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Comment by spenrose | Hacker News Reader

Good points. Note that you could make the same comparison with offshore wind farms, which have similar nameplate capacities at much lower cost per watt, run at about 60% of nameplate over time, and are, unlike nuclear reactors, actually being deployed now and in the near future.

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Alas that still doesn't solve intermittency. Even offshore is intermittent. 60% is very high, all the figures I saw where closer to 25%.

Also, nuclear reactors are deployed (Taishan 1 & 2, Hinkley Point, Flamanville...).

It is true, however, that nuclear has a glass ceiling. IMHO for the wrong reasons.

unlike solar, geographic diversity in wind goes a long way toward addressing intermittency. anyone who's ever build a server cluster or a DR plan knows the solution to higher availability is to just leave some spare capacity on the table. when wind costs 1/3rd of nuclear, and has half the capacity factor, well the math is not hard.

nuclear reactors are mainframes. gas plants are ibm/hp/sun. on-shore and off-shore wind are windows and linux on intel. solar is cell phones.

we never got rid of mainframes. they are still built and sold today. but no amount of arguing about their technical superiority in the 80s would have put you on the right side of that bet.

> geographic diversity in wind goes a long way toward addressing intermittency

This is unfortunately not true. Taking the whole Europe, either the wind blows everywhere, or it doesn't [1].

1. https://www.vive-le-nucleaire-heureux.com/images/Textes-blog...

I'm pro wind and solar, but also believe that nuclear could and should be part of the mix as well. To extend your mainframe analogy, nuclear should be whitebox PCs.

Make the plants smaller, cheaper, modular, and designed for easier maintenance and disposal.

Thank you for the correction and the "correction". When I Google, the top 3 results all show that:

1. 60% is too high for current turbines; 45% is about what recently installed turbines do. 2. Only old (and outmoded) turbines are anything like 25%. 3. The newest 12MW turbines should achieve 55-60%, as Hywind did for the (windy) winter months. Since future deployments are the topic here, that's the relevant number. Call it 55%, and say I was exaggerating by 10%.

I'm glad that ~10GW of nuclear is coming online, albeit at high LCOE. We don't know how to accelerate deployment. We do know how to accelerate the wind deployment that is already at higher volume. The small-modern nuclear camp is hoping to reach 10GW a year a decade from now at higher-than-wind LCOE. And I hope they succeed! But that is not a reason to talk down the wind and solar-plus storage wave happening right now.

Nuclear electricity is good. I wish we had a lot more of it. Nuclear advocates spend way too much time bashing variable renewables, including with trivially-Googleable misinformation such as your "25%", and not enough tackling the horrible political economy of nuclear. Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies.

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