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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

Not needing storage is a real advantage. I see nothing "dishonest" about pointing that out.

It's an advantage if you assume the current grid is a great setup and shouldn't be changed. With the increasing frequency of severe weather events taking down the grid in areas, the decentralized storage that a more renewables-focused grid would probably require would probably be a good thing to have.

No, not needing storage is an advantage under any conceivable scenario. Storage of any kind is bulky, expensive, and dangerous.

As long as you solve the waste issue. If you can't solve nuclear waste, cheap batteries, solar, and wind will beat you every time.

And you better be able to deliver for under 8 cents/kwh, which is where battery backed renewables are currently at (and that will continue to fall).

Yes. The waste issue has already been more or less solved.

Whether the cost can be made sufficiently cheap is another question. Inflation adjusted estimates have (somehow) been climbing since 60s when we actually built nuclear plants.

Can you provide a citation for waste being solved? My understanding is that there is no long term storage facility, all waste is being stored in "temporary" facilities on site, and that any reactor capable of reprocessing nuclear waste ("burning it up") has never been operated at commercial scale.

https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/nucle...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-environment-i...

France had been recycling waste for decades.

The US is building the Yucca facility, but politics have held it up. Generally, the nuclear waste problem is political not technical.

And once nuclear waste becomes more than an academic question, the solution will magically appear.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

Unfortunately, without a legitimate method of disposing of nuclear waste today (despite France reprocessing some nuclear waste, they still bury large amounts underground) at the scale we've generated it, I'll continue to oppose nuclear power and advocate for renewables and battery storage.

Nuclear advocates hand wave away the waste concerns as "solvable", yet they're never solved. You can't craft policy in such a way, as it's just yet another example of kicking the can to future generations. If you can prove that recycling facilities are in place and ready to accept waste on day 1 of a new facility coming online, that would be cause to advocate for nuclear.

Your point is reasonable as stated for sure. I'd like to add to the conversation that there's a used fuel repository facility in Finland that's under construction now and is very likely to be the first permanent solution for nuclear waste [1]. The geologists I've talked to are very confident that deep geologic storage is a solid technical solution.

I'd also like to point out that the magnitude of nuclear waste is extremely small, due to the unbelievably energy density of nuclear fuel (2 million times more energy per mass than chemical energy). All the waste ever generated in the US fits in a football field a few stories high. It's incredibly small, albeit dangerous stuff. But that means it's even more reasonable to think we can bury it responsibly, without kicking the can.

There's also been good storage of waste in salt deposits down at WIPP [2]. We know that water moves centimeters in there in hundreds of thousands of years, so the radioisotopes will be well contained outside the biosphere until well after they've decayed to harmlessness.

I'd also plead with you to advocate nuclear energy in addition to renewables and battery storage. We need them all. You obviously are aware that batteries and vast fields of solar and wind and hydro have land/waste/cost/and carbon footprints of their own. I beg you to fairly compare those footprints with the footprints of nuclear energy. Nukes and the intermittent renewables must be partners in our major quest to decarbonize.

Future generations will be much happier with us if we stop emitting carbon than if we safely bury tiny amounts of radioactive waste.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

Agree with all of your points, and spoke with my Illinois legislators when they were considering subsidies to keep at-risk existing commercial nuclear generators operating.

My concern with new generators is that it takes at least a decade to construct one. Can someone build one faster, cheaper, and manage the waste stream? I'm all for it.

Distributed battery storage is getting cheaper than upgrading the interconnects right now though. Never mind the generation, it is getting cheaper than the wire.

Is it any more dangerous or complicated than diesel fuel, generators, and keeping pumps and a fuel supply around?

If they had pointed that out, it would have been included, and thereby pointed out.

My point is that it was omitted.

And that it seems dishonest to omit it when making a comparison with renewable against reactor designs yet to be tested while battery prices fall through the floor.

"Always on" means "doesn't need storage" pretty much by definition.

It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison anyway.

In general, nuclear lends itself to providing reliable baseload power, whereas storage is most economic when used for peaking or responding to contingencies on the grid.

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