Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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