Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

The way I've see, for all the noise, the world has a simple choice: do we build nuclear power everywhere now, or in 30 years once we've destroyed the environment completely?

The solution to our problems has been here all along, we just need to grow a pair and get it done. Putt-putt-ing around building windmills and dams to generate our power is not only an exercise in futility but one rooted in the fact that there's no urgency. If we really needed to end fossil fuel consumption now for some reason, you can be damn sure you'd see cooling towers being built outside your window right now.

View on HN

While the idea of increasing nuclear power is one of the leading solutions, it still has to get past some negative fall-out from previous events (i.e. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island). These incidents are the reason why the law (in the U.S. anyway) makes it hard to build one and why there hasn't been one built in the last thirty years. The other critical point nuclear power plant supporters have to break is the popular idea of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The fear of nuclear meltdowns is so great that coal-plants can't build hyperbolic cooling towers (one of the most efficient type) because the public at large believe the towers are nuclear reactors.

To sum it all up, until the public at large welcomes the idea of nuclear power and gets past previous nuclear mishaps, you won't see many reactors built in America.

Apparently there are 60 new reactors in the licensing process right now.

Luckily, reality is a lot more complex than that, you can't reduce it to that simple choice.

Nuclear power is getting a fresh start, but even if a lot of nations committed to constructing more of them right this instance, we wouldn't see the results of that until decades from now because you would first have to invest in the capability of manufacturing nuclear power plants, because the current capability is very low.

And even if you build out the nuclear capacity, you would still need other power sources, because nuclear power plants yield power constantly, but our power consumption isn't linear, it varies a lot over the day, and you need to adjust production to consumption.

So why bet on a single horse? We need lots of alternatives to complement each other, there's no golden hammer.

I agree that fission is a powerful technology that environmentalist killed 30 years ago and now can't seem to admit they may have been wrong.

I think fission is another stepping stone that we can use in our climb up the energy ladder, but I would hate to see us stop there. It surprises me that lack of proponents that fusion has. I'd like to see a lot more resources thrown toward fusion research.

Why is it an exercise in futility? Hydro power accounts for a huge amount of our power already, and there's enough in wind and solar for the rest of it. Nuclear is presently quite expensive and takes a very long time to build. There are new technologies being pursued, but there are new technologies being pursued in wind and solar, too.

Indeed, we shouldn't forget economic side of this.

Nuclear fission is physically the most powerful power source we can control now, that's true. But it is very capital intensive.

Solution is not a single technology, it's a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, natural gas, nuclear etc.

6.1% is a huge amount of our power? The US generates 3x more electricity from nuclear than hydro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008_US_electricity_genera...

Most of the cost-effective places to build hydroelectric dams are already utilized. Also, the lakes created behind the dams displace people.

By choosing a more expensive form of power generation, the economy is impacted. This is an often-overlooked external cost of renewables.

It's 19% of worldwide electricity generation.

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/wuhy.html

Furthermore, hydropower may be throttled up and down, such that the combination of hydro + wind and solar can hit penetrations near 50% before more energy storage is needed.

Also, wind power is less expensive on a kwhr delivered basis than coal. http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Ia.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com