Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

1. There is no long term storage facility anywhere in the world for nuclear waste. Nuclear proponents don't get to wave away waste until there is an operating long term waste repository or reprocessing facility. Short term on site cask or cooling pond storage doesn't count.

2. Nuclear, even state of the art tech, is not cost competitive against renewables or natural gas [1].

3. The time to build generators is measured in decades, not months of years. Investors don't want to invest without sovereign guarantees, both on the bonds and the facility itself. An enormous amount of investment is pouring into renewables.

It is a fine technology for your military navy, but a terrible technology for commercial electrical generation. Wind, solar, and storage are going to carry us to 100% renewables at this point. China installed almost 12GW of solar PV generating capacity in December 2019 alone [2].

[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/450769/unsubsidized-analysis-ce...

[2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/china-installed-30gw-of-new-sola...

All three of these points are either outright wrong, or misleading.

1. Nevada has a operational storage facility that has space to hold ALL of the waste for the entire United States. It has been rated as stable by geologists for at least the next 700,000 years. Nuclear reactors produce 1 barrel of waste per year. That is an easily manageable quantity.

The reason they are not holding more is purely fearmongering polits, it's neither a scientific nor an engineering problem.

2. Nuclear power is not cost competitive because outdated and overzealous regulations and litigious environmental organizations. China, for example, is building 24 state of the art reactors, at a fraction of the cost that western countries are building them - for the exact same internationally approved design. Reactor construction is regularly delayed by local political litigation.

This is like pushing someone off of a cliff and then accusing them of being clumsy.

3. I'm not sure what you are comparing to in this point. There is currently NO renewable power plant capable of producing baseload in the quantities we need to avert climate change.

If we spent the next 2-3 decades averting climate change by building nuclear power plants, we would be smart. There are currently ZERO renewable projects for building baseload.

EDIT: You added some points about renewables storage - the costs of running a grid on 100% renewables with 100% storage capability far far exceed the costs of nuclear power. When you factor things like transmission losses of 35-45%, January solar production at 10% June levels, the intermittent nature of wind power, and the critical requirement that baseload be met 99.95% of the time - you quickly realize that there are absolutely no storage solutions that can get us to a 100% renewable grid (or even a 50% renewable grid).

1. Yucca mountain is not operational, and has had no federal funding since 2011 [1].

2. Even stripping away regulations and environmental requirements, wind and solar are still cheaper at sub 2 cents/kwh utility scale, having no marginal fuel cost. China has set their nuclear price floor at 6.49 cents/kwh [2].

3. I do not want nuclear reactors built to Chinese standards in my first world country.

4. Storage and renewables aren't an investment, operational, or proliferation risk.

EDIT: Transmission losses are minimized with renewables, as generation occurs closer to load centers. Not so with nuclear. Also, storage costs will continue to decline as EV battery manufacturing scales up (see: Tesla's Hornsdale Power Reserve). Nuclear is a solution looking for a problem, when renewables, transmission, storage, and demand response can meet market needs faster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-energy-nuclear/update-...

1. The facility is not accepting new deposits but it is operational. Regardless, this is a political fearmongering challenge, not a scientific one.

2. This is absolutely false because you are not including the costs of STORAGE. Without massive storage, they are useless in providing year-round baseload.

3. Gen III+ reactors are built to international standards. Racism is not an adequate argument.

We agree to disagree then. Good luck to nuclear proponents attempting to make their case to the general public (who don't want it), investors (who won't invest in it), and political leaders (who don't want to risk their careers on it).

In the meantime, progress marches on:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_d... (Generating unit retirements, Nov 2019 through Oct 2020)

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c... (Generating unit additions, Nov 2019 through Oct 2020)

Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/#tabs_unit-4 (EIA Electric Power Monthly)

This is agreeing you were wrong, but your false claims still win because the people are suckers. When climate change is still roaring along 30 years from now and the laws of physics haven’t changed to allow solar and wind to completely displace fossil fuels, you can really be proud of your win.

I'm not proud nuclear proponents are ignorant of the reality of the situation. They care more about being "right" than what is feasible today.

Nuclear would've been fine to go all in on 20 or 30 years ago; today, it's too late (considering the timeline between first kwh produced and breaking ground today). Mourning a tragedy isn't a strategy for success. If you can get it built, why isn't it built yet? Or at the very least, under construction.

Claiming that nuclear power isn't feasible because "people fear it" is as valid an argument as saying that Climate Change cannot be averted because too many people don't believe in it.

The entire point of us having these conversations online is to help convince these uneducated idiots in society, exactly so that we can overcome these challenges.

> help convince these uneducated idiots in society

Hence why the argument is already lost. Educated citizens have valid concerns that aren’t being addressed, and the uneducated ones? They still get the same vote you do.

You aren’t helping your case by labelling people who disagree with you as “uneducated idiots.”

In my local environment the most visible people championing nuclear power are the same ones who turn up in Parliament House wearing their sponsor’s uniform, or bring lumps of coal into the House. They also engage in corporate style group psychopathy of “if what we want to do isn’t illegal, there’s nothing stopping us from doing it.”

With friends like those, nuclear power doesn’t need any enemies. The impression is that the only reason nuclear power is mentioned is because some politicians are looking for a comfortable post-retirement life in a junket lobbying position at Westinghouse.

So between the nuclear advocates here on HN claiming that everyone who doesn’t support nuclear power is a “climate alarmist” uneducated idiot, the only proponents in government being the most visibly corrupt, and the discussion of nuclear power always turning to “proven” thorium technology, nuclear power really has little hope of being accepted by society at large.

> We agree to disagree then. Good luck to nuclear proponents attempting to make their case to the general public (who don't want it), investors (who won't invest in it), and political leaders (who don't want to risk their careers on it).

The point here is not disagreement with these points, rather than the arguments that brought us to these points are misguided.

> In the meantime, progress marches on:

And so does climate change.

...political fearmongering challenge...

Nevada is not so populous a state. There seem to be lots of nuclear enthusiasts online. You folks should just move to Nevada and elect more courageous state officials!

Voting margins are around 3%. Population around 3M. Thus Nevada only needs an influx of about 90,000 nuclear-friendly gentry to make a huge change to the future of nuclear power in the world.

Keep in mind, voter turnout was 1.1M in 2016, and that was considered very high. In most years the margin you're talking about could be much smaller.

Honestly I doubt we’d find 500 people who thought nuclear power was important enough a hill to die on that they’d move to Nevada to ensure its future (and I sometimes wonder whether the majority of pro-nuclear experts can be bothered to get out of their armchairs and vote in the first place).

A better option would be to move to Australia and campaign for a nuclear waste dump here. The voting margins are lower (often measured in low triple digit votes) and the politicians are more cheaply bought. Those same 500 proponents could more easily effect change in Australia than any state of the USA.

Regardless of the reasoning, if the US cant keep a site operating for even 100 years, how do we expect it to keep functioning for 10,000?

Storing nuear waste is a complete non-starter for me simply because of the timelines involved. Nobody can guarantee the safety of anything for thousands (!!) of years, when the USA itself is only ~400 years old.

You really don't need to. The whole reason we have the waste problem now is politics. We could reprocess the waste. the 'old' rods still have 95% of their energy in them. President Carter ended that with a single executive order.

Storage of spent fuel is almost entirely passive. You're literally burying it in a geologically stable site, where even if the containers completely dissolve it will take hundreds of thousands or millions of years for that waste to even potentially impact the greater environment to any significant degree.

The only conceivable risk is for some future civilization coming across the cache, not knowing what it is, and potentially suffering as a result. Which presumes that such a civilization will have declined substantially in scientific knowledge at which point it is unlikely that such access would even affect more than a small group of future peoples.

The risk is practically non existent, especially when compared to the risk of continuing to ignore nuclear now. This is pure, unsubstantiated fearmongering.

I am generally in favour of nuclear. But objectively a nuclear reactor is massively more complex than say a turbine or solar panel. It is harder to mass produce, more difficult to model, requires more skilled workers, and needs higher levels of security. It has stringent safety requirements as a result of radioactivity. All of that has to cost money. Nuclear physics is difficult and we should not underestimate the challenges.

And we do have to make these things work in risk averse capitalist democracy. A perfect technology that you can't get consent for is useless. We are trying to generate energy, not build a techno utopia. It is not an academic question, but a practical one. Renewables wins because it is highly contentious but NOT difficult to build. Nuclear fails because it is highly contentious AND difficult to build

Also, the storage debate leaves out interconnectors. That lets you use excess power now which is cheaper than storage.

There are some incorrect arguments here - as well as some valid ones.

You claim that a reactor is more complex than a turbine (I assume you mean a wind turbine) or a solar panel. This isn't an apples to apples comparison because a reactor provides 24x7x365 baseload power, whereas solar and wind would require MASSIVE storage facilities to be comparable. That is both cost-inefficient and complex.

You claim the required number of highly skilled workers is high. Well, is that really true on a PER GWh basis? Reactors generate on average 1GW of power. Solar plants generate 50MW of power, at a highly variable rate. Even excluding the storage requirements, nuclear power likely employs fewer people.

You claim that nuclear physics is difficult and complex and therefore costs money. A refined process and established international design can remove these bottlenecks. In the same way that we have immensely complex silicon wafer chips with tens of millions of 9 nano meter scale transistors in them - for only hundreds of dollars.

You claim that safety costs money. That's true. But is it an unreasonable amount of money for the amount of power we're providing? A lot of the costs are borne from issues we cause ourselves. The Nevada storage facility is capable of holding literally ALL of the nuclear waste in America. Yet is remains closed because of fearmongering politics.

(I think) You claim that storage can be largely solved by national interconnects. But if you look at the massive power distribution systems in Northern Canada - they lose around 25% of the power in transmission alone, going only a fraction of the way that a NATIONAL power transmission grid would require.

The problem with renewables remains the storage problem. There are few practical solutions on the scale that are needed, and I find that most anti-nuclear pro-renewable advocates are simply not doing the math.

All these kind of comparisons are apples to oranges. If you ignore every advantage of one technology then the other will look good by comparison. The best comparison is actual industry performance in deploying new installed capacity.

Canada has some ridiculous geographic challenges to overcome. Transmission losses are far lower on grids in more densely populated areas. And HVDC/Ultra high voltage AC give more options. And anyway, what's wrong with wasting 25%? There are obviously some good reasons to do that.

Also, a relatively short interconnector can be useful. It can be used to satisfy demand in a neighbouring area. In turn that area can generate less or can export more to its neighbours. The power has a knock on effect across a much larger area. But the great thing is that they are not monolithic. It benefits everyone, and can be a modular element of a larger system. This even works out well for energy storage. A pumped hydro site in a mountainous area can benefit people across the other side of a country.

Tightly packed grids don't help because the generation vs consumption disparity is across hundreds or thousands of miles. HVDC and Ultra HVAC sounds nice on paper, but the reasons the industry doesn't use them today are numerous.

Again, the grid needs to provide 100% capacity 99.95% of the time. Renewables simply cannot handle that without massive storage that is still only theoretical - and often infeasible.

Pumped hydro is a great example of a theoretical storage concept that would only work in a small number of places, and yet still would be a major undertaking with large losses in efficiency.

These are just pie-in-the-sky ideas, or flat out unrealistic.

You complain about minsinformation and then say stuff like that.

HVDC is very widely deployed for interconnectors and grid connections. And there are >20 UHV lines in China, many over 1,000 km long.

This is not pie-in-the-sky but physics. By using appropriate technology you reduce tranmsision losses and/or cost.

Also consumption and demand are already very spread out in a traditional grid. A generator can go offline and the power is sourced from another location. In fact this is essential for nuclear stations as large generators can fail rapily.

I agree that pumped hydro has limited value, and nothing is a panacea on its own. But most of the nuclear states actually have significant deployed pumped hydro capacity. It is a complementary technology. When nuclear power stations fail they can leave a big hole in generating capacity. Pumped hydro can deliver >1GW in a short amount of time and fill that hole. Otherwise you need to maintain more spinning reserve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com