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Comment by kscaldef | Hacker News Reader

"Nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity"... so long as you pretend the only other option is fossil fuels.

At scale, right now, those are the only two options.

Well, for that matter, we don't have enough nuclear power production capacity to meet our needs either, so I don't entirely see your point. Reducing the amount of power we're producing with fossil fuels will mean needing to increase our production from other sources, but it doesn't mandate that we have to increase it from a particular source.

My point is that fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two types that scale efficiently with current technology. Everything else doesn't scale as well. Not sure how else to word that, and that's exactly what I meant up there.

It has nothing to do with current capacity. Nuclear has lost a lot to debates much like this one; however, if we wanted the capacity, nuclear would step up and fill it in at a reasonable price. The same amount of power generated by the alternatives would be astronomically expensive. That's one of the problems that plague the alternatives you've named: either they are far too expensive to use at any kind of large scale, or suitable locations are in thin supply, or power output fluctuates unsuitably with a change in weather, and so on. They just can't compete.

The current research into nuclear is making it even cheaper and safer (thorium, etc); the current research into the alternatives is making them cheap enough to be possible with significant demand.

The reasonable price you talk about doesn't include the cost of disposal. Whatever about providing electricity to be consumed at scale, dealing with radioactive waste has not been successful at small scale, why would it work at large scale? A lot of people display hubris about the merits of the on paper research reactors, what about their unknown unknowns?

* We currently have massive political pressures blocking the production of nuclear reactors. There is no problem in building it, the problem is in the politics.

What are the other options, then?

Hydro-electric, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, to name the ones that come immediately to mind.

Hydroelectric has the problem that: 1) You're making tens of square kilometers of land uninhabitable by flooding. 2) Such flooding promotes the formation of anaerobic algae which generate thousands of tons of C02 3) Dams collapse too.

Wind cannot provide a stable energy source. The advances required in battery technology and so-called "smart grids" are still too far off. You can't power a steel mill on wind power.

Solar is extremely dependent on location and, once again, requires a power infrastructure overhaul.

Geothermal and tidal are still untested.

All of the mentioned experimental technologies will require at the very least 20 years to mature and will bring their own problems as well (geothermal has the tiny little problem that it causes earthquakes).

Most people don't understand that undertaking an energy infrastructure update is something that takes decades and has to be planned thinking about its effects 30 and 40 years from now. And that also means that while you wait for technologies to mature you have to use stopgaps. Right now there is no alternative for nuclear and there likely won't be for 20 years unless nations are willing to invest hundreds of billions in research and upgrades.

What about hydro on natural waterfalls? No space lost. No dam-failure risk. I don't think every rainy mountain is fully tapped.

True, they aren't everywhere. Maybe some of the power-intensive industry can move to them.

Fortunately people tend to like waterfalls for their aesthetic value so much that they would never allow industrial processing or power plants near them. I would like to see calculations on how much theoretical power could be obtained from all sources if there were no limits, i.e. every river dammed, every waterfall harnessed, every atom of uranium split, every atom of silicon and necessary rare earths turned into solar panels, every acre of desert used in molten salt solar collectors, etc.

Doesn't seem to be a problem and Niagara (2.5GW) or Snoqualmie (54MW). Both are still popular with tourists (obviously, Snoqualmie is not on Niagara's scale in either power or tourism, but I include it because I imagine there are a lot of Snoqualmie-sized waterfalls yet untapped, and probably no Niagara-sized).

I strongly doubt that you can generate more than 0.1% of our power requirements from that source. The world uses 17 trillion kilowatt hours per year, that's 1900 Gigawatts.

None of those can replace coal / nuclear.

EDIT: Here's Bill Gates explaining why nuclear is not optional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I

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