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Comment by SeoxyS | Hacker News Reader

Let's use the smarter, more innovative, and safer energy solutions available today. Let's leave these 50's and 60's era shitty technology behind.

Oh, and what do you suggest? In the US, for example, we've just about dammed every river that can be dammed, and solar and wind are too expensive for wide scale deployments.

The only real alternative we have to the 20% of our energy which comes from nuclear would be to add to the 45% which comes from coal (or to the 23% from natural gas.) That would be a disaster, coal plants are far more damaging than nuclear plants are.

We should be doing the opposite. Replacing our alarmingly high coal energy usage with nuclear plants, instead. Too bad there's so much propaganda (and big-coal lobbying) against this. Nuclear is the only practical source of zero-emission energy for wide scale use.

Personally, I'd much rather live with a couple nuclear incidents than with the horrors of today's fossile fuel industries.

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solar and wind are too expensive for wide scale deployments.

No, they aren't. And the only reason nuclear is considered "cheap" is that the costs of accidents and waste disposal are methodically underestimated.

Oh, and another thing: Uranium fuel is a quite limited resource as well...

Thorium isn't.

Yes, but major development is still needed to make such reactors safe and viable.

Sure. Major investment and infrastructure improvements are needed to make its alternatives viable too.

EDIT: I should note that even the above is somewhat irrelevant to my original point, which was simply that one cannot dismiss nuclear power as a whole simply because one type of fuel supply is "limited".

We have 50 years of petroleum left and maybe 100-200 of coal. Compare that to centuries of Uranium, Plutonium and other radioactive minerals. Also, emissions are a big deal, too. Nuclear waste is contained and far less dangerous (when kept properly) than fossile fuel emissions.

I'm a long way from an opponent of nuclear power, but when you say

Nuclear waste is contained and far less dangerous (when kept properly) than fossile fuel emissions.

I think you might be making the opposite point to what you intend.

You compare the worst case of safety & long term consequences for oil/coal (ie, the current situation), with the best case ("when kept properly") for nuclear power.

A better comparison would be to compare the safety coal/oil power after spending the money required to keep nuclear waste safe on cleaning coal/oil emissions and improving mining safety, or else to compare the worst case in each scenario.

The worst case for coal/oil is a few thousand dead (from mining) a year, and bad climate damage. The worst case for nuclear is a few million dead and regional environmental catastrophe. It's fair to have a discussion about the probability any disaster happening, but to preclude the possibility undermines your argument.

To me, nuclear proponents making the case the nuclear is safe if everything goes well sound a lot like the NASA administrators who Feynman criticized in the challenger disaster report for not understanding risk.

The problem with solar is that they require large amounts of resources to produce but also that they also produce the wrong type of power.

To give you an example, think of a way to run a large aluminium smelter overnight using just solar cells. There isn't any sun shining, so you arn't getting any power in. You need to somehow store enough energy to run the plant overnight, and do it in a form that can actually be produced, isn't absurdly expensive and isn't utterly dangerous.

And at the end of that, you need enough solar cells to produce enough power so that your countries economy doesn't stop in the first spat of bad weather.

I do agree with your point, however. Fossil fuels cause too much damage to the environment for them to be viable long term.

The only question is how do we go about replacing them, with the current political state of the issue?

> Wrong type of power.

I don't think you explained this. It seems as though you're just arguing about the cost of batteries, not a certain "type" of power. (what types of power are there, anyways? I only know of one: electricity. There are many different ways to generate it though..)

Batteries don't actually store electricity. They convert electrical energy into chemical energy (and vice versa). I believe the "wrong type of power" referred to above was electrical vs. thermal energy, as well as delivery at the wrong time.

The power for a particular grid generally has two components, that which is always on and that which fluctuates through the day. To give you an example, an aluminum smelter will always use a fixed (and very large) quantity of electricity, day or night, rain or shine. As it is impractical to store electricity anywhere near the scale required to power these types of buildings, you need a power plant that can provide cheaply a continuous supply of power. These are known as your base load power plants.

To show you that the storage of large quantities of is impractical by example, think of the last time you visited a data center, and remember the rows upon rows of of UPS batteries required to run one datacenter for a few minutes. It stands to reason that enough batteries to power the datacenter for an extended period of time (ie. days), would be utterly impractical. This is why datacenters have generators, ie. the batteries can't power the datanceter indefinitely and when the batteries run out, it needs to produce the power to power the datacenter.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load_power_plant

Aluminium smelters might be better placed somewhere with abundant power from sources like Hydro or Geothermal sources.

Or you could mine New York garbage and make diesel out of that.

Photovoltaics are indeed not very cost efficient right now, but solar thermal[1] is a much more mature, cheaper technology. It's also easier to store large amounts of heat than to store electricity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal

Solar thermal is in fact a very interesting technology. I've looked into the pilot plants over in the desert in california and it seems like a real step forward.

Its also interesting that they seem to solve parts of the "baseload power" problem, ie. some plants store molten salt and can thus generate power for extended periods, but they would still have issues. For example, in non-equitorial climates I would assume it would have diminished capacity in winter, which could be a problem if a large portion of the grid was composed of solar thermal plants. Similarly you have efficiency losses/etc. associated.

Considering that the only alternative in terms of storing power involves pumping water up hydroelectric dams, though, it's certainly a step in the right direction.

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