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Comment by kodfodrasz | Hacker News Reader

EROEI is not everything. This is a major step forwards a sustainable energy mix, but the major shortcomings of solar and wind are still storage and location dependence.

What I am afraid is that the nuclear renaissance may be further delayed in the west, which is what we badly need now to reduce carbon footprints, provide stable energy production and to fill te gap until fusion gets there. (Which despite the recent great news is still 30 years far, as ever since the 1970s)

As a European as much as I hope that the OPEC shall fall, I am also afraid of the turmoil it may cause as its core states are rumored to be closely linked with the funding of terrorism in the middle east for their political purposes, which recently has reached Europe as well.

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We would have needed nuclear yesterday. Right now renewables are the most promising path. New nuclear probably wouldn't make a dent until it's already too late.

Of course we need storage and backup generators for renewables. It will be mostly pumped water with gas and oil. Nuclear does not fit as a backup.

In the future, the pricing must include renewables PLUS their backup plan (e.g. a gas generator on standby) to achieve level pricing and availability.

Having a large grid and moving to more flexible consumers in order to distribute and smoothen out supply and demand will also be a huge factor.

In the end I'm positive that it can be done.

I think that it still does have a solid viable place.

It makes the most sense for base load, as well as night time load (which is mostly the same as base load).

While I agree with you for the technical merits of nuclear, I think nuclear has lost for several reasons. One of them, a cultural shift towards decentralization. It is possible now, to build decentralized power grids with lots of local storage and real-time tariff changes on a micro level. This was not just possible before.

10MW passively fail-safe nuclear power plants are feasible and have been designed, so in countries where nuclear regulation is less-than-paranoid they might be an option in a decentralized grid.

Just to point something out regarding nuclear. The announced cost overrun at Vogtle of 3 Billion USD, would pay for 7GwH of battery storage at tesla powerwall retail prices of 5500 USD per 14 KwH.

3 billion / 5500 = 545454 545454 * 14 KwH ~= 7.6 GwH.

try at google ((3 billion / 5500) * 14kwh) in Gwh

That is the current state of the Nuclear power construction world.

What sane investor is ever going to invest in power generation that is online 12 years after the decision to go?

In addition to cost overruns on new plants, estimates on the cost of decommissioning are balooning on the other end.

Sellafield: 2005 estimate: $59 billion. 2015 estimate: $155 billion.

German utilities set aside $45 billion but an additional $26 billion may be needed

The EU estimated recently that funds set aside to cover the cost of decommissioning 16 nuclear plants would fall short by $137 billion.

Source: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/soaring_cost_german_nuclear_shu...

The biggest problem nuclear culture has is the costs are very aerospace or military or healthcare or higher education like, in that they'll cost exactly how much money is available, not a penny more or a penny less.

How much should it cost in some abstract sense? How much should it cost to be safe? Who knows. But one thing is certain based on historical observation, it'll cost exactly and precisely every penny that is available, and not a penny more or less. There's a lot of profit to be made off spending each penny, and each penny will be spent.

That mindset doesn't mesh well in an industry that has competitors like coal plants or natgas peaking plants or solar plants. What does "spend every penny you can" mean at a coal plant? Or what does "a penny not spent is a penny lost" mean at a solar plant?

Meanwhile you're comparing a product that's been shipping for half a century, admittedly at various levels of technical and economic success, with vaporware under so far successful development. You can't compare the price of a commodity gallon of standard cow milk in 2016 to the price of a shipping in 2028 Intel CPU in a useful way.

Yes. And for renewables with battery backup would require 375 GwH of storage to get a reasonable two week minimum to be considered reliable backup for a equal electicity producion. You can calculate easily 24 * 14 * 1.117 Its not about just how much long sun is up, its about snowstorms and ice.

That is an unreasonable backup requirement. It is not a backup requirement for any single nuclear power plant either. Those can be taken out by snow storms too (single pylon failure on a line). Or just a refueling stop, which are quite common for nuclear power. One assumes grid resiliency through Geo-distribution and recovery. Any snow-storm taking all solar down for two whole weeks would take down any other power source as that assumes frozen rain followed by massive snow over a huge area. Such a snow storm would kill anything generating power as well as taking down massive parts of the grid. i.e. not any snow storm seen in the last 100 years would be sufficient for this.

In the end cleaning snow, while a pain in the ass, is not a real challenge. Much like desert sand cleaning, this is automatable (and small snow removing robots exist already) and would be worth the investment in northern (or extreme) southern climates.

We are basically talking about plant equivalence. You need 3x nameplate capacity and about 12 hours of battery storage for equivalency between a solar and a nuclear solution. Assuming night load is equal to day load. That assumption does not hold for a grid, night load is normally half the day load. So a system must only survive the evening peak plus the normal night load.

The quip about battery storage price basically showed that if you throw as much money at it as a single nuclear power plant then yes it is a solved problem today.

I am not a fan of Wind energy because of location and the fact that windmills have reportedly killed a lot of birds, sames goes for the underwater windmills.

I love solar though, and yes, storage dependency is there, but then, we have done no research on it. the main problem is the will to do research.

I'll give you an analogy, for pumping water to x height, we use an electric water pump. As you might be aware trees are the best water pumps available, with 0 noise they pump water all the way upto their top, some trees are just crazily huge, so if we are to harness the tech in trees to figure out how the heck are they able to move water from roots to the top, we'll have a revolution on our hands, but in the words of Henry Ford, "If I asked what people wanted they'd have said faster horses" :-)

I want to see the entire world powered by solar with microscopic solar panels which are stuck to things like walls and stuff sending electricity wirelessly (invented by Tesla) to the home/office/car etc

>"so if we are to harness the tech in trees to figure out how the heck are they able to move water from roots to the top, we'll have a revolution on our hands"

I guess the problem is not one of replication (see [1]) but of throughput. A pump that replicates the tree transpiration process would be too slow for any real energy application.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410833/synthetic-tree-hau...

Hi, just fyi, the Royal Society's position on wind farms are positive.

https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/our-positions-and-campaigns...

Actually, this pumping water idea is considered in solar.

During the day, energy is used also to pump water behind a dam. At night, when the solar output is null, the water is released and produces power via normal hydro turbines.

For example in Romania, which produces exces power [1] almost all the time, there is a plan to build a huge reservoir in mountains to use this power to pump water from the major rivers into it, thus building a reserve energy store.[2]

[1] http://www.transelectrica.ro/widget/web/tel/sen-harta/-/hart...

[2] http://www.hidrotarnita.ro/en/despre-proiect/

This is why a majority of power production in the U.K. is in and around north Wales - excess power is used for pumped hydro storage - mountains and deep lakes.

> windmills have reportedly killed a lot of birds

From what I understand, far less birds are killed by windmills than by flying into windows and power lines, yet nobody is arguing to ban those.

According to [0], windows are even worse than cats.

(I still prefer solar, though. It just feels like free energy that we're wasting by not making use of it.)

[0] http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mort...

> [turbines] have reportedly killed a lot of birds, sames goes for the underwater [turbines]

I hear this argument a lot, but it's not usually connected with concern for birds in any other context. No concern for habitat depletion from oil sands extraction, nor from acid rain, nor domestic cats, nor windows (which kill a much larger number of birds), nor global warming itself.

The effect of tidal turbines on marine life seems to be basically .. unknown. Probably dwarfed by the known impacts from fisheries and pollution. The continued existence of fish depends on putting fishermen out of business, which is politically fraught.

> harness the tech in trees to figure out how the heck are they able to move water from roots to the top

Evaporation. You can demo this on your desk with a piece of rolled up paper in a glass of water. It takes energy from the sun and air and you can't use it to pump water into a reservoir.

> microscopic solar panels

.. produce microscopic amounts of energy, although you can run a calculator or watch from that.

The water pumps in trees are solar-powered, and not efficient ones at that.

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