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Comment by breeny592 | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear gets pointed to because the mining companies still have a large role to play in digging material out of the ground for nuclear energy. Lobbyists gon' lobby.

As an asset, much like coal power stations, they require huge Government subsidies to be profitable to run.

Renewables are the only way forward - they've proven to be far more efficient, stable, and infinitely cheaper when mixed across multiple mediums.

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Renewables are a dead end if we want to keep evolving society. Imagine what possibilities there would be with 10x or 100x the available energy. Renewables are not even at the point where they can currently replace the existing electric grid. (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline.) You certainly can’t build a Star Trek world with wind mills. You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.

Imagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power all its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather than trying to equate science fiction with reality.

> (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline

Because traditional baseload isn't a concept in a fully renewable grid - distributed storage and production naturally evens out demand and production, and also makes the grid more resilient to freak weather events (the kind we see more and more thanks to climate change)

> You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.

You're not doing them with anything at the moment so whats the point of conjecture. You really think that energy is the biggest concern over, you know, the colonisation of space?

>Imagine what possibilities there would be if humanity finds a way to power all its current and future needs that produces no harmful side effects rather than trying to equate science fiction with reality.

So when do we turn off the giant nuclear reactor in the sky we don't understand and might evaporate the planet if something goes wrong?

There is no such thing as 'no harmful side effects'. We can put our head in the sand and pretend that the universe is a friendly place for life and go extinct in the next 100k years or so. Or we can acknowledge that there is no such thing as 'nature' and make the universe fit for us.

Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline.

Right now reliable baseload can be provided by renewables plus gas fired turbines for intermittent supply much cheaper than nuclear.

http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP16%20BaseLoad.pdf

If the argument is that we want nuclear power on Mars, then sure, that seems a reasonable position to take.

Gas-fired turbines are extremely bad for the environment.

Why would you compare nuclear, which is 100% green, to 'renewables + gas + batteries' which is far from green energy?

Gas isn't great, but it isn't terrible (especially in a world where gas plume burn-offs is a thing).

It's much better than coal, and can be migrated to incrementally (which is much easier than the huge up front investment in nuclear).

Not if we want to mitigate climate change.

Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.

> Renewables will not get us there in time, even if they might be viable at some point.

Construction of new nuclear plants takes on average 7.5 years, and are extremely prone to cost overruns and delays. Renewables are a much faster and cheaper option to come online, be profitable and allow for shutdown of legacy infrastructure in the same period of time.

And they are viable now - several countries have run for days and weeks on renewables alone. Several regions of Germany are also fully renewable powered.

Also, nuclear power plants are very slow to start up/shut down (ramp rate), and need to be periodically offline for refueling, many technical issues require the reactor to shut down, and they need a huge staff a highly trained technicians and engineers.

The slow ramp rate, and lower reliability means the power they output is less economically attractive, and the other factors makes the price higher. Combined, they mean that nuclear plans sit around idle a decent amount of the time, so much so that some locations just flat-out subsidize them (like Illinois).

I used to work in power markets.

Hopefully much like how renewables went from being unprofitable, inefficient, and requiring subsidies to where they are now over the last decade and a half thanks to R&D, subsidies, and a market that has scaled up, nuclear could become a more desirable solution if we incentivize it and start pursuing it seriously again.

The thing about most renewables is still that you can schedule and control output easily to meet demand so you have a storage problem unless you can pair it with another production method to cover the gaps. Maybe nuclear is a good option to lean on for that.

There has been significant R&D in all directions in nuclear in the past decades. Even if something would come out of the current development it's slow and expansive. Too slow and expansive compared to the rapid development in renewables to justify throwing even more money on it. Those funds are much better invested in renewables which is why only those few you hear about do invest in it.

Uranium is such a dense fuel that mining it isn't a huge market. The total market is about 6 billion a year. In contrast, oil is about 2,000 billion a year, so oil is about a 300x larger market, and oil only produces about 4.5x as much energy per year as oil. The fuel is practically free compared to any fossil source.

Renewables also requires digging stuff out of the ground

And look at the companies that publicly advocate for things such as battery storage, typically they have vested interests in things such as lithium.

Nuclear gets thrown about because it's an easy pivot for mining companies - especially in Australia which has a powerful mining lobby and large amounts of both coal and uranium.

Do you how many people are killed yearly mining coal vs uranium? [0] Uranium is mined in open pits, and when the radon is handled properly is safe

> Renewables are the only way forward

How do you reconcile the article that Germany is already failing their goals before they shut nuclear down in 2022?

[0] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...

Edit: well, I guess that is how polarizing Nuclear is, HN is ready to ignore reality as poised in the article, and a nasa link.

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