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Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

6 months ago I would have hot-headedly agreed with everything you say.

The discussions I found on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958

changed my mind though. Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized and it doesn’t make much economic sense. I mean, the radioactive emission from coal plants is higher than from nuclear powerplants - but the overall costs are too high.

Check out what Patagonia has to say on hydro plants and the ecological impact in case you are interested.

I do think that the way Germany is tackling electricity/energy is not great. Like so many things they are not solving...

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Dams burst and kill lots of people. Not often in the scheme of things, but by comparison they make nuclear look like a saint.

    Incident    Location   Fatalities

    Banqiao     China      171000
    Machchu     India        5000
    South Fork  USA          2208

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

The environmental impact of flooding entire basins is also pretty rough, and basins don't exist everywhere you might want one.

Nuclear is very often (majority?) located on connected lakes with dams cooling and pumped storage.

Neither Machchu nor South Fork Dam are good examples in this particular argument. They were never used for power generation.

Banqiao, however, is spot on.

Not so sure about Banquiao, at it "took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most people were busy with the "revolution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

The "Cultural Revolution" began in 1966.

In such a context an otherwise avoidable catastrophe may happen.

This Revolution followed the "Great Leap Forward" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ), with famines. "In the subsequent famines of the early 1960s popularly attributed to the Great Leap Forward, Henan was one of the hardest hit and millions of lives were lost." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henan#Modern_Era .

Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" (same source).

Predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so.

> Check out what Patagonia has to say on hydro plants and the ecological impact in case you are interested.

This is Patagonia's brand strategy to sell products, rather than a political policy. So they have the luxury of pointing out problems and being light on the detail of solutions.

They get to focus on the negative ecological role of dams, and generally promoting reducing resource consumption. All energy production has a negative ecological impact to a greater or lesser degree, and it's rich for a company selling mainly things we don't need to talk about reducing consumption. The headlines are also different to the detail which calls for decommissioning the worst offenders rather than all dams. The difficult broader question of where energy comes from instead is ducked:

> ... solar, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal and biomass are helping us to transition to a clean energy future. [1]

The cynic in me feels like there is probably scope for future marketing campaigns about the ecological impact of these too. I had professional dealings with the company and advise taking it with a pinch of salt.

[1] https://www.patagonia.com/on/demandware.static/Sites-patagon...

I do not know what was their ultimate motive to go ballistic on hydro power. I guess if it was all about marketing I would have picked a different “enemy” than hydro power...

I learned about it through Blue Heart: https://blueheart.patagonia.com

And the story I heard about it was: their CEO went on a fly fishing trip there, really loved it, was told by the local guide that all will be gone in short time for hydro plants. He then decided to use all/most/a significant portion of the marketing budget in this campaign instead.

You can always criticize ulterior motives - and we will never know for sure. But I give them some kudos for the initiatives they take - like taking their biggest revenue driver (e.g., dry suits) and deciding to make it “as ecological as possible” and 3x as expensive along the way...

Every company is in the business of making money. And the fashion industry is known for making little money and having a big environmental impact. I don’t mind if somebody goes a more risky route that also makes them money along the way...

Sometimes you hold the people you respect to a higher standard than others, and that's certainly true of me in this case.

I think what they do is great, but I would take their campaigns, and especially all the Yvon stories, with a pinch of salt.

Tonuge in cheek, I'll share a story of my own - to launch a new Patagonia store in a Europe, they had bespoke furniture commissioned from recycled wood (probably using no solvents etc etc). Great! Except that it was made by in California, covered in bubble wrap and sent thousands of miles by land and sea.

Thanks for sharing.

Yes, No worries, I am not glorifying them.

But I guess they try harder than I do. That’s good enough for a start...

What do you count as subsidies to nuclear power?

Wind and solar have been heavily subsidized in France through buying it at an above market rate. [0]

0: http://www.bsi-economics.org/1016-evolution-prix-electricite...

For example, the UK's "Hinkley Point C" nuclear plant expansion has the following subsidies [1]

* Guaranteed minimum price for the electricity generated, well above current market rates. Taxpayer pays £92.50 per Megawatt Hour - when the wholesale price of electricity has been £35-£42 for the last year or so. The guaranteed price rises with inflation, and lasts 35 years.

* Loan guarantees, reducing their interest rates.

* Guaranteed maximum price for waste disposal, taxpayer pays anything above that.

* Capped liability / reduced insurance requirements for nuclear accidents. Taxpayer pays if an accident exceeds their insurance.

* Guaranteed maximum cost for decommissioning. Taxpayer pays if decommissioning costs more than predicted.

When the whole project was kicked off it was pre-brexit and our politicians were pro-chinese-investment. So a nuclear plant built with French expertise and Chinese money seemed like a great way to replace our ageing coal-fired power plants and keep the lights on.

[1] https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/united...

The parent comment was talking about nuclear being subsidized in France and your example is in the UK. My point was about France if it was not obvious.

I don't know enough about the UK nuclear program, so I might be wrong, but it seems wrong to compare a guaranteed price to an ongoing price.

Could you even get someone else to guarantee you an inflation pegged price of electricity for the next 35 years? And in that case, how much would it cost?

Yes, many offshore windfarms will do this. At about 40GBp, in somewhat current tendering (Contract for difference (CFD) auction round 3, UK). Although normally on a 15 year period (for arbitrary reasons Hinkley Point C was allowed a 35 year period and did not participate in the 2015 CFD auction).

I think anyone would love to offer a CFD over a 35 year timeline, only HinkleyPoint C (and Sizewell C in the same agreement) where offered these conditions. i.e it makes financing much easier.

HinkleyPoint C is in planning since 2008 or so, not exactly a quick process. Real construction since 2018 (but some prep work done in the decade leading up to this.) Expected generation is in 2025/2026. This sounds bad but is actually decent, 10 years from idea to generation is common and outliers exist in both directions.

Do you know where I could read more about this scheme?

How do they guarantee that they will actually provide the energy at a given time? Are they pairing wind with another power plant?

That is not what is guaranteed (nor at Hinkley Point C (HPC)), what is guaranteed that in the period a Mw produced for the grid is paid at least the strike price (but maybe more). Hinkley Point C will have have downtime for refuelling and other reasons. So needs to be paired with another power plant.

The CFD for hinkley point is available and is a few hundred pages.

Part of reason for the strike price with HPC is that they expected offshore to cost 85 GBP in 2025, while it costs 50 GBP in 2020.

I don't think that the downtime of a nuclear reactor is similar to wind and solar (less often and can be scheduled).

Thanks for the explanation on CFD. One of the advantages of nuclear is its predictability, it seems unfortunate if this isn't what was bought by the UK.

That is an argument against nuclear power in France as an economical base load generation mechanism.

The remaining points about the intermittent nature of renewables and how difficult it is to incorporate them into a reliable grid economically are still valid.

>Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized and it doesn’t make much economic sense ... the overall costs are too high.

How much would it cost per kilowatt hour without subsidies?

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