Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

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"One of the best" assumes that nuclear power generators are competently run and fuel competently disposed of. Which organisations do you trust more to be more competent than the Japanese (Fukushima) and Germans (who ditched unknown, unrecorded, probably large quantities of nuclear waste in an incompletely built facility)?

We have better, anyway. The combination of wind, power, burning things that have grown in our lifetime and time-shifting power usage seems to be good enough AFAICT.

By the latter I mean that a lot of big power users don't really need to run all the time. A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare (building extra capacity while building is cheaper than adding if a car sells well) and most the power-hungry bits can be shut down for a while if the power grid really needs it. Unless a car model is really, really popular and the factory runs at full capacity, but in the case competing factories don't.

I think this is a pipe-dream.

There is no energy grid anywhere in the world t1hat has ever run only on intermittent power sources.

As for the hypothetical BMW factory, what are the workers meant to do while the power is low?

You have to be honest that cost of such setup would be significantly higher because you need huge amount of storage, or large overcapacity, or both.

Lastly, zero people died from radiation at Fukushima - the tsunami killed 15,000. Why is anyone surprised that a natural disaster can damage a building? Do we have tsunamis in UK and Germany?

The story is completely overblown.

150 years ago there was no energy grid anywhere in the world. We've come a long way since then. You seem really confident that a renewable grid will never happen. Do you have credible projections on storage and deployment costs that indicate asymptotic bounds on cost that are above the cost of similar projections for comparable nuclear?

I am not saying it won't happen. You are free to argue we should be paying more for energy so its sustainable, but unless you are going to bring some serious evidence you can't just claim the problem is easilly sorted and wind + solar grid would be cheaper than nuclear.

Current and projected cost of storage is relatively high, the most cost efficient storage is hydro and compressed air, they are not showing any kind of fast decrease in cost.

Maybe there is potential in energy grids that span continents and have large over-capacity - then you dont need much storage.

I am assuming we are talking about imminent future, in 50 years maybe math is different, but thats too late for climate change.

It doesn't make sense to invest into storage until you are well beyond 80% renewable energy. If we had 80% renewables today then climate change wouldn't be as big of a problem as it is right now, so the next best thing is to build more renewables until we actually hit bottlenecks.

Nuclear power has always been a government funded energy source so unless government policy changes and UK orders 50-100 of these power plants by 2050 then nuclear power is not going to make any difference. Convincing all governments on the planet to invest into nuclear power is extremely unlikely. Without the introduction of a CO2 tax nuclear power will always look bad vs coal and coal will always look bad vs renewables and from what I can tell the vast majority of people don't want a CO2 tax even though it would be the best solution for climate change.

> There is no energy grid anywhere in the world t1hat has ever run only on intermittent power sources.

"Nothing can ever happen for the first time."

> zero people died from radiation at Fukushima

This is false, and lower the credibility of the people that keep repeating this fake mantra again and again.

How is it false? Would you care to provide any kind of source or at least state what you believe the actual figures are?

Official statistics says the only fatalities were from physical injuries, stuff like collapsing walls, etc.

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

>A company like BMW needs a lot of electricity to produce a car, but the factories are built with capacity to spare

So interestingly, one of the reasons why the steam engine took off in working factories was because you didn't have to rely on the intermittent nature of water or wind power.

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