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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Renewables are definitely a factor at this point, and a growing one. Nuclear is not... new nuclear production is basically at a standstill, because it's far too expensive. Cost is what's killing coal, and it's killing traditional nuclear as well.

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Operating nuclear plants are shutting down early in some places because electricity revenue has gone down because cheap fracked natural gas has brought prices down.

Trading perfectly-fine NPPs for fracked gas plants at this time in our climate history for 1 cent/kWh is a travesty.

And how would you prevent this? The flip side of nuclear's stability at high loads over long term is that the economics are all built around running at high load. If they lose major customers to cheaper competition, they can no longer operate profitably.

Give nuclear plants subsidies in the form of zero-emission credits like New York and Illinois did:

https://statepowerproject.org/illinois/

https://statepowerproject.org/new-york/

That way low-cost natural gas generation can still replace coal fired generators but won't drive premature nuclear retirements.

By internalizing the cost of pollution, specifically, a carbon tax (though also a methane tax and a mercury tax).

I don't know if nuclear plants are covering the costs of storing spent fuel, but they should, and coal and natural gas plants should have to pay for the crap they release into the air.

Markets will only allocate resources appropriately if you internalize externalities. I can't think of a case where doing so is the wrong decision.

Institute carbon pricing and nuclear will be competitive. Solar can only deliver 40-50% of overall demand because the rest of the energy consumption happens at night. If the carbon costs are high enough, solar + gas will be more expensive than nuclear.

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