Comment by javcasas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javcasas | Hacker News Reader

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> What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?

Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?

I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.

BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.

The carbon payoff for the average NPP is 6 weeks. The idealized payoff for a solar panel is 5 years, in practice its 10 in the tropics trending to 20 on a line about where SF or Barcelona is. And a solar panel on average only lasts 20 years.

Show your sources.

My sources say: nuclear power 20-33 months, coal power 33 months, peat power 26-27 months, gas power 21-27 months, wind power 7 months and photovoltaic power 60-95 months.

https://inis.iaea.org/records/kgzhn-ark54

Which means, among other things, that solar is already net negative before nuclear is built and starts to produce.

And also, solar panels are rated to 25 years 80%, which means they retain 80% of initial production after 25 years, not "explode after 20 years and you have to replace them".

But even better: let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin.

> let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin

During the last decade Europe went for wind and solar, but wind is quite expensive to build. Solar was expensive but is now a lot cheaper, mostly because it's mass produced in China using cheap, still quite coal heavy, electricity.

Still solar and wind are weather dependent and need to by supplemented by fossil electricity production in Europe in the winter months, which is why we see these days market electricity prices around 300 Euro/MWh in Europe. (The plan, decade ago, was to use cheap Russian gas to supplemented solar and wind. Things didn't go according to the plan).

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