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Comment by pathseeker | Hacker News Reader

> It's going to take a lot more than $1T and a decade for fusion to be cost-competitive with wind and solar.

Wind and solar don't even compete in the same category as nuclear until you include storage. Cheap, bursty energy is useless for base-load.

Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.

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There is no requirement that the grid requires "baseload" sources of power. The grid can operate with flexible sources of power that can ramp (gas, some hydro, etc.) in addition to wind and solar. If anything nuclear and coal, which can only run at 80-100% capacity or 0% capacity are inconvenient and inflexible sources of power.

The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!

> Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.

Do you have a source for that? Cost comparisons I've seen between nuclear and renewable energy doesn't reach that conclusion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21479651

Or a lot cheaper if you continue to ignore the nuclear waste lying around for the next 100,000 years from a price perspective.

We can get energy from that now, too. Russia already has a working reactor on the grid.

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