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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

I’m guessing that is because nuclear is often framed as a solution to the climate disaster.

If the discussion was simply: “see how cool of a technology nuclear power is; see how nuclear powers the latest mars rover” I would not guess there would be a lot of backlash. However in this thread you see a lot of: “wind and solar has some problems too”, or “nuclear waste is better then the warming of the planet”.

The problem with pitting nuclear as a solution to the climate disaster is that there are existing technologies that can solve the energy part of it, those technologies are primarily wind and solar. And there is ample reason to be skeptical about how well nuclear could solve it. So naturally when someone states that nuclear is good actually at solving the climate crisis, a natural response would be: “well actually, it isn’t. Wind and solar is”.

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Huh? Nuclear is an existing solution to climate change, though. More existing than wind and solar. It provides more electricity in the US than wind and solar combined. The problem of climate change would already have been worse without it. So it already is part of the solution.

It doesn’t have to be and isn’t the entire solution. But no activist calling for the end of nuclear electricity is doing any favors to climate action.

Nuclear was largely built 50 years ago. Our technological capacities have shifted vastly since then. Also, the nuclear industry is completely unwilling to reuse those same designs, and regulators don't want that either.

So the nuclear from 1970 may still be operating, and operating somewhat cheaply, but that doesn't mean that nuclear as a technology still matches the technological productive capacity of our economy.

The thermal conversion of steam to electricity used to be considered dirt cheap, as far as the overall cost of electricity: low capital costs that last a good amount of time. The primary expense was fuel.

Zero-fuel electricity generation capital costs are starting to eclipse the thermal conversion capital costs. This has huge implications for what we should think of basing our future grid upon.

Take natural gas for example. Turbine-driven generators followed by a steam cycle-combined cycle- have completet obsoleted thermal-only gas plants. It's why coal is so much more expensive than gas.

The world is different, and nuclear only seems like a solution because we paid massive capital costs at a time when the competitive environment was entirely different. We no longer live in that world.

China alone is building 12 reactors alone and if the US isn’t going to get their act together and stops with that renewables-for-all non-sense, China will be the dominating world power.

This competitive mentality of who gets to be the dominating world superpower is beneficial to no-one.

I always took it as: As the nuclear plants from the 70s and 80s are getting decommissioned because of age, there is no plan to replace them with new nuclear. So they should be replace them with wind and solar, because wind and solar is a cheaper, quicker, and more reliable alternative then new nuclear (as this tread demonstrates).

I don’t see the debate as existing nuclear vs. new wind and solar, but as new nuclear vs. new wind and solar.

Germany is a counterexample. Much progress was lost with the decision to accelerate retirement of (rather than extend) nuclear power plants. The rule ought to be we retire all coal, then all (or virtually all) natural gas before considering retiring nuclear. Extend or even upgrade existing nuclear to ensure safety and productivity.

(The US has mostly been doing a pretty good job of this, upgrading and maintaining the existing fleet and even adding a reactor here or there, although we have had some unforced errors like how some nuclear power plants in California were shut down early.)

There was supposed to be a nuclear renaissance kicked off by the loan guarantees passed under Bush. The AP1000 was supposed to be safer, simpler, more efficient and easier to build.

However, the 2 plants that started under Obama were failures, with one getting cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground and the other about to come online after going 2x+ over time and money budgets. Westinghouse, the maker of the AP1000, went through bankruptcy as a result. All prospective AP1000 projects have been halted.

No generator in their right mind would order one without huge additional subsidy from the government, guaranteeing against construction risk.

Wind and solar need backup power plants and therefore *CANNOT* replace nuclear power plants.

Well, they can, but it’s a lot harder than people realize. To replace 1GW of nuclear completely in Virginia without a bunch of transmission, you may need about 14GW nameplate solar and about 50GWh of storage. It’s not cheap. Source: here, with 0 as exponent, 2011 as the year, 2020 cost scenario, and only solar and battery storage. https://model.energy

I assume that was with just batteries for storage, not batteries and hydrogen. Adding hydrogen often greatly reduces the overcapacity needed in those model solutions.

As you can see in that model, you're correct. But I generally find the assumptions in those solutions to be optimistic. Large scale hydrogen storage using salt domes is not as mature of a technology as we would like. Solar and battery are solutions mostly independent of geography (although latitude and weather play a role in solar, of course). Purely replacing nuclear without relying on any backup or geographic trickery can be simulated by just using solar and battery.

But it's also useful as a way of understanding these systems. It's often insisted that you CANNOT replace baseload power with solar and battery, and yet you, in fact, can. Adding other energy (including nuclear) and storage sources as well as long-distance transmission help tremendously, in this case by about a factor of 2-3x or so in cost.

If you can't tell, I'm bothered almost exactly equally by those arguing against nuclear as I am by those who argue against solar and wind. Both "sides" are wrong because either options would suffice and are safe. But it's much cheaper to just do both, or expressed in another way, allow us to emit the least amount of carbon emissions possible without freezing anyone to death or causing pipes to burst or dealing out energy poverty.

Nuclear on a scale needed to replace fossil fuels is also a technology that is not mature. In particular, it would require such an expansion that a full breeding cycle would soon be necessary.

The deepest flaw of nuclear is that it has failed to show good experience effects. This alone marks it as a doomed technology, when it is facing competition with strong experience effects. Unless this changes, things will only get worse for nuclear, not better.

Nuclear is the largest source of emission-free electricity in the US and it’s the only one that can be built at scale.

Emissions free uranium mining. Emissions free uranium enrichment. Emissions free refueling.

Where are they?

It’s framed as a solution to energy reliance on fossil fuel because it is a solution.

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