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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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