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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> By 2050 “we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs,” Levesque said.

We can already reach 90% renewables by 2035 without these reactors [1]. If they get built, that’d be great, but they won’t be built in time to avert climate change. TerraPower has existed for 14 years and still hasn’t built a reactor. For comparison, the Kamuthi solar facility in Tamil Nadu, India, has a total generation capacity of 648 MW, covers 10 sq km and took 8 months to build. This work can be parallelized; more generation capacity deployed in the same time or faster with more people. Portugal just had a historic bid close for a 700MW solar facility at 1.3 cents/kWh. Nuclear cannot compete against such economics, even when storage is factored in to enable firm dispatch of renewable energy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707

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Your article includes nuclear:

"Wind, solar, and battery storage can provide the bulk of the 90 percent clean electricity. The report finds that new fossil fuel generators are not needed. Existing gas plants, used infrequently and combined with storage, hydropower, and nuclear power, are sufficient to meet demand during periods of extraordinarily low renewable energy generation or exceptionally high electricity demand."

Existing nuclear, not new. Those facilities will eventually be decommissioned, as they’re nearing end of life, but it of course makes sense to extend their operating licenses if safe to do so (to be replaced last after fossil generators).

If you break ground on a new reactor this moment, it won’t generate its first kw for years. Historically, over a decade, but folks handwave that cutting regulation and red tape would speed up the process, so I say years to be generous.

If only we could replace these old, baseload reactors quicker, and cheaper, and maybe with an identical, smaller design, with better tech so one control room could monitor multiple reactors. And if refuelling could be done without turning off all power generation at a site. Maybe if we had something modular......oh, wait

Wow its so easy, can't believe all those idiots trying to build nuclear plants the past few decades have never though to simply apply "better tech". Thanks hacker news/silicon valley!

Why is Rolls Royce trying to build small modular reactors then? If you look at what Rolls Royce is doing for example then everything that came before it appears to be a joke in terms of economics. You can't build bespoke power plants like you're an artisan and expect them to be cheap.

The real challenges in nuclear power plant construction are the total lack of economies of scale. Nobody wants a bloody $30 billion plant. People want 10 plants for that price.

The barriers, time, and cost for nuclear seem to be primarily of political origin, not technical. It's held to an unreasonable higher standard than anything else.

Nuclear is an inherently centralized technology, in contrast to solar and wind which can be controlled at a more local level, even down to the individual home owner and land owner. Even with small plants purported to be in the works, the cost scale is not in reach of an individual family like solar panels can be. That centralization of nuclear brings with it things like corruption, taxation, cost overruns, and cleanup costs that are not accounted for in the lifetime of the politicians whose buddies are benefitting from the contracts. So I wouldn't say the higher bar is unreasonable.

So certainly all the non US/EU countries with less strict regulations should have electricity "too cheap to meter" through nuclear, right? since there's no technical challenges here apparently.

There are technical challenges, but arguably the primary challenges are a) capital costs, and b) nonproliferation treaties.

Fossil fueled power capacity and consumption is still rising faster than any other type of energy source, and by a large margin. If we take consumption from 2010 to 2019, fossil fueled energy consumption increased by 15070 TWh, while solar and win combined increased by 1773 TWh. That is almost a 10x in difference in favor of fossil fuels.

There is nothing to even imply that we will reach 90% renewables by 2035. To be fighting over which non-fossil fueled energy source is more economical is just a distraction. There need to be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants. Expand solar and wind production as if they were tanks and munitions during world war 2. Build as many nuclear reactors we can from the current pool of educated nuclear professionals. Throw in some battery technology from tesla, hydro pumps, compressed air, EV transition, dynamic grid, or what else is left that do not depend on burning fossil fuels. Set the date of 2035 as the day we ban burning fossil fuel in the power grid and let the market decide how to deal with it.

That is how we avert climate change.

That study groups nuclear with clean energy.

I wish there was an option for people to run on purely renewables for a year.

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