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Comment by jjordan | Hacker News Reader

Generation III+ reactors are orders of magnitude safer than everything else that was built before the turn of the century. China is actually leading the charge right now, with AP1000 reactors under construction. One of the plants just went live last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station

The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

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> The US needs to find a way to make building reactors affordable.

Early reactors were hailed as paragons of safety too. Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.

I mean, look. It's... fine. Go nuclear. I agree with you, that these are probably safe designs and are probably not going to poison anyone due to misanalyzed failure modes. Nuclear is carbon free power and preferable to coal and gas for sure.

But in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries, I just don't care much anymore. If we run out of ridgeline real estate and still need more power, we'll call you.

The US doesn't "need" to do anything with nuclear, at all. The nuclear industry (and its geek proponents here on HN) needs to find a way to make itself worthwhile on a balance sheet.

> in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants and handle the grid buffering with batteries

I notice you left the batteries out of your cost comparison with natural gas. Building enough battery for a carbon-free grid without fossil backup is not so cheap.

Nuclear is "not so cheap" either. But even wind and solar with legacy plants for peaking (i.e. something we can do right now without citing fantasy vaportech) is a relatively affordable 80% solution. Nuclear doesn't clear even that bar as it stands.

> But in a world where we can build out solar and wind as cheaply as we can gas plants

It might be that your world is Arizona desert.

Please do not dive into latitudianizm.

> Fukushima, remember, had a triply-redundant (or whatever) power supply to ensure that cooling power could be provided even in the event of a simultaneous meltdown and grid failure. Oops.

Yeah, and then they installed the backups below where the main plant was, rendering them completely useless. Oops.

This was a human failure. Not a technological one.

If it happened once what's to stop it happening again. Think about the type of people who design nuclear power plants. These are some of the smartest people on the planet and they still managed to make this terrible error.

And your proposal is that these future spiffy reactors will be designed by something other than... humans?

Humans design technology, a technological failure is a human failure.

The only way to make nuclear reactors affordable is to build lots of them.

And nobody wants to build lots of them because in most countries nuclear is extremely unpopular and there are issues with disposal of waste.

No, the reason people don't want to build lots of them is because there are much cheaper alternatives.

I'm not sure how they can calculate safety levels that represent anything measurable or measured accurately. Nuclear plants are black swans, they should be built deep below.

Russia builds affordable reactors. I think that US can try to ask them to build few.

There have been some strides in the past to work with Russia on nuclear. Nothing is happening in today's political climate however.

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