:

1. if you decide to make a power plant today, it won't be online before the 2050s, in the best case scenario. It's very difficult to bring nuclear plants online, especially in the west. Even the countries with the capital and know-how (US and France) see more projects cancelled than brought online. I think US has put online a single nuclear plant in 20 years, France not a single one.

2. Nuclear needs tons of water, we have less and less of it as it rains less and global warming doesn't accumulate enough snow in the alps (which generally melts in the summer), our rivers are literally dry stone most of the year.

3. Renewables can be attached to the grid (or close to where they are needed) in the span of few months and with very little know-how required.

4. Money isn't limitless, building a 20B+ nuclear plant (realistically 50 knowing these projects + Italy) means this budget won't be available for the next decade on projects that could bring benefits immediately.

I'm sure that Italy and Germany, which are manufacturing heavy countries that need lots of energy cannot rely renewables alone, of course nuclear should be considered, but hell, in my region (around Rome), 95% of our energy comes from imported natural gas, I'm sure we could invest some more in that.

I’m anti nuclear on cost reasons but that’s excessively pessimistic. Nuclear can use seawater for cooling, and being colder offsets the cost premium of using salt water.

Your 2050’s comment assumes a level of dysfunction that’s presumably exaggerated. Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.

The cost of canceled nuclear projects is generally quite low compared to lifetime subsidies of nuclear. Nuclear may be an inefficient use of government resources, but it’s also offset a staggering amount of emissions and the subsidies tend to end back up in the local economy recuperating some of the expense. IMO, there’s probably dumber things your government is doing that are worth fighting instead.

> Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.

The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it.

There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an anti-nuclear referendum that's been voted 3 decades ago. So there is a lot that needs to be changed, starting from having a public voting.

Hinkley Point C, in UK, has ballooned it's cost from the planned 18B pounds to a 43B pounds in the span of a decade. These projects always go overbudget, badly.

Depends on what you consider the start date. Practically speaking there’s some investigation into building nuclear in Italy that already occurred but using that as a start date isn’t meaningful here. Similarly the announcement you point to was a long way from having everything required to actually build a power plant.

Until there’s actual funding talking about nuclear doesn’t really mean anything. Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.

> These projects always go overbudget, badly.

Using the worst examples means there’s something very wrong with each of them.

> Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.

Well there you are, then: projects experience delays in construction approval and run into other unexpected delays, which extends a ~10yr estimate.

The 10 year estimate comes from a range of projects including some that go very badly and others that didn't.

You can always pick worse numbers by using a smaller sample of projects, but it isn’t necessarily meaningful to do so. California’s high speed rail has gone far worse than Italy’s projects, America is currently comically bad at large construction projects.

They go over budget because regulatory burdens are very high, not because of any fundamental unknowns in deploying the technology. A motivated national government could reduce the cost substantially.

You make it sound like the regulatory burdens don't have a purpose and are merely annoyances.

Regulations of course have a purpose but they are often (a) out of date with respect to current technology (b) not well well designed to accomplish their intended purpose in the first place or ignored 2nd and 3rd order effects and (c) perverted to extract rents for incumbents at the expense of new market entrants. Certainly (a) is true in most places with respect to nuclear technology.

Australia fortunately has a political neutral research organisation (CSIRO) whose job is to estimate the net cost benefit for various government programs.

Detail and detail on cost benefit analysis https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2024/December/Nucl...

Needless to say not at all cost effective to go nuclear at this point. There's no reason that wouldn't hold similarly in other nations since the scale of the difference in costs are so huge too.

Hasn't stopped certain parties from doing the same thing as Italy though, the CSIRO being credible really hurt their efforts though, Murdoch press tried & failed to discredit them with ferocity.

Worst part is, even if price comes down I think they further poisoned the idea of nuclear in Australia because their plan was brazenly to keep the coal & gas plants running in the meantime rather than spend money on wind/solar. They didn't even make an effort for their timelines and costs to be remotely believable.

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