Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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> can't provide power where it's needed

I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear from 200km. An off-shore wind farm could be built anywhere between 100 and 250km from my city. In-shore wind, if distributed and connected, can provide a lot of reliable with little need for constant hydro or nuclear.

Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils. Plus, if you are really clever, you can use it to host carbon-fixating algae you can bury to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.

Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.

And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.

> I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear from 200km.

Impressive, but those grids aren't cheap, and their maintenance is only getting more expensive with modern safety standards and labour costs.

> Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils.

Anything but coal is progress, sure. But hydro is still damaging enough that it's well worth replacing.

> Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.

The fuel density of fissiles is so high that that's not really an issue though - the amount of fuel mining needed is tiny.

> And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.

Solar-thermal has potential, but it still has some time/storage issues (yes it doesn't go to zero immediately at dusk, but it's not entirely aligned with demand either, and e.g. seasons are a big issue further from the equator) and location issues.

Ultimately while conventional renewables will be part of the mix - maybe a big part - it's hard to imagine we won't have cases where we need reliable, consistent power in a specific arbitrary location, and nuclear is really the only viable clean power source that can offer that. Maybe storage tech will improve to the point where that's no longer the case, but we can't rely on that - at least, not the extent of closing off nuclear research. The cost of the likes of ITER is a drop in the bucket compared to the world's total energy expenditure.

Not to sound like a fossil shill, but I want to agree with "anything but coal is progress" and suggest that natural gas, done sufficiently cleanly and only for demand curve smoothing, could be part of a 'good enough' solution in the near future.

Hydroelectric power, like geothermal, is only applicable if the geography permits it. It is also a potential WMD, so you'd better hope the area where you are building your dam is either not near a population center or is (geo)politically stable.

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