Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanny | Hacker News Reader

It's too late. Solar and wind have the popularity and the momentum. They won. The base cost to solar is also much, much cheaper than nuclear, making it easier to practically implement. And solar/wind is a better long term solution anyway in that we don't have to worry about waste management, safety, maintenance, etc. It can also be extremely decentralized.

View on HN

Germany has already been raked over the coals for going un-nuclear. I think we'll see the opinion of solar/etc change as we realize its actually much more expensive.

That's one of the stupidiest thing that has ever been done. Just because people can't design safe (enough) nuclear reactor in the 70s, it means that it's politically expedient to shut off all nuclear power station inside a country.

I would be super happy, if they'd only shut down the nuclear reactors of the 70s, for starters!

How is solar/wind + batteries cheaper than nuclear? Any numbers I saw omits batteries which would be an unfair comparison.

EDIT: I had asked the opposite question of what I intended.

You don't need batteries with nuclear, at all. There's also less habitat destruction, less issue with bird strikes, less people falling off towers, less issues with "view obstruction".

I think he meant including the batteries in the solar/wind costs, which would make nuclear (relatively) cheaper.

This is what I meant indeed. Edited original question.

there's no time to ramp up on solar unfortunately. solar requires a massive amount of area and should ideally also be built for purposes of reuse, as they do expire and need to be replaced.

there's not enough solar and batteries that exist today to capture the needed electricity. and we need energy today - not "sort of in the future" - or else there are likely to be mass deaths starting in 2050 or so when clean water is due to become an issue, assuming status quo until then (which is highly unlikely as well)

Surely a ramp up of solar would be a lot faster than a ramp up of nuclear? We might not have the battery capacity now but we could build a lot of factories in five years if the demand was there.

OTOH I doubt we have the specialists available to build more than a few nuclear plants simultaneously, and each plant appears to be a 30 year process...

"solar requires a massive amount of area"

This areas could be used, maybe(?):

http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands/

(Has anyone ever calculated the size of radioactive contaminated areas in the US and how much power that areas could produce in solar?)

"solar requires a massive amount of area"

The US, for instance, has massive amounts of undeveloped land. The majority of the population live in cities, which only make up a tiny fraction of the land mass (as you can see if you've ever flown across the US).

Its undeveloped for a reason, its wildlife habitat. Nuclear needs no such wide footprint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com