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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be about fission not fusion. Spending billions on fission research seems wasteful when you could leverage that into wind solar projects whose profits could then be reinvested into even more clean energy.

Add in leverage and say 2 billion in research could represent 10-20+ billion worth of clean energy investments before the fruits of this research could come online. And even then you would need to spend even more money actually building something useful.

This could be my own bias talking but fission has seen 100+ Billion in R&D. I have my doubts this is going to move the needle much.

PS: I am more than open to any counter arguments you have...

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Seems silly you were downvoted without being responded to. But I do believe you are misinterpreting/misstating facts. If you take into account externalities, fission is cleaner and kills fewer people than other renewables (and both are much better than fossil fuel). This is true even after including the grossly incompetent (but thankfully rare) disasters in the history of nuclear energy. There are a couple of research paper references that always pop up in conversations like this about deaths per MWhour for each type.

Even storage of waste is a solved problem: bury it in dry old mines in seismically dead locations, or start moving to the known novel reactor types.

Politically, the issue is much different though...

Costs are the real issue not worker safety. The trucking industry kills lots of people and nobody saftyreally cares. So, it’s really a straw man argument about non issues.

Really, I would have no problem with Nuclear if it was cheap, but nobody can get it to be cheap (not even China) even without the need to load follow. We need cheap power and supplemental load following / storage. But, Nuclear is simply well behind the curve on both sides of the equation. Safe, stead production at 4c/kWh without subsidies would be a game changer or load following at much higher prices.

Now, if the economics looked great then sure, but this stuff is all about minor improvements that don’t really change the game.

Skimming the first Google result for amortized cost, nuclear seems cheap: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electri...

However, I do not have good enough background to vet the source well. Are they missing something obvious?

Also, I was not talking about worker safety, rater about everyone's health, from the miner to the person living near the power plant.

Were you looking at production costs instead of levelized costs? That page notes "A new nuclear power plant, for example, has one of the highest levelized costs, particularly compared to coal and natural gas-fired plants, and its costs are exceeded only by certain renewable plants, such as offshore wind and solar power, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA)."

Another issue is that the page is from 2012 and its numbers for renewables, solar PV in particular, overestimated costs for 2017. Solar PV costs declined much faster than the EIA estimated.

Seriously, if I see another push for wind (!) on here, I might just loose it. It’s like saying let’s use sail boats in the era of supersonic travel.

>It’s like saying let’s use sail boats in the era of supersonic travel.

the era of supersonic travel?

I mean, sure, supersonic flight is /technically possible/ but it is exceedingly rare that the sound barrier is broken by traveling civilians.

My understanding is that the problem mostly has to do with air resistance increasing with the cube of speed; this could be overcome by going higher, above the atmosphere, but nobody has figured out how to do that at subsonic flight costs, either.

I mean, it is kind of sad; one of those technologies that we created, but that then turned out to not be as practical as the older stuff for everyday use.

That’s like complaining about shoes or buildings as old tech. Wind is the second cheapest power source behind solar in ideal conditions and operates when the sun is down.

Which is why countries and companies that don’t give a fuck about the environment are all over it. It took a long time to beat coal, but games over it won now it’s just a question of time.

However, replacing natural gas as peaking power that’s still in the works.

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