Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway210222 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com