Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

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Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs. Their potential for life-threatening disasters - on the scale of Fukushima, Chernobyl, coal ash floods, etc. - is zero.

Just as with coal mines, uranium mines and oilfields, there's a large upfront cost ... but a much lower cost to the environment.

Furthermore, anyone can create solar-powered electricity, anywhere. There will be no wars over access to sunlight. Sunlight is a democratic power source, which cannot be monopolized by special interests. Nomads in Mongolia make their own electricity. Anyone living near a creek can make their own hydro ... thousands do.

Once renewables are built, apart from maintenance, the cost of the energy and its transport is free, and (apart from recycling costs) pollution-free. It will continue to be free until the generator has to be replaced, some stupid war destroys it, and/or the Sun burns out. Too obvious for some interests.

Attempts to distort these facts, to maintain monopolies and continue to enrich a very few, will persist. It's easy to invent lies and distortions and to spread FUD about renewables. Yep, there's a lot at stake. For a few.

But what's best for the biosphere and its people? For the people of the future, including our kids and grandkids? For all the lifeforms, the water sources, and the atmosphere of the planet? The answer is renewable -- and the technology to support its generation and storage is a superior and long-lasting investment.

> Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs.

That's not true. It costs fuel to mine the resourses needed, to build the equipments, to install them, to maintain them. The IPCC states that globally, nuclear power emits _less_ greenhouse gases than hydro and solar, and emits about the same as wind. [1]

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Table A.III.2, page 1335

For more info, please see this eye opening TedX talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

The table linked lists the following lifecycle emissions (min/median/max)

* Hydropower: 1.0/24/2200

* Concentrated solar: 8.8/27/63

* Rooftop Solar PV: 26/41/60

* Utility Solar PV: 18/48/180

* Wind Onshore: 7.0/11/56

* Wind Offshore: 8.0/12/35

* Nuclear: 3.7/12/110

I've gotta say, Nuclear/Utility Solar/Hydro all have massive ranges in their lifecycle emissions. If you're basing "which tech has the lowest lifecycle emissions" from the median alone, you're not getting the full story. Rooftop solar is a lot more consistent than Nuclear, for example.

What units are we talking here?

Joules? Bananas? Pears? My physics teacher would say...

gCO2eq/kWh :-)

The crazy part is that all over the world nuclear is being phased out as it's uneconomic compared with renewable energy. I wonder why they chose now as the time to endorse it, just when it's no longer relevant. So strange.

It's not one or the other. Renewables on their own can't work. They need to be paired with another energy source. This is where Nuclear (or coal or else) comes useful.

Coal displaces renewables. Nuclear power displaces renewables. Gas plants don't displace renewables. I seriously wonder why people don't understand something this simple.

In the last 10 years there has been an explosion in new renewable power plants. Consumption of solar energy has increased by 20x. Wind by 5x. Even hydro has gone up almost 30%.

But for every 1 watt hour of extra renewable energy, fossil fueled energy consumption has expanded by 10 watts. Gas and oil usage has only gone up, and the increase from 2010 in just coal consumption is more than the total amount of wind generated in the whole world.

The biosphere and its people, the future, all our kids and grandkids, water sources, atmosphere, it all depend on us stopping fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels when there are better alternatives available is a an on going crime facilitated by almost every government on the planet.

It would be good to say that the answer is renewable, but it the wrong answer to the wrong question. The answer to the short and long term danger to the planet is a immediate stop to the production and expansion of fossil fueled energy. No new fossil fueled power plant should be allowed to be built in 2020 and onward. The answer about what we do next is also related to fossil fuels, ie any alternative energy source which is not fossil fuels. We need to ramp up production of solar, wind, storage and nuclear and we need people to invest into that today. There is only so many trained people in those fields and only if everyone is working on fossil fuels alternative may we get a functional energy grid without fossil fuels fast enough.

Do you take into account storage? Having zero electricity at night or on cloudy days is not an option. So it’s either batteries or nuclear. On the scale of powering a city, what make more sense?

Wind and water are other sources as well, though maybe not quite as efficient.

You can't guarantee there is going to be enough wind at night.

Wind power is surprisingly bad for the environment in the long run.

The blades need to be changed at regular intervals, weigh tens of thousands of kilos and are 100% unrecycleable, basically glass and carbon fibre.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

Why can't we create a nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert like area 51 type of setup so if there is a meltdown it can be contained. Could we safely store the energy somehow and transport it or make some sort of long-distance hookup to our grids?

Also anyone know why the nuclear site in San Onofre by San Diego failed?

> Why can't we create a nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert

In principle we can. Dry cooling is more expensive and less efficient than using water, but technically doable.

But the plant requires personnel. Said personnel has kids, spouses etc. You end up with a small town to run the plant. And that town requires fresh water which might be hard to come by in the middle of the desert.

> Could we safely store the energy somehow and transport it or make some sort of long-distance hookup to our grids?

We could store the energy in nuclear fuel, at the amazing energy density of 80 TJ/kg. Hard to beat that, except with fusion or antimatter. :)

Anyway, long distance electricity transmission is technically doable; HVDC losses are < 3%/1000 km. But again, it costs money.

> Also anyone know why the nuclear site in San Onofre by San Diego failed?

They detected premature wear on new steam generators. In the face of stiff opposition by local state politicians, rather than fixing it they decided to decommission the entire plant.

> But the plant requires personnel.

So all we need is to build the plant and then automate the entire operations.

Because nuclear power is still just thermal power. You need access to coolant. Ever wondered why a tsunami prone island like Japan decided to place a nuclear plant near the ocean? Doesn't that sound like a very stupid decision? Well, the reality is that this a necessary requirement for monolithic nuclear power plants. Rivers vary in their flow rates depending on the season. If the flow rate is too low there is less cooling capacity and subsequently you will have to turn the nuclear plant off, which will seriously hurt the economics of the plant. The only reliable cooling source is the ocean. Of course, if you have smaller plants you can live with less cooling.

So what if we build it in the middle of the ocean?

Why can't we create a nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert like area 51 type of setup so if there is a meltdown it can be contained. Could we safely store the energy somehow and transport it or make some sort of long-distance hookup to our grids?

Also anyone know why the nuclear site in San Onfre by San Diego failed?

Excuse my pedantry, but hydro is renewable, you have replies counting it as renewable, and a hydro dam failure long ago in china is the record holder of energy disaster casualties.

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