Comment by renaudg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renaudg | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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