Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

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> > Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering?

> Yes, people do study nuclear engineering.

Note I said "readily" not "really". I see you made the calcluation when you made your decision.

It's a shame really because I believe nuclear power has great promise in benefitting society.

Too bad the moonshot level investment in nuclear went towards military ends (france in 80's excepted). And too bad funding is dependent on political whim.

Although solar and wind is working, I worry that might be a "save ourselves rich" strategy.

When you look at this table:

  material              energy density mj/kg
  Uranium               22,394,000,000
  Diesel fuel           38.6
  Lithium-ion battery  2.63

I think it would be nice to think about the benefits of growth on the high end not just savings on the low end. I believe making energy available in ever-increasing plentiful quantities at low (to zero) cost would really change the world.

Nah, the nuclear industry got a TON of R&D funding too, and continues to. Plus I don't think you realize just how much governments subsidize and assist nuclear power. $8-10 billion per reactor is more money than companies can easily plunk down for an investment that takes decades to pay off. They rely on government loans, subsidies, and loan guarantees to raise capital and help fund the projects.

Loan guarantees are a particularly common example -- for example, last year the US govt provided $3.7 BILLION in loan guarantees for the troubled Vogtle reactor builds in Georgia. The way loan guarantees work is that the government agrees to pay the debt owed if the company goes bankrupt or cannot complete the project; this is surprisingly common actually, since the same project had already driven Westignhouse to file bankruptcy.

Solar and wind aren't likely to make a handful of people extremely rich -- the profit margins on the components are pretty low due to the high degree of competition pushing them down. Building solar and wind farms to sell their power does produce a solid and reliable financial return on investment, but it's still less than 10% (even though the energy return on investment is good).

> When you look at this table [energy density]

For power generation, energy density is largely irrelevant.

Also these energy densities are apples-to-oranges comparisons. You can't burn uranium without a fairly large, heavy reactor. There are no "nuclear cars." Similarly diesel requires an engine although it's smaller. Batteries aren't a power source on their own, they're storage, and you're not "burning" them up.

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