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Comment by clusterfish | Hacker News Reader

Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster is like seeing a news report of an aircrash and concluding that cars are a safer means to travel.

Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning fossils.

https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-evaluation/thecostofairpollut...

I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my lungs.

Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the construction and operation of long term storage sites for spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry, disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.

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> Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster

Also...how about oil spills? How much money, adjusted for inflation over time, have we dumped into cleaning that shit up over and over? And speaking of costs, what's the cost of entire cities being underwater in a decade or two?

Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?

Pound for pound, nuclear seems like the most effective option we have at the moment. If fossil fuels were priced according to how much damage they are actually causing the planet, nuclear would seem pretty cheap too. The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels.

>Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night.

Also production of solar panels is quite far from being "green" as well. Luckily most of solar production is handled by China, a country with quite lax environmental standards, so most of the HN crowd does not feel the environmental impact from it.

While this thread makes some fair points, one that is missed is that safety is only one part of the reason [1] nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity, and always has been. "Power too cheap to meter," never materialized, not even remotely.

Proponents for nuclear power will extoll its virtues while completely ignoring the bottom line: if nuclear power were economically viable, nothing, nothing whatsoever could prevent the mass adoption and proliferation of nuclear energy. Energy is enterprise, and enterprise requires investors. So without investors, or with only investors that leave the public holding the bag of paying massive subsidies for construction of nuclear plants, storage of waste and plant decommissioning, all the while charging that same public a premium for electricity, nuclear power plants won't get built and many that did and do were and are abandoned thanks to cost overruns.

IMO, the solution is staring us in the face: decentralize power generation by requiring all new buildings, houses, structures, anything built that needs power, to generate their own electricity on site. If every artificial surface everywhere that got sun was covered in PV, power would be far cheaper than centralizing the generation of everyone's electricity in hundreds of (initially) $20B nuclear power plants.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

Solar panels, which we have built millions of, are on a learning curve. The more we build, the cheaper they get. Storage is still a problem, but that too can handled in a distributed manner where the learning curve can be applied.

Nuclear, which we have built 100s of, never got to a critical mass where the cost started going down. Nuclear plants are just not built on time and budget. The alternatives to nuclear aren't going to be easy, but humanity has been trying to get nuclear to work for over 50 years and has failed.

> if nuclear power were economically viable

I think you missed one of my main points: "The only reason nuclear even seems remotely expensive is because we're (stupidly) letting markets dictate the price of fossil fuels."

Nuclear IS economically viable. We just haven't figured it out yet. I know that sounds snarky, but it's as close to the truth as we can possibly get. If fossil fuels were priced according to their known externalities, not just based on supply/demand, nuclear would be astronomically cheap by comparison.

The problem is the economy itself is completely ignoring the costs of the alternatives to nuclear. We all know how bad fossil fuels are, but we haven't priced that knowledge into their cost. They are not cheaper than nuclear, we are simply lying to ourselves. This in itself highlights a very huge flaw in capitalist markets.

Granted, this is somewhat independent of solar vs nuclear, which is an entire discussion in itself.

Free market is good and subsidies are bad, says the person advocating for distortion of market conditions to favor certain technologies that the free market doesn't want (that much).

If only the government made the stupid investors understand which technologies are cheaper...

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If renewables are as cheap as advertised they'll sweep the market on their own. But it seems to me that claims of cheap storage are just as far fetched as those of cheap nuclear, despite tons of subsidies and support that renewables get.

Wind and solar are never going to power literally everything everywhere all the time. The sun and wind are not evenly distributed, and no amount of storage or transmission will economically fix that, ever. You'll have several different power sources for different needs, and I find it hard to prefer fracking and coal burning to modern nuclear.

> Ok, so solar and wind are great, but now you're building massive batteries to store the energy at night. That's expensive, no?

Yes, but remember that any nuclear plant whose construction is started now will not be available for about 10 years. So it will be competing with the storage technologies of maybe 8 years from now. Given the rate of improvement in cost, it's very likely IMO that nuclear will be more expensive than just synthesizing the equivalent baseload source from renewables and storage.

https://model.energy/

"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago."

I'm not convinced there aren't hidden costs with wind and solar, such as finding the land to put them on or the complexity of storing energy for night time usage or cloudy days or lack of wind etc.

What I do know is nuclear is able to power our collective needs just fine, day and night, RIGHT NOW and all we need to do is build the fucking things. So, let's build them...now.

Renewables are still an unknown, nuclear is not, and I'm not comfortable staking the future of the planet on "wellll, it will probably be fine in 10 years."

Land cost is computable and is not a showstopper (particularly in the US).

Storage is addressed at that modeling site. In particular, a mix of energy storage technologies appears to be very useful (not just batteries). A key is to note that a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear plant per kW. So, if we had to totally back up the grid with hydrogen-burning turbines that could, in a rare pinch, supply 100% of the demand, it still would be cheap compared to supplying that same power with nuclear power plants.

I was unaware of hydrogen-fueled turbines or energy storage via electrolysis. I have some more research to do. Thank you.

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