Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with you that shutting down existing nuclear plants, assuming they're in proper operating condition, is a bad idea vs the urgency of climate change.

But nuclear power has never been the ultra cheap clean power slam dunk you're portraying. I've been hopeful someone will come up with a clever innovation that changes the cost numbers, but so far every attempt has tanked.

With hydroelectric dams, there is an urgent motivation to bring many of them down: ecosystem collapse. It hurts to lose the storage capacity, but there's a growing awareness of just how severe the damage has been. I don't expect Grand Coulee to come down any time soon but talking with someone who does modeling related to this for NOAA made clear a lot of them are going away.

View on HN

EXISTING nuclear is extremely cheap. Like solar and wind, the vast majority of the cost is the upfront building, and so it costs pennies to operate afterward.

And your comments about hydro dams is just proving my point about climate change just not being a major priority. Local concerns take precedence. It’s not that these local concerns shouldn’t matter, but folks just don’t seem to be willing to replace fossil fuels first. It shows how little most people really care, including (unfortunately) people who ostensibly ought to, like environmental activists and regulators and pro-environmental politicians. I really think Greta Thunberg was right about that.

Again, it's just not true that existing nuclear is extremely cheap. States in the US have recently had to bailout nuclear plant operators because they are struggling to compete against solar, wind, and cheap natural gas (see Illinois and Ohio as examples). These plants were built 30+ years ago, but still struggle to operate profitably today! In the past 10 years, something like 20 plants have been decommissioned for cost reasons.

Now I totally agree that we should keep existing plants running for as long as possible for climate reasons. I am fine with subsidizing them to a certain extent because they produce carbon free power. But even the existing plants are expensive to run and you should acknowledge that instead of saying otherwise...

> like environmental activists

Having worked in energy (and radiation) I've always been confused by the fact that the activists aren't aligned with the scientists. I have yet to meet a single climate scientist that is anti-nuclear. Most of them are shy about their support and will end up saying things like "but we can't get support for nuclear, so why even try?"

The only real argument against nuclear is cost. Safety it is number 1 (you can see numbers from my other post), emissions (lifetime) it is on par with solar and wind (without batteries), waste isn't as big of an issue as it is made to be (waste is magnitudes smaller than most people think and storing on site is perfectly acceptable), it is clearly environmentally friendly (low footprint, you can recycle fuel, most emissions are from construction). The only argument against it is cost. The only argument is that the cost of climate and human lives is low. I'm really frustrated with the misnomers people are making about this.

No, local concerns are not dominating, and I don't think you can read this as some measure of relative prioritization like that. It's too complex to reduce to such a simple imagined dynamic. Understanding that sustainable ecology requires both removing some of these dams and addressing climate change is urgent is in fact possible simultaneously.

Then why are existing fossil fuel plants treated as a separate problem to be tackled later?

Greta is right. There are certain things about climate change that are complex. But the lack of sufficient action is not a complex mystery. It’s just not a priority.

Greta is right, and also smart in that she focuses her activism on the need for urgency without getting bogged down in advocating for a particular solution.

You have very strong expectations that the rest of the world should immediately follow your plans concerning fission. That's not the same thing, and you will get pushback. Getting pushback does not mean we're somehow evil people that don't prioritize this enough, it just means we disagree with you about the costs and best path forward given pragmatic realities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com