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Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because there is absolutely nothing wrong to have your infrastructure and economy exclusively depend on a politically unstable region.

The lengths of bizarre ideas people are coming up with just so they can avoid nuclear power seriously have no end.

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That notion isn’t entirely wrong, but Sahara here means Morocco which happens to be among the most stable countries on that continent, and would compare favorably even to some South American countries or, say, Belgium.

The politics around nuclear is a real hurdle (rightly or wrongly) so it makes sense to look at other solutions.

Lots of energy in Europe is supplied from countries you may not want to be reliant on (Russian gas for example).

if politics is the problem, it would indicate that not even the politicians mean there is a problem. If they were truly concerned with CO2 emissions they would find ways to solve for the criminalization of nuclear we are seeing.

UK is currently building new nuclear. Can’t think of anywhere else.

For me people seem to have an either or opinion - we should build renewables or nuclear or whatever (I don’t think this is your stance though).

Reality is that we should be deploying none CO2 producing energy as quickly as possible, and if that means building solar / wind farms then build them, if we can build nuclear then build it.

Hopefully politics will enable future low risk low waste etc nuclear to thrive.

It's for European countries to decide from whom they want to import energy and not, isn't it? But for some reason the biggest opponent of this "reliance" is the US, not the affected European countries.

I think the annexation of Crimea certainly increased tension between Europe and Russia. I’m not sure how it effected energy policy however.

And? How is it relevant to my point about letting European countries to decide their policy for themselves? Some countries like Poland have announced a complete discontinuation of gas import from Russia in the near future (though I suspect they still will buy it indirectly like Ukraine), others like Germany would like to continue import the same amount (which for the whole EU has already decreased compared to the previous decade from ~630 billion m3 per year to ~550). Note that it's much easier for Poland to do, since it still uses coal for 70% of its electricity generation, compared to Germany with its 30-40% renewables and powerful industry.

I was meaning that annexation of Crimea might have made countries want to be less reliant on Russia as a partner, outside of US-Russia relations.

I agree it is up to European countries to do what they want.

Nuclear is a) way too expensive, b) takes decades to build in the current climate (see France and UK for current timelines) c) the Swiss population voted against new nuclear plants in 2017, so this topic is moot anyway.

That fact alone that nuclear power is so much more expensive compared especially to renewables is it's last nail in the coffin.

Edit: fixed idiom, thanks raverbashing

This misses the point.

Europe and the N.America are 34% of the entire electricity consumption. Even If they miraculously reduced their carbon pollution to zero not only would 2/3 of the problem remain, but - and here is the kicker - the growth in consumption is coming from the poor and poorest countries with enormous populations.

They are going to use the cheapest energy available: brown coal.

Its not a simple simple cost argument: we have to find a scalable, safe, clean, base-load source of energy that is cheaper than coal.

And then give it away.

The only possibility is nuclear fission - preferably not one that boils water in a pressure cooker.

Keep in mind my hint at costs was purely descriptive, not normative: As we talk about market economies, neither of which currently is interested in nuclear proliferation, the LCOE of each energy source is probably the most important decision factor.

The same is true for your scenario, though: Why should the rich countries export one of the most expensive energy sources to the poor countries, when e.g. onshore wind is right now already on par with brown coal?[0]

[0] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... page 2

LCOE is useless when comparing nuclear and ex wind and solar.

And why would that be, pray tell?

Because with Nuclear you are providing true cost which includes everything from insurance to decomission.

LCOE isn't a very thorough standard which you quickly realize once you dig into it.

Furthermore renewables are unreliable and thus require backup energy from reliable sources such as coal, oil, gas or nuclear. Because renewables are forced into use when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, they basically make the reliable sources more expensive.

I could go on with all sorts of ways this provides a completely skewed comparison structure.

Comparing the cost of nuclear vs. and wind and solar is like comparing the cost of construction and upkeep of a Boing 747 and a Cessna based on their ability to fly.

> Because with Nuclear you are providing true cost which includes everything from insurance to decomission.

All of these, including decomission, are part of the LCOE formula, just as they are for renewables or coal or gas: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/e049...

> Because renewables are forced into use when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, they basically make the reliable sources more expensive.

That problem with renewables can easily be fixed with storage, which can be batteries, generating green hydrogen trough electrolysis or a number of many other ways.

While on summer days where a lot of sun shines nuclear reactors have their very own problem: They produce too much heat and need to be throttled/shut down [0] [1] or else they would start heating up their cooling medium too much, which are usually nearby waterbodies/river systems.

With global warming being a thing, we can expect this problem to occur much more frequently, and even more so if we decided to build even more reactors.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

It can't easily be fixed which is why it haven't yet. There is a world of difference between making something work in the lab and in a test situation and then at scale, economically, practically and in competition with extremely powerful competitors.

Coal is about 2.3 times the cost of PV. Costs have changed radically even in the last decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Coal $112/MWh vs. utility solar $48/MWh.

Actually it will be much easier for most of them to find a path without coal as they won't have to battle an established domestic coal industry in the process.

I wouldn't underestimate the appeal renewables have in terms of "we get free energy as long as we can keep the facility running" if you don't have much money. It's a rather "obvious" investment.

Consider the USA’s position as nuclear police, then put yourself in the position of a third world nation on the receiving end of this “gift”.

Here are some of the very valid questions a poor country would have to ask.

“Do we really want America’s unreliable foreign policy to effectively control our ability to generate electricity? What if we piss off the wrong diplomat, hire the wrong leader, or if our people believe in the wrong god? What if they decide to destroy our economy via embargoes? Where will we get our fissionable materials? Will they pull a stuxnet on us ? Will they assassinate our top nuclear engineers?”

Just buy your nuclear plant from Russia or China. They don't have a habit of using dependency on their high-tech export to strangle other countries (hell, Russia even supplies its nuclear fuel to Ukraine, even though it could've been a really painful place to apply pressure). Unless you want to manufacture your own fuel from start to finish, you will have almost no issues with the IAEA.

Sure, but This doesn’t get around America destroying your economy via sanctions and embargoes. It also doesn’t prevent America and Israel from assassinating your nuclear physicists and engineers, or attacking your infrastructure with viruses like we did to Iran with Stuxnet.

Why solar not an option? The Sahara is really big, has plenty of sunshine. And population in a lot of upcoming economies are already used to supply limited energy grids. Maybe they can more easily adapt/grow into a power grid that meets demand 95% of the time, but sometimes not. Would be vastly cheaper than guaranteeing to meet demand 99.99995% of the time. Just like developing countries that never got around to landline POTS don't really miss it now. They just skipped it and went straight to mobile. Supposedly Mpesa makes it easier, cheaper, faster and safer to transfer money in Kenya than any system available in the US.

A strong argument against nuclear is that the costs and benefits are very spread out in time (random numbers follow) say: 10 years of construction, 50-70 years of operation, 10 years of decommissioning. Who is willing to make an investment in an unstable region that will pay itself back in 20 years? And then save money for another 20 years to pay for decommissioning?

Unless of course a military coup happens and contracts are nullified, or riots, or conflict or etc..

And even worse, how can you ensure someone will be around willing to put in the effort to safely decommission something that has no more value? Even in the most developed and stable nations this is and will be a challenge. Who wants to put in the effort to clean up the previous generations mess.

Right now coal is not cheap - China and India are the only ones building new coal stations and in the case of China, the new coal capacity is not being added for economic reasons but because of the local vs central government politics.

The economics of electricity generation have been transformed in the last couple of years - for example, the LCOE from on-shore wind and solar has dropped 80-90% in less than 10 years. Prices for renewables and even grid-scale batteries are falling so fast that you cannot even trust financial analysis of electricity generation from a year ago.

Burning coal is now 2 to 3 times as expensive as on-shore wind, for example. Nuclear is over times as expensive. Where governments aren't forcing the market to use coal, nobody is building new coal generators.

This price shift has had a very visible effect on coal generation for example - you can see it in graphs of global electricity sources - after a long period of growth, coal generation (as a share of the total) has been dropping since 2013.

The fact that wind and solar are not dispatchable unlike coal and nuclear turns out to not actually be a deal-breaking problem for expanding renewable generation considerably.

Quite a few European countries which now generate nearly 50% of their electricity through renewables. None have grid-scale batteries and many don't have nuclear. As a whole Europe gets about a third of their electricity from renewables. And even the US is at about 20-25%?

You can achieve these sort of percentages with a low-tech approach. You over-provision wind/solar generation and use derating in the case of wind to cut generation if demand is very low. This is feasible because of the cheapness of these power sources.

In tandem with NG peaker plants and a small amount of storage (hydro and some batteries for stabilization) and/or interconnectors, we have seen countries achieved 40%+ renewable electricity without any effect on the reliability of domestic supply. This share is still rising, so the limits of this approach are not yet apparent.

The expression is "the last nail in the coffin"

There are projects of cheaper nuclear power plants, which I agree is the main issue. You have to put 10, 15 years into building this massive thing instead of doing modular, smaller projects.

Nuclear is expensive because we haven't invested in it like we have with Solar.

Obviously costs come down when you start mass producing things, which we've done with solar but have not even really tried to do with nuclear.

Doubtful, as construction costs haven't gone down anywhere in the world after 1970, despite most plants being built after that date: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

It doesn't matter anyway: Only what is, not what could have been will have an impact on the decision makers.

I'm not sure you understood my point.

For costs to go down on nuclear, you need to stop building giant one-off projects which are bespoke down to the rivets. It's like expecting a hand-made suit to ever be price-competitive with something you buy off the rack at Brooks Brothers.

> It doesn't matter anyway

Luckily, it's not what could have been because unlike the cynics on HN, some[1] people[2] are actually having a go at solving this problem.

[1] https://usnc.com/

[2] https://www.nuscalepower.com/

The EPR and AP1000 were supposed to be standardized designs for overcoming the "bespoke" problem you mention and ushering in a new era of predictable, affordable nuclear projects. The projects in the US and Europe ended up as scheduling and financial disasters; they are all still unfinished, years late, and billions of dollars/euros over budget.

Maybe small modular reactors will do better. That would be great! But at this point I'll believe cost/schedule numbers only after a new reactor enters commercial operation. The numerous reactors that exist only in PowerPoint form belong in the same bin as the Battery Breakthrough of the Week.

Chicken and egg. You need to invest in order to get the prices down.

Did you want to wait for Solar to be price-competitive with gas before we started using it? That doesn't make any sense. The reason solar is so competitive these days is because we invested massively while it was still expensive. This has not happened with nuclear in its entire history, because we lack the political will (mostly thanks to anti-nuclear FUDders) to do so.

The earliest nuclear power plants in the US were far more expensive than contemporary fossil combustion plants. I can dig up specific cited numbers if you doubt it. The US has built 114,694 megawatts of power reactors [1]. The US has built less than 100,000 megawatts of solar PV as of 2019 [2]. If both technologies need equal numbers of megawatts to reach equal maturity levels, nuclear should be more mature. (Obviously the number of projects is always going to be smaller for nuclear, since solar projects are as small as a few kilowatts on a rooftop, and nuclear projects are all measured in megawatts.)

The AP1000 units under construction at Vogtle started construction in 2013. That was 56 years after Shippingport Atomic Power Station and Vallecitos Nuclear Center started operation in Pennsylvania and California.

As of February 2013, the 2 AP1000 units at Vogtle were supposed to cost $15.3 billion. As of December 2017 the estimate had increased to $23 billion. The big mystery is why the costs were so badly under-estimated only 4 years earlier. Construction started after Three Mile Island, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, after 50+ years of commercial power reactors in the US, and after regulatory requirements had changed to address prior nuclear incidents. The initial cost estimate should have accounted for all those factors. Will the next nuclear project account for them better?

"How the Vogtle Nuclear Expansion’s Costs Escalated"

https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...

[1] Summing column "Reference unit power" from IAEA Power Reactor Information System https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...

Maturity/optimization isn't automatically attained by producing more watts, or by taking more time, it's achieved through iteration. We have iterated far, far more on solar designs than we have with nuclear. Is it easier to iterate on solar? Absolutely, as you touch on with "number of projects". This is why political willpower hasn't been a problem for solar/wind/etc.

Iterate on nuclear like we have with basically everything else and I guarantee the prices come down significantly. Why do I know this? Because this is what has happened every time we have iterated on anything in human history. Nuclear is not the magical exception to this rule, it's just harder to iterate on because the initial investment is so high.

A small modular reactor can generate 77 megawatts:

https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us

A big wind turbine generates up to 6 megawatts [1]. A big solar panel generates up to 0.00067 megawatts [2]. If nuclear reactors can't progress much faster per iteration, that's another way to say that they won't catch up at all.

[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/11/trina-launches-670-w-...

> Nuclear is a) way too expensive

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

> c) the Swiss population voted against new nuclear plants in 2017, so this topic is moot anyway.

This topic is not moot. This is the only realistic way to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, even if there are many fear mongers.

I hate nuclear. Its stupidly expensive, potentially dangerous, and produces radioactive waste we have no way of dealing with. Its also the only currently available technology that can produce the amount of electricity we need if we want to mitigate the worse affects of climate change.

> stupidly expensive

that can change if big governments focus on that

> potentially dangerous

the safest energy production per kWh hands down

> radioactive waste we have no way of dealing with

not true, we deal with it since 40's and we are doing fine.

Not too long ago there was a whole period dubbed "the nuclear age" where big governments all over the planet put major resources and focus into nuclear. Sure, a lot of that was based on its potential to weaponize, but funding and research into that has very strong synergies into the civilian sector.

In that context, nuclear has very much seen way more focus and support than probably any other modern form of energy generation.

So, why didn't that pan out and we apparently need another round of "big government focus"?

It did pan out, we have hundreds of functional and useful nuclear reactors in the world that produce electric energy with close to zero CO2 emissions.

The focus is needed to double down to get rid of all coal/gas plants.

Energy directly translates to wealth, wealth translates to stability.

The lengths of bizzare ideas people go through to not help their close neighbours, so that they can avoid facing the injustices of the past have no end.

Close neighbours that are dictatorships and openly resent and propagate hate against their neighbours.

Maybe not a great idea to setup infrastructure that is core to your country.

Just look at Russia and German gas imports to see how this plays out.

By making the russian economy heavily dependent on europe, europe gets geopolitical influence on russia.

The US is the worlds Hard SuperPower, europe is the worlds Soft SuperPower.

You'd pre pretty resentfull too btw, if your continent had been carved up by a foreign power with complete disregard for your cultural borders, extracted your resources and the discarded you in a state of chaos.

The african people can't be that hatefull if they try to escape their impoverished conditions by seeking an education and better life in europe.

The european people have a historical responsibility to right the wrongs their ancestors did to the ancestors of the people of africa.

A inter-continental power grid and energy collaboration is a win win for everybody.

> By making the russian economy heavily dependent on europe, europe gets geopolitical influence on russia.

That's not how this worked out in the last 20 years of negotiations;

> You'd pre pretty resentfull too btw, if your continent had been carved up by a foreign power with complete disregard for your cultural borders, extracted your resources and the discarded you in a state of chaos.

Agreed, but that just validates the fact that it wouldn't be a good idea to put critical infrastructure in a country that resents you.

> The african people can't be that hatefull if they try to escape their impoverished conditions by seeking an education and better life in europe.

Right, because they individually gain something out of it.

> The european people have a historical responsibility to right the wrongs their ancestors did to the ancestors of the people of africa.

Do African people have a historical responsibility for the wrongs done by Algerian piracy or for destroying each other's empires?

> A inter-continental power grid and energy collaboration is a win win for everybody.

It's really not when the most basic things already don't work in said countries. You can see the European CoVid-19 help to Tanzania for a little sneak preview.

"Energy directly translates to wealth, wealth translates to stability."

Is that true? It's not hard to think of energy poor countries that are poor or energy rich ones that are poor. Stability is an ambiguous thing but it seems like it's easier to make the the argument that stability causes wealth or instability causes poverty then the opposite.

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