Hacker News Reader

Comment by andromeduck | Hacker News Reader

We could have had nuclear but nope too scary!

We do have nuclear, and have had it for decades. Concerns about what to do with the waste are indeed an issue, but the bigger problems is nuclear hasn't been cost competitive with coal and more recently natural gas. It is complex trade-off and just blaming it on NIBMY sentiment is not really engaging the issue.

> We do have nuclear, and have had it for decades.

Not enough. Some countries that had it even ran from it recently (like Germany).

If we hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace, we'd be 50% nuclear (instead of 20%) today. If we had continued the accelerating pace, we'd be 100% nuclear. Today. Not in 2050, today. Compare to solar, which only recently broke the 1% mark.

Nuclear has gone from very cost-competitive (5c/kWh) to not at all cost-competitive (alternatively: "financially risky," often shortened to "risky" in a disingenuous attempt to imply something else) because we gave NIMBYs and self-styled environmentalists a free pass to introduce arbitrary delays into the construction process, and they did, and it was very effective at raising the price / financial risk. That is what people mean when they say that we decided to stop building nuclear.

The typically socialised decommissioning costs, far in excess of estimates, of nuclear usually seem to more than cancel out any cost competitiveness.

I was quite pro-nuclear in the 80s and 90s...

Well, if you agree with the comment you're replying to you'd logically still have to be pro nuclear now. Because the costs of our fossil fuel energy production seem like they'll be the death of our civilization.

I've never advocated sticking with fossil though. Nuclear could have bought us lots of extra time to deal with the rest - if all the coal generation had got replaced by nuclear say in the 90s - but that bird flew ages ago.

Personally, for most of the 21st century I've seen wind, solar, tidal and (pumped) hydro as increasingly more suited - far faster to bring onstream, and without quite the same scale of NIMBY delays of nuclear. A network of micro generators seems more suited to the adoption of community heat and power which also seems an essential part of reaching zero emission - as seen today in Ireland's emissions plan.

... until we collectively decided to stop leveraging the upsides of nuclear and it turned into just a money pit, rather than a plausible investment. Yeah, I hear you. FWIW I consider it a lost cause these days too. It didn't have to be that way.

Sounds like China is making a go for it, though. Maybe in 20 years they can come build some plants to save us from the duck curve.

China is helped there that they can centrally require it. I doubt they have quite the NIMBY issue we typically get for major projects...

At least we have plans to deal with nuclear waste.

What is our plan to deal with carbon waste?

Get HBO to make a dramatic miniseries about it?

The anti-nuclear scare was saddening. We could have had multiple per-state with cheaper electric and more efficient and resilient power grids by now.

I find it a little ironic that green activists from 40 years ago are the ones who indirectly caused so much harm.

I've started thinking that people with good intentions are often the most terrible because they will never question their methods (or results) as their goal is holy and justifies all.

The problem is that even if we had way more nuclear, we'd just use it all.

We need to start leaving carbon in the ground. Try to burn less fossil than the year before, instead of setting record after record. All green energy initiatives are just red herrings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com