Comment by temac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temac | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear fission could, obviously -- I've yet to see anybody propose a reasonable alternative (with a known tech, not just hypothetical handwaving) to cover our enormous energy needs -- and even then some work is needed to migrate direct fossil consumption to electric. Wind and solar consumes ridiculous amount of spaces and the storage is not solved (we need it for too for other purposes, maybe not in the same form, but that does not make the problem disappear for existing usages...). Without storage, it is not a solution (it does not prevent it from becoming one in the future, but we need to start to build things now, while storage is being studied). Hydro is used already, and developing it to the max will not be enough. Nuclear fusion is not there yet.

So even with pervasive nuclear fission we would have a shitload of problem to solve, but at least that would be an immediate first step, and could be replaced if we eventually figure out how to replace it. We haven't figured out that yet.

Storage isn't the problem. The problem is that the governments 'own' all the nuclear material and anybody operating a nuclear plant is utterly dependent on government actors to do something with the 'waste'. It is illegal if the plant operators went about fixing the problem on their own.

And since the government refuses to solve the problem or even really look deeply into solutions then it's not getting solved and it isn't ever going to get solved.

Because of this the solutions to recycle spent fuel is still in it's infancy. Nobody is allowed to do anything, the government isn't really interested in allowing nuclear power to be competitive, so it's just not happening. No money, no motivation.

People in the industry are not going to invest millions in developing these breeder reactors and other ways to recycle fuel if they will never be allowed to use them.

Theoretically you could recycle the fuel to the point to where most of it is spent and isn't much of a danger. Recycle the fuel 60 or a 100 times. Then mix it with clay and cook into into a ceramic so that they are safe to handle, transport, and store. Massively reduce the danger and radiation levels.

Despite all the talk and rhetoric about CO2 emmissions you see coming from the state the petroleum industry is still king. People inside and outside of government are making a lot of money and they have no interest in seeing that go away.

The dirty secret with things like solar and wind is that in order for them to work reliably they need to have large number of natural gas generators. Because of this and other issues they really pose little threat to total fossil fuel consumption.

Nicely said. That last point tells you why they get support from oil companies. It's empty climate signaling. I'd like to see an oil company bet on nuclear.

My understanding is that models show that with a large enough geographically diverse combination of wind and solar almost no storage is required. Furthermore, with the cost of HVDC transmission lines dropping so quickly it's becoming economic to build such large networks.

Models shows precisely the inverse at least in Europe (there is mostly no independent abundance of wind/solar, at least way not enough)

It even shows today with even quite small capacity disturbing market prices. That's why even "low" production costs can make wind not profitable; you end up selling your production with very low prices (because there is some overproduction), in some cases even negatives. You would not have that problem with storage. But then the production costs of wind+storage are already high...

With a “large enough” network, sure, but you just defined your way out of the problem. The real question is, how large exactly the network need to be. Is the required installed capacity 2 times average use? 10 times? 50 times?

Networks are expensive and not resilient.

> The dirty secret with things like solar and wind is that in order for them to work reliably they need to have large number of natural gas generators. Because of this and other issues they really pose little threat to total fossil fuel consumption

Of course they do. Because storage is not solved. That's why I said they are not a replacement without storage (among other reasons)

As for the economical cases, nuclear is competitive in the long term if we do not require stupid high rentability. Given wealth is extremely strongly correlated to energy consumption, and we will have to get rid of fossil (even if we don't want, we will be forced to), the economy will restructure anyway, and we will be forced to do rational things rather than wishful thinking economy based on ridiculous hypotheses (eternal exp. growth)

So in the long term, the governments will not really be able to allow or disallow things by incentives, if the world simply does not have any other solutions. That's not even what all the governments are doing today. China is building some nuclear power plants.

In the U.S. it's also quite hard to get permission to develop those reactors.

Several years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a dozen advanced reactor companies, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people said their biggest problem was that the NRC required several hundred million dollars worth of design work before even taking a look. Then they gave a flat yes or no. If yes then you still only had a paper reactor, and if no then you were out of business.

That's a difficult sell to investors. They said just a more phased process would help a lot. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and was uninterested in climate change.

>The dirty secret with things like solar and wind is that in order for them to work reliably they need to have large number of natural gas generators. Because of this and other issues they really pose little threat to total fossil fuel consumption.

The reality is that capital and fuel costs make running coal and gas plants uneconomical because wind and solar do not have a fuel input and low capital costs. Building coal plants is very expensive therefore they need to amortize their capital expenses over as many hours as possible, they have to keep running even if they make a loss per unit of energy. Building a gas plant is very cheap but the fuel costs are significantly higher compared to renewables. What happens is that the gas plant reduces its output during times of high renewable energy instead of keeping it running to amortize costs. In other words it is more economical to run both gas and renewables combined than either of them alone. Your "dirty secret" is just a big fat lie.

> Wind and solar consumes ridiculous amount of spaces

Yet the ocean and deserts are massive. More than enough room in the North Sea to provide enough kWh to power Europe each year. More than enough room in Saudi Arabia to power India (not to mention the indian ocean), more than enough room in China to power the far east, in the outback to power Austrailia

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