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Comment by jasoncartwright | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is much more expensive than wind in the UK, and plants take 10yrs+ to build.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle... "Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948 "Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23. This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour."

Perhaps reply addressing my point rather than blindly downvoting :(

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We can't possibly know the world that could have been if the subsidies payed out to wind power and solar were split 50%/50% along side nuclear. But I can't imagine we'd be in a worse place. There are so many ideas to explore, e.g. thorium or traveling wave reactors.

Unfortunately it's too late as we need to address carbon emissions now. If we want nuclear, we'll have to invest everything we should have invested over the last 30 years plus continue subsidizing renewables at the current rate.

Nuclear is expensive because of design costs and regulations. Mass production would greatly lower prices. The fact is when I was a nuclear power plant operator the same WOG value you could buy at Home Depot for 10 dollars costs 300 dollars with all the certifications and requirements for safety need in a nuclear plant.

don’t you welcome the spirit of all those pesky regulations?

Those regulations are buying down risk.

Sure, they could buy them from Home Depot without those regulations. But how do they know they were manufactured to spec? How do they know the manufacturer used the correct alloy?

You aren’t paying for “regulations” you’re paying for quality pedigree. This is also why aerospace work is so expensive. The industry has determined the supply risk is too great without a verifiable level of quality. Quality is expensive, but not as expensive as failure in these industries.

In Ontario, Canada we get a large portion of our energy from nuclear. We have a decent amount of wind, but if you click on the "Supply" tab you'll see it is very variable, and gas turbines kick in to pick up the slack:

* http://www.ieso.ca/power-data

Especially evident in the '5-11 Mar' data series.

Meanwhile nuclear chugs along at 10 GW day in and day out.

Eye-ballying it, if we added another 2500 MW of nuclear, then Hydro could probably pick up the slack with regards to the daily variable load in the province.

I'd be curious to know how portable this kind of set up would be: it's the variability of wind (and solar) that's of most concern to me. You have to build back-up capacity for both of them, and it's usually gas turbine.

To be fair, nuclear power plants are base load power generators.

So while the cost for wind power is just 57.5, I wonder how much will be the energy costs for, say a town powered with wind and with nuclear.

We're not going to resolve climate change with one or the other; we need a combination of every clean, non-fossil burning energy tech available.

That's one of these broad "sounds good, but isn't logical" statements.

We don't need "every clean" tech. If we have tech a and tech b and tech a is cheaper and can be scaled up faster, while tech b has a lot of challenges and is clearly more expensive in every situation then we don't need tech b. And I think there's a lot of evidence that in most situations nuclear (particularly new nuclear) is tech b.

If we have tech a and tech b and tech a is cheaper and can be scaled up faster, while tech b has a lot of challenges and is clearly more expensive in every situation then we don't need tech b.

The only problem with that is that theoretical "tech a" doesn't exist. Every energy production technology has some drawback or trade off. Nuclear is expensive, wind and solar don't work all the time, tidal is limited to coast lines, fossil fuel burning makes the climate worse, and so on. In the real world we can't limit ourselves to one single perfect solution.

Meanwhile, China has been investing steadily in nuclear power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

The UK has a problem with massive costs for infrastructure projects. Somehow projects that one would imagine would take a few guys with a bulldozer and a few loads of concrete end up costing millions.

Hinckley Point is just a larger example of that.

Portable nuclear bypasses that by being able to build in other countries without such extreme costs and import the result.

Large infrastructure projects with massive costs is hardly a UK-specific problem.

I guess instead of waiting a decade or more for a nuclear plant we'll wait a decade or two for these portable nuclear plants to be maybe (if ever) be commercialised.

In the meantime, we've already built the largest wind farms in the world which are proving valuable as the primary source of UK electricity https://electricityproduction.uk

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