Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurelwu | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is far from being cheap. Take a look at the exploding costs at Flamanville [0], Olkiluoto[1], Hinkley Point C[2]. Those 3 Plants alone already cost more than 1/50 of the 2 trillion which you claim would have been sufficient.

Decommissioning of 1990 retired german nuclear powerplant Greifswald is still not even close to being finished.

newly installed PV is far cheaper than nuclear and I'll exclude storage/PtX here as usually when nuclear prices are looked at they also ignore decommissioning costs which are probably way higher than future storage technologies will be.

[0] http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Weld-repairs-to-delay... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-olkiluoto... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

View on HN

It's the economy of scale. Nuclear costs are do to limited production of plants and the strictness of regulations. The costs could be lowered significantly if plants were built at scale. As is almost every plant is one of kind in the west where as China they are cheap because they just crank out the same design that has all the engineering and construction all figured already which is the bulk of construction costs.

"and the strictness of regulations"

Are you saying we should have laxer standards?

economies of scale only work to a certain point. You point to China as an example of doing it right. But China is really just in the same position as the us, but earlier in the process. They’re cranking out nuclear facilities, but are probably equally unprepared to decommission them when the time comes.

Nuclear is a very important technology. It probably doesn’t make sense to scale it up as a solution right now.

This is somewhat true for solar as well but for opposite reasons. Economically, it seems better to perpetually wait as the price and efficiency keep improving. Buying panels now and getting an extra year of service vs waiting a year and getting a better model is often not worth it.

(On the individual scale. There are obviously macro goals that incentivize solar investment now).

Well, in China nobody can tell you where you can stick the radioactive part of your "economy of scale".

Or the reactor facilities themselves, because in China it's relatively easy to use any amount of land, without regard of who owned it before. Then you really don't need to tailor the plants to each location...

AFAIK no democratic country with significant nuclear energy has sufficiently solved the waste storage problem, and it is a very active problem in a lot of countries I know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com