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Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

> nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe.

Fortunately, within the past few years, this is no longer true. Renewables + storage are now cheaper than nuclear as a carbon free and dispatchable resource. They are actually not only winning bids for new generation, they are actually starting to win power purchase agreements over _existing_ coal power plants and expecting to start beating existing gas plants within 5-10 years.

It's truly remarkable how fast solar, wind, and batteries have scaled up and started competing on price in the base load markets over the past few years.

The current expectation in the utility industry is that by the time next gen nuclear is commercialized, the grid will already be >90% carbon free. So even if we missed the boat on nuclear, there are other carbon free alternatives that are scaling up to meet decarbonization needs.

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90% isn’t enough, and being able to decarbonization all of it is super helpful, so yeah, even if new nuclear helps just with that last 10%, that’s still hugely important. Remember, we’re going to have to be carbon NEGATIVE because of how much time we’ve wasted.

We need every resource at our disposal.

Every time we manage to reduce carbon emissions we are also gaining more time to solve the problem.

Oh totally. If next gen nuclear can help decarbonize the last 10%, that would be great. However the tone in OP's comment seemed more like nuclear is our only hope. When in reality it will likely be something to meet edge cases rather than base load.

Nuclear is uniquely terrible at filling in the occasional time slices renewables cannot. Nuclear's economics degrade horribly when used at low capacity factor like that. They are not complementary sources.

You would use the nuclear resource constantly, just like solar and wind. Can schedule refueling and maintenance in summer when there’s plenty of sun. Additionally: thermal plants like nuclear are more efficient in the winter (particularly if you add a bottoming cycle), meaning they generate more power right when they’re needed.

But then you're paying the much higher levelized cost of nuclear (and it is much higher, a factor of perhaps 4 or more) when the solar or wind or solar/wind in short term storage are available. So this doesn't work either.

As I said, solar/wind and nuclear are not complementary. They're in competition.

It doesn’t matter. We can no longer use fossil fuels any longer, and the amount we’d need to curtail wind and solar in the wintertime, even with a day or two of storage, is so high that nuclear is competitive & extremely helpful. Northern nations are going to have to decarbonize heating as well at the time of year when solar is at its worst. They really should be using nuclear.

No, I don't think that's the case. I think if you optimize out a CO2-grid using realistic assumptions about where the costs of renewables, storage, and nuclear will be in ten years, it will optimize out to 0% nuclear. There may still be reactors operating at that time, but they will be lame ducks with their construction costs already sunk.

I think you haven't done such calculations. I have. At high latitudes, nuclear is competitive.

Or perhaps we have different ideas of what "reasonable" assumptions about costs will be in ten years.

I expect nuclear to show little or no cost decline in that time. And I expect renewables to have shown large continued declines. I expect solar to have fallen by a factor of 2. Given that sort of decline, even low efficiency seasonal storage could beat nuclear.

High latitude regions -- what latitude are you talking about? 95% of the world's population is below 50 N/S. For the few in true polar regions, I suggest solar + moderate temperature geothermal could be a good combination. Geothermal would be used in the winter, when a very low temperature heat sink is available.

In a solar dominated future, I expect those high latitude regions to eventually lose most of their energy-intensive industry. They will not be able to compete with industries at lower latitude with better access to cheaper solar power. Having expensive nuclear available there will not save them from this.

To assume nuclear won't be making any cost reductions is to basically beg the question.

We're discussing whether we should invest in nuclear. Renewables have reduced in price because of investment. Nuclear has not because we have dramatically reduced our investments there over the last several decades. If we invest again in nuclear, there will be cost reductions from the learning curve. If we don't, there won't be cost reductions.

IMHO, climate demands we invest in every promising resource. And that includes nuclear.

No, it's to respect the evidence. Nuclear has a history. That history shows a stubborn lack of progress in reducing costs. In contrast, solar has shown spectacular and sustained cost reductions.

Governments have invested very heavily in nuclear, much more so than in renewables. To pretend there hasn't been investment is disingenuous in the extreme.

Storage? You have to generate the energy to store it. Where is it coming from? Renewables don't come close to fulfilling the USA's power needs.

What is the argument you are making there? That renewables do not now come close to fulfilling US energy needs? That's true, but it's no reason to think that doing so is impossible.

Or are you arguing that they never can do so? If you are arguing that, I must disagree.

I'm curious what the external effects will be for disposal of EOL solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. They don't have the same regulation as nuclear and it seems to be ignored in these discussions -- solar panels leech extremely toxic chemicals into the water table if not properly disposed of... which we have no regulation for yet as far as I'm aware.

Nuclear has far more regulation and decades of operational experience. Newer designs are incredibly safe and offer far more power, constantly, than renewables alone.

I think we can all agree that a mix is in our future however I think the article is probably spot on that fear of nuclear technology, however misplaced, is a significant contributor to its slow adoption and greater expense.

Chemicals can be filtered out of water. Radiation cannot.

Radiation is released by specific chemicals. If what you said was true they would be easy to filter out.

No. Chemicals operate at the level of atoms and molecules. Nuclear radiation operates at the subatomic level and moves through matter into other matter.

You can hold a rock made of heavy metal in your hand which would kill you if ingested. If the rock were a gamma particle emitter, however, those subatomic particles will leave the rock and pass into your body, then through your body and out into the world beyond.

This poorly understood fact is what makes nuclear materials so dangerous. They simply cannot be compared to other "poisons" such as are used in solar plants or PC chips.

And the radiation that enters the water does nothing terrible there. If it is a alpha particle, it will scatter a few times, grab an electron and become a harmless helium atom. An electron from beta decay will be harmless after a few collisions. A positron from beta decay will annihilate rather quickly, producing to gamma photons. And those are absorbed in water after a few meters. Neutrons scatter down to thermal energies and decay after a few minutes. The water is not dangerous afterwards and there is no remaining radiation that needs to be filtered out. (For water that is quite different to e.g. steel that itself becomes activated and radioactive after sufficient radiation exposure.)

The specific radioactive pollutant I'm speaking of is tritium which has been found in discharge water from 45 of 65 tested US nuclear sites.[0] Tritum's half-life is more than 12 years, not a few minutes. [ibid]

Several studies have found a connection between ingestion of tritium-contamined water and health effects, including DNA damage that leads to increased infant mortality. [1][2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium

[1] http://www.ccnr.org/tritium_1.html#BEIR

[2] http://www.ccnr.org/tritium_1.html#UN-H

And how is Tritium, or rather super-heavy water that contains Tritium as one of its two hydrogen atoms, not a chemical?

Tritium isn't really a "separate chemical" but rather an isotope of hydrogen. Since water molecules are made of hydrogen and oxygen bound together, there is no simple way to remove the radioactive hydrogen by itself. The current best methods, from what I'm seeing online, involve separating the hydrogen and oxygen atoms into gasses and then processing out the tritiated hydrogen molecules. Apparently, it's expensive and only about 85% effective.

https://agrdailynews.com/2015/07/01/how-to-remove-radioactiv...

>...Renewables + storage are now cheaper than nuclear as a carbon free and dispatchable resource.

Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variations. For example, one estimate is that Germany would need about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is 183 times their current capacity:

>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...

>...The current expectation in the utility industry is that by the time next gen nuclear is commercialized, the grid will already be >90% carbon free.

What is your industry source for this? Getting the grid to be >90% carbon free is a huge undertaking and won't be done anytime soon.

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