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Comment by Kuinox | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and move away to what ?

LED lights? Highly isolated apartment buildings? Revised urban planning to accommodate a post-commuting work-life? Other energy saving technology? In EU we have a comfortable living off consumption levels that in the US would qualify as church mices' (still not enough to prevent collapse though: https://web.archive.org/web/20140913032823/http://graduatein...)

> LED lights?

you need to be addressing the larger chunks of these pie charts:

https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers

Switching to LED lights (and reducing usage) is one example of low-hanging fruit that is easily achievable without affecting lifestyle much. The fat needs to be trimmed in all areas.

Yeah, did I mention "Highly isolated apartment buildings"? (I did ;)

In fact, there are apartments here in Amsterdam that stay a cool 20C in winter with little or no heating at all, just the warmth from the water boiler flue running through the heat exchanger of the air ventilator.

Nationally sponsored infrastructure plans to replace existing buildings with energy class A at scale would put a big dent on energy consumption.

Solar, wind, storage. Fusion at a distance.

EDIT: "20 years from now" is still faster than any nuclear generator getting built.

So a mixture of unreliable, expensive, and "20 years from now".

Don't forget the chemical byproducts of producing solar and storage.

All options are trade offs, and I don't understand why "perfect" keeps preventing us from just getting "better".

With many recent breakthroughs, fusion is now seen as very viable and just needs funding to finish it off. The last of the hard problems are solved and they just need to pull it all together and "adjust for rounding errors", so to speak.

ITER won't become fully operational until 2035 and that is just for conducting experiments. We are still decades from commercial fusion power plants.

Nuclear power plants take at most 5 years to build from the time we break ground until the reactor's hooked up to the grid. Look at how fast the Chinese are building them, or how fast e.g. the French or the US were at building them in the 60s and 70s.

That it takes so long now in the west is because we're not building enough of them, thus losing the advantage of experienced workforces and inability to leverage mass-manufacturing of standardized designs.

It's also slow because of onerous safety regulation seeking to make nuclear too safe, when we consider the result of a slowdown in commissioning of new reactors, thus increasing the reliance on coal killing way more people than if we were to hypothetically mass manufacture relatively unsafe reactor designs from the 60s today.

>Look at how fast the Chinese are building them, or how fast e.g. the French or the US were at building them in the 60s and 70s.

"The country [China] has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.)

> That it takes so long now in the west is because we're not building enough of them, thus losing the advantage of experienced workforces and inability to leverage mass-manufacturing of standardized designs.

Can you provide evidence that the cost of nuclear would be comparable to solar and wind if built at scale?

> It's also slow because of onerous safety regulation seeking to make nuclear too safe, when we consider the result of a slowdown in commissioning of new reactors, thus increasing the reliance on coal killing way more people than if we were to hypothetically mass manufacture relatively unsafe reactor designs from the 60s today.

I'm unsure you can sell nuclear to the public or politicians as "it's expensive because it's too safe". It's unlikely we're going to relax safety regulations when cheaper alternatives already exist (solar, wind, natural gas, storage). We're not increasing our reliance on coal, we're temporarily increasing our reliance on natural gas (which is driving coal and nuclear out of business).

EDIT:

"but pointed out that it taking anywhere near 20 years to build a nuclear power plant is clearly off by an order of 4x at the very least."

I’d prefer nuclear reactors not be built in the developed world to Chinese standards.

I made no claims about overall cost, but pointed out that it taking anywhere near 20 years to build a nuclear power plant is clearly off by an order of 4x at the very least.

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