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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Greenpeace has been known to fight nuclear power, as have far left green parties. It really saddens me.

Reaching good power output with renewable energies is laughable. I keep hearing that germany generated a lot of power with wind, like 80%, but it lasted one week, and it makes me really wonder about the accuracy of that news. Wikipedia is moot about germany wind energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany

The amount of solar panels, dams and wind turbine you need to reach the power output of a nuclear plant is ridiculous. I wish we would consider the cost of kWh for each non carbonized energy.

A french consultant showing cost graphs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuzGG9W7obs

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Nuclear is cheap if governments back the loans (all the cost is up front so a 2% or 5% interest rate has a massive impact on final project cost), and if the projects can be delivered consistently on budget (conspicuously not the case for any of the most recent designs with passive safety features).

Not cheap, but probably still cheaper than renewables, per kWh.

Also the problem with renewables is the power output curve, which are unpredictable because of sunlight and wind fluctuations, which will be compensated with coal/gas energy. Less of a problem with nuclear.

In the UK solar and onshore wind are about 5p/kWh, offshore wind about 7p/kWh, nuclear about 7-10p/kWh, depending on generation of reactor and scale of order, so more expensive per kWh. But you’re right that clearly once you include the cost of grid integration, taking wind or solar above 30-50% will incur significantly higher costs. I think in the UK it’s about 20p/kWh now for solar or wind with four hours of battery firming for example. But the difference is those costs are continually falling each year, whereas nuclear has stayed the same or risen. I would still renew nuclear personally, to provide maybe 15-25% of the grid, but it’s not enormously obvious. I think by the time the nuclear stations are built renewables will probably be cheaper, I just favour it as a hedge. Although in the UK we’ve had some nuclear development companies pull out and ask for more money even after agreeing to build at 10p/kWh, so that may not work out in reality.

Nuclear is much more expensive per kWh than renewables.

The intermittency of renewables renders nuclear unable to coexist with them. Nuclear is inflexible and wants to be able to sell all the time, but can't do that when renewables crash the price on the power market. You might say this is a renewable problem, but it's just as much a problem of nuclear being too inflexible to adapt to a dynamic power market.

Maybe that's a feature. Forcing to make more efficient use of energy.

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