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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, it's diminishing virtually across the entire world (with very few exceptions).

It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unable to compete in price in most countries including the US.[1] Even China, the large last country to buckle the trend as of late seems to have reduced the role of its nuclear energy policy and seems to be missing targets [2].

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/industry-meltdown-is-era-of-n... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-...

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Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable.

Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe so: we don't have the storage technology yet.

Compared to renewables. One of the unanticipated side effects of our current focus on solar/wind is that being decentralized technologies compared to a single complex for coal/gas/hydro/nuclear/whatever mandated a focus on unit reliability since you can't have someone babysit each unit when those units are smeared across a 10 square miles or mounted on an entire suburbs' rooflines. This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs. Turns out using a power source that works by restructuring everything around it on the atomic level is a bit hard on the surrounding infrastructure.

> This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs.

You say weakness - and I say that more people die from falls, from installing rooftop solar panels, than do in nuclear accidents.

Power generation is inherentantly dangerous. Just because you distribute the danger around, instead of centralizing it, does not mean that you've reduced the danger.

As for the economics of nuclear, as time goes on we are finding that the actual alternative to nuclear is not renewables. It's natural gas, sourced from either fracking, or Russia.

Compared to the uptick in natural gas, renewables are a rounding error.

Manpower salary weakness, not literal life/death weakness. Paying the population of Rhode Island to use exercise bikes connected to generators all day would also be a way to generate pollution-free safe power (in fact considering the obesity rate it would probably end up saving lives), yet there's still an obvious economic reason why such an idea would be completely stupid.

Sure, the economics of nuclear aren't great.

The economics of non-nuclear are terrible, though. All roads that don't include it as a major generator of electricity rely on burning carbon, in the form of natural gas.

If you think I'm wrong - would you mind explaining why natural gas deployment last two years (~20% increase, so about ~5% of global energy generation) was as much as the deployment of renewables, for the last decade? (also ~5% of global generation)

If you are right - could you give me your best guess for when you expect gas plant deployment to go net negative? 2020? 2025? 2050? 20-never? What mechanism (political, economic, etc) do you expect to drive that inflection point?

[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/natural-gas/gas-consumption-da...

[2] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-el...

Renewables aren't a rounding error, unless you consider multiple percentage points of growth in every power market in the 2010s as rounding errors. Yes LNG has accounted for 3 or 4X the coal closures, however renewables don't incur methane leakage. Overall, both renewables and LNG are greening the grid by killing coal.

> Overall, both renewables and LNG are greening the grid by killing coal.

in your dream

Coal production is growing last three years

Nuclear costs are heavily externalized ($12 billion liability cap, rest paid by governement and there are plausible >$1trillion accident scenarios). It is as if they only have to pay insurance on a deductible.

The lack of a carbon tax makes any fossil fuel technology heavily subsidies.

When all externalities are taking into account, then we can talk about the cost of Nuclear.

Both are heavily subsidized due to externalities. So wind and solar subsidies seem good to do given that reality.

Actually there have been numerous studies how wind and solar could provide 100% power for a country like the US. The thing is you need significant upgrades to your power grid, this will become easier and easier with improving battery and storage tech. The myth of base load is essentially nuclear propaganda that keeps getting debunked. Power plants that can't easily be adjusted are pretty much the worst for operators.

Citation much needed, because that sounds like unsubstantiated wind/solar kool aid that's not worth much more than "nuclear propaganda".

My impression is that battery storage tech and infrastructure is nowhere near able to provide 100% of US power when it's night and the wind doesn't blow (which is surprisingly often)

It's absolutely not. These calls for relying on renewables are pure fantasy; the storage technology doesn't exist yet, so you can't build a reliable power grid based on something that isn't in existence.

It's just like the calls to rely on fusion power instead of building fission plants. Fusion doesn't exist (as a usable power generation method), so calling for it to be planned for now is ridiculous. It's the same with storage systems; we don't have any that can supply the entire grid yet. We're having a hard enough time just getting enough lithium to make batteries for the relatively small number of electric vehicles on the road now. There are things like pumped-hydro, but those only work in some places, and we already have them (i.e., we can't make more of them, because we've already exhausted all the available hydropower sites), and they're not enough.

Don't get me wrong: renewables are great for what they're good at: supplying variable power, especially on sunny days, and the US in particular could definitely stand to deploy much more, particularly in the sunny states where a lot of power is used for A/C. But it's not a solution yet for baseload power.

Thank you, this should be the top comment.

It was politically motivated to shut down the plants early and rely on coal.

Using the existing nuclear that you have for an additional decade or longer is much better than switching to coal.

A lot can happen in a decade.

It's just that Germany did not switch to coal.

That is simply not true. Right this moment, coal is the single largest source of electricity production in Germany (33.66% of the total) They're emitting nearly 400gCO2eq/kWh, compared to nuclear-first France's 70. That is an abysmal result. https://www.electricitymap.org/

That's simply wrong. Renewable energy for electricity is at 46% last year. Up from 6% in 2000. Coal has been declining a lot from 2000 (when the Energiewende startet) to today.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem...

You're just focusing on the wrong metric.

Because coal is so bad in terms of carbon intensity (800 gCO2/kwH), Germany's greenhouse gas emissions figures are still terrible on average.

"Why Aren't Renewables Decreasing Germany's Carbon Emissions?" https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/10/10/why-arent...

"Why solar and wind won’t make much difference to carbon dioxide emissions" https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/solar-wind-energy-carbon-dioxid...

"German electricity was nearly 10 times dirtier than France's in 2016" http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/2/11/german-e...

> You're just focusing on the wrong metric.

I don't and you are posting links to outdated articles.

For current values, check by switching to the country tab: https://m-transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGenerat...

btw. this map is bullshit. french basically netted zero co2 emissions for their nuclear power plant. I mean 90% of their uranium ore comes from nigeria. it's not like that stuff gets teleported to the reactors. the uraniums needs to be mined, refined, transported.

see: - https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg23531450-700-7-generat... - https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

etc... of course it's way less than coal. but it's stupid to let some countries "export" their emission to third world countries. the map bases their nuclear plants with 12gCO2eq/kwh. which is basically just insanly low and is only the median and does not factor everything in (no build, decomission of the plant (because that is unknown and different for each reactor) and basically the icc does in fact not factors in mining with all their transport routes, mostly it's just a nuclear energy favored estimate)

Yes, it does need to get mined refined and transported. But the fissile energy density of uranium is, literally, a million times greater than gasoline or coal. It doesn't take much uranium to generate a lot of power.

Nope sorry, it takes all of this into account. From their FAQ :

"We use a life cycle analysis (LCA) approach, meaning that we take into account emissions arising from the whole life cycle of power plants (construction, fuel production, operational emissions, and decommissioning)."

yeah, but their approach was to basically cut the emission of construction, fuel production and opertional emissions and decomissioning basically to zero or at least extremly misleading numbers: https://euranetplus-inside.eu/deep/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...

Well, they didn't shut down all nuclear plants either. The last ones are planned to go offline in 2022. It would probably have been possible to extend nuclear use a bit and reduce coal consumption faster instead.

Well, Germany expanded the share of renewable for electricity production from 6% in 2000 to 46% in 2019. I think that's quite remarkable.

https://www.strom-report.de/strom

But it doesn't matter, because their CO2 emissions are still catastrophically worse than they could have been with nuclear (compare and contrast with neighbouring France).

It just demonstrates that even a strong and "remarkable" drive towards renewables alone such as what Germany did, just isn't enough to sustain a developed economy, unless you're lucky like Sweden and have a geography that allows a lot of hydro.

we would sit on a bunch of nuclear waste we would not know what to do with. France does not scale with nuclear to the rest of Europe. Basically France is bound to nuclear because it needs the technology for their nuclear weapons and nuclear powered submarines ... otherwise it would phase out this costly technology.

Germany helps the world more, since renewable energy scales much easier and is cost effective, low-danger, ... that's why exporting energy efficient systems and renewable energy production technology is the way to go. Whether we use coal for a decade longer or not does not matter much in the larger picture. We need to develop scalable renewable technology and deploy it, for billions of people. Nuclear is too slow and too risky. If we look at the world-wide numbers for electricity production from nuclear, its mostly stagnating and it will be tough in the coming years when aging reactors will be taken off grid to sustain the level of production, enhance the life of existing reactors by upgrading them, build storage, have money for both decommision of old reactors and money to build new ones. France will need to invest upwards 100 billion Euro just for their aging fleet ... good luck with that. There is a single new EPR in the works and its expensive and late. With an old design from decades ago. The real battle for emission reductions will not be with 80 mill Germans, but with billions of people in Africa and Asia - where the growth is. We need to develop together with them fast scalable electricity production.

Let me quote the World Nuclear Report (!) from 2019:

* Non-Nuclear Options Save More Carbon Per Dollar. In many nuclear countries, new renewables can now compete economically with existing nuclear power plants. The closure of uneconomic reactors will not directly save CO2 emissions but can indirectly save more CO2 than closing a coal-fired plant, if the nuclear plant’s larger saved operating costs are rein- vested in efficiency or cheap modern renewables that in turn displace more fossil-fueled generation.

* Non-Nuclear Options Save More Carbon Per Year. While current nuclear programs are particularly slow, current renewables programs are particularly fast. New nuclear plants take 5–17 years longer to build than utility-scale solar or onshore wind power, so existing fossil-fueled plants emit far more CO2 while awaiting substitution by the nuclear option. Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow.

Let's put the myth of nuclear waste to rest by putting things in perspective :

The amount of energy required to run France's trains for one whole year is 9 TWh. In terms of waste you can take your pick between :

* assuming 100% nuclear energy : 200kg of nuclear waste

* assuming 100% coal : 700.000 tons of solid ash (usually stored in the open air), plus 1.000 tons of soot and fine particles, including tons / dozens of tons of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, even uranium and thorium.

(Source : http://www.sfen.org/rgn/dechets-radioactifs-verite-faits-exa...)

Option 2 is what German coal plants are pumping into the European air right now (34% of total electricity production as I write), for years, contributing to dozens of thousands of premature deaths.

That is the clear and present danger. And there is no credible plan to get out of this, because no matter which way you put it (and as much as I'd like the opposite to be true) you can't solve the renewables intermittence problem without a major breakthrough in battery storage.

All of your arguments will be valid when and if that happens. In the meantime, this stance is betting on a future that may or may exist, whilst causing immense and certain harm right now, in the middle of the climate emergency.

That's all irrelevant. The world production of nuclear power is basically flat for the last 30 years. Renewable energy is expanding rapidly. That's currently the only viable option. The best is to phase out all costly nuclear reactors and invest the money into renewable energy expansion.

Storage of electricity can be done in multiple ways and we will see larger new installations in ten years from now. Models for running countries like the US with electricity from 100% renewable are looking feasible.

Since there has been almost no expansion of nuclear in the past 30 years on a global scale and everything looks like we will see a long and slow decline for nuclear, it's easy to see that it's the wrong technology and its further contribution to reduce carbon emissions will be likely zero or less.

> The world production of nuclear power is basically flat for the last 30 years.

I'm glad that China proves you wrong. If they had gone all in with coal+renewables like Germany, climate change would be an even bigger issue than it already is.

> Renewable energy is expanding rapidly. That's currently the only viable option. The best is to phase out all costly nuclear reactors and invest the money into renewable energy expansion.

No, again Germany has tried that. It. doesn't. work. 20 years later, even now at 46% from renewables, the country still has one of the worst carbon intensity figures of all European countries.

Besides, there's an upper limit to the expansion. Wind farms require 360 times (!) as much land area as nuclear, solar 75 times as much for the same output.

It's a beautiful idealistic dream that I hope will work one day, but causes us all terrible harm in the meantime.

> Storage of electricity can be done in multiple ways and we will see larger new installations in ten years from now. Models for running countries with like the US with electricity from 100% renewable are looking feasible.

This is hot air, nothing more than wishful thinking. And you can't build a power grid on wishful thinking. Also we can't afford "hopefully, one day" to tackle the climate emergency. Another commenter put it best : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996271

> I'm glad that China proves you wrong.

It doesn't. And China is not the world.

Nuclear is 4% in China for electricity production. Tiny. Renewable production & investments in China are much higher that the ones for nuclear. Wind power already is larger in China and fast growing.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Electric...

> No, again Germany has tried that.

of course it works. Renewable will grow year over year. In a decade it will be more than 60% in Germany.

> Besides, there's an upper limit to the expansion.

That limit hasn't been reached. By far.

In the EU basically most new deployment of electricity production is renewable. Basically none for nuclear.

Check the trends: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-S...

It's clear where this is going. Nuclear's contribution to reduce CO2 emissions will be minor - the large share of reduction will come from large scale deployment of renewable energy. The numbers are clear, just read the World Nuclear Report from above...

> This is hot air, nothing more than wishful thinking

It's not. For example I live in North Germany. There is a large power line under construction to Norway and more can be build (some are already under planning). These will combine electricity from on/offshore windfarms with Hydro-Electric storage.

We also have very large storage facilities for gas, which can be generated from surplus electricity. The areas here will have huge amount of surplus electricity.

This will all get more important in a decade or so.

There are various other technologies for storing electricity either existing or under development.

> this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated

It's politically motivated to the extent that people are scared of nuclear and any political move to support it or finance research could be career suicide. Without any attempt to research improvements we are stuck using old technology and anyone advocating against nuclear power has good reason to keep doing so. It's a bit of a vicious cycle where the only way to break it is to hope for some unexpected breakthrough.

Germany has invested zillions in Nuclear. Breeder technology, Thorium pebble bed reactor, storage sites...

Failed costly experiments. Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society.

> Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society.

Phrased this way, this is less of a problem with nuclear and more a problem with said democratic society.

> this is less of a problem with nuclear

It's exactly a problem with Nuclear, because it thrives only in centralized, monopolistic, authoritarian, non-market situations and actually supports those structures.

It's such in many countries. That's why Nuclear is on the way out in the West. The struggle will be to build new ones and even keep the current level. The French EPR is way over budget&time in France and Finland.

Basically Nuclear is also not insurable. That's why all risks are state owned. Building them is only possible with large amount of state money and protected markets (see the new EPR for the UK).

This is exactly right.

> In “Der Atomstaat” (“The Nuclear State”) Jungk quotes the Austrian scientist Helga Novotny, who back in the day worked at the IIASA (International Institute für Applied Systems Analysis) in Vienna/Laxenburg. She said that “the opposition against nuclear energy roots in the resistance against those who profit from the increasing economical and scientific focus. The opposition is directed against large-scale industry that makes common cause with big states and big science. It is the resistance of those who feel powerless and small in the face of the developments” (Der Atomstaat, 1977, zit. n. Ausgabe 1979 p. 77ff). This finding is still relevant today and still undermines democracy.

https://jungk-bibliothek.org/robert_jungk_english_2/

It's the Atomstaat which works against the democracy.

Democracy works great when people know what they're talking about. But sometimes they're "educated" by mass media and "scarecrows". They bring arguments like "we shouldn't even try, it definitely can't work" (without real knowledge and proof) or "we can't invest in this because we already invest in that" (as if investments in parallel research is unheard of). It's when you get to see the downsides of democracy and it's how democratic systems elect populist leaders not because they are better.

In the mean time (tens of) billions of Euros are spent on projects where some still have no end in sight (Stuttgart 21; Berlin Brandenburg Airport; Elbphilarmonie) but that's an easier sell because they look fancy.

Nuclear research of any kind has a massive stigma associated to the label. Since most people's "education" related to nuclear power is "Chernobyl and Fukushima" politicians will become populists and won't risk their cozy seat. If all your education about flying machines was "Hindenburg" you'd walk.

> Democracy works great when people know what they're talking about.

Energy policy has been widely discussed in Germany for three decades. There was even a party founded which had this as one of their main political topics. That party has been relatively stable and has been in the federal government for a few years.

> Stuttgart 21; Berlin Brandenburg Airport; Elbphilarmonie ... that's an easier sell because they look fancy

None of these decisions were particular popular.

> Nuclear research of any kind has a massive stigma associated to the label

Rightly so. But worse is nuclear deployment in the form of large scale nuclear power plants in densely populated countries.

> Failed costly experiments.

The battle for finding cancer cures had so many dead ends but it's the worthiness of the cause that keeps you going. The promise of single power plants able to produce an almost endless supply of cheap, clean(ish?) energy still tickles the imagination more than vast swaths of land covered by PV panels or wind turbines.

> Nuclear is simply not cost effective in a democratic society.

Democracy is about picking your aim, not making the target more cost effective. And the more complex the topic, the less qualified regular people are at even guessing if something is cost effective or not. Also absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we failed to make the tech cost effective until now doesn't mean it cannot be and never will be.

You suggest anything that we've failed at for a few decades (even if some attempts are half-hearted) should just be halted because that's proof it cannot be done. Some of our greatest achievements came from people who wouldn't give up. Some are yet to come. Or we can just stop it all because democracy and cost effectiveness.

This is exactly why the move away from nuclear is politically motivated. Not because it's a foregone conclusion that it cannot be solved but rather because a politician will find it easier to convince "the democracy" that spending tens of billions on a stealth democracy dispatcher is more cost effective than spending the same on trying to improve nuclear to the point of eliminating the key downsides.

> The promise of single power plants

Such a promise does not produce any power and does not scale.

> Just because we failed to make the tech cost effective until now doesn't mean it cannot be and never will be.

We are making solar and wind cost effective. It's already happening. In scale.

You haven't addressed the core of my comment that we usually don't stop just because we failed a few times. Are you arguing we should stop all research that hasn't produced results after a certain time or budget? The argumentation you're basing your opinion on is circular: we couldn't do it > so we shouldn't do it > so we couldn't do it. It also relies on the assumption that investing in nuclear research prevents us from investing in solar and wind power, which it shouldn't. There's no reason to stop research into better alternatives just because we have something that "works".

> It's already happening. In scale.

Again, you are evading the fact that (the as of yet unfulfilled promise of) better nuclear power would actually deliver more than that. In the mean time our energy needs are increasing faster than the efficiency of PV cells and generators is. There's nothing wrong with researching even better alternatives.

Just over a decade ago so many were insisting EVs were dead in the water. We had tried and failed and ICE tech was delivering and constantly improving. You're not arguing that nuclear is bad, you're arguing that we should not even attempt to make it better or good. Why build cars when we can already do it with horses and horses scale...

You could be correct but not based on the arguments you brought so far.

The market tells you that it's not true.

If a horse is dead, you might as well climb down.

I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse by avoiding all direct answers and just replying with platitudes. Some of them plain wrong since the "horse" argument was based on a well known quote by Henry Ford [0] also implying that just because you have a working solution doesn't mean you have to stop searching for a better one, and that "the market" is not an oracle.

The market was wrong so many times that using it as a source of ultimate truth sounds like a last ditch argument. The same market that still goes for oil and coal and would have barely touched EVs or clean energy if it wasn't for subsidies.

You either didn't understand the problem or are just like anyone who ever said "why invest in clean energy when we have perfectly good coal and oil today, and it scales". We did and now we reap the benefits of clean energy. There is no reason to not invest in getting even better, even if this requires research. But I think you just see the label "nuclear" and any reasonable argument based discussion flies out the window.

In the mean time Germany is closing nuclear plants to burn coal. Lungs rejoice.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/15297-if-i-had-asked-people...

So far I have't heard any convincing arguments from you. Just appeals, platitude and stuff from Henry Ford.

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