Hacker News Reader

Comment by greatpatton | Hacker News Reader

Strange that the article is not talking about the latest french reactor Flamanville 3. This EPR reactor is already 10 years late and will cost more than 13b€ For 160MW. And this just for construction cost and not for running/dismantling it.

Then I wonder what practical exemple would support that after 15 years a solar PV installation has to be rebuilt.

View on HN

It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it. Thus it is quite insignificant.

But solar failure rate and cost will never go down?

> It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it.

It's the only new one, based on designs of early 90s and earlier. The others are mostly all old and many with completely outdated designs from the 70s. Many wouldn't survive the crash of a larger airbus or boeing aircraft.

I don't judge a software on an alpha release.

Alpha release software is not for production.

It isn’t software

To stay in France, it's a bit as if you said the cathedrals construction was a total failure basing your judgment on the Beauvais cathedral which also suffered of the second system effect.

That's the problem. Nuclear reactors are huge undertakings and obviously producing only one is going to be incredibly expensive, just like building only one wind turbine of a design. That's why countries should cooperate to build more continuously and more efficiently.

Countries should cooperate to phase out fossil and nuclear fuels and instead invest that money into expanding the power grid and into power storage.

In many ways Germany's renewable infrastructure was first of its kind, because Germany paid for the entire industry to get kickstarted.

Just like semiconductors needed ridiculously overpaid government contracts to get started at the beginning of Silicon Valley, solar needed a massive government funded effort to kick start the beginnings of the industry.

And unlike nuclear, which never got cheaper as we built more, solar is plummeting in price on a consistent schedule.

And whether or not it is a first of kind, the estimated for the FOAK build were wildly off and inaccurate, whereas with solar, Germany knew exactly the amount of financial risk they were taking by buying high.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com