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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. The construction is too expensive and too slow - allocating capital to nuclear ends up slower than allocating the same capital to renewables for hitting climate targets. If you look at reports of lifetime costs for utility scale energy, Nuclear is the most expensive and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind is already 3-4x cheaper than nuclear, and by the time the decade is out it will likely be 10x cheaper even with attendant storage.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

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I’ve yet to see any renewable plan that could cover big northern cities.

Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January.

NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area.

You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.

offshore wind...

Why is there a requirement that power be generated within 300 miles? NYC already gets plenty of power from further away than that. With HVDC transmission, we can transmit power thousands of miles efficiently. PNW hydro power is used in LA, for example.

First of all, did you look at a map? 300 miles from NYC gets you to upstate New York, or western Pennsylvania, or rural West Virginia. Second, NYISO, which covers New York State, already imports lots of power from Quebec, Ontario, New England, and PJM (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and more).

We do need more transmission (another thing the White House is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over long distances is already commonplace.

Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could read the proposal for a North American Supergrid: http://northamericansupergrid.org/

You say 'did you look at a map' but have you looked at a topographical map? I don't see much room that isn't either protected forests or the Appalachian mountains, in some cases it's both.

Well, I don't know enough about the industry to analyze specific locations, but it's easy to find real-world projects in upstate NY and elsewhere: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/03/large-scale-so.... The projects named in that article will apparently get more than halfway to the "11,000 megawatt hours per day" estimate.

Anyway, the more important point is that we already have large regional grids across the country, and while it's obviously nice to have generation and consumption close to each other, it's not a requirement.

Why do you think solar and wind could not be built in the Appalachian mountains? Wind in particular would benefit there. And the mountains are an excellent place to build off-river pumped hydro storage facilities.

Have you looked at a map? I live in NY, and there is absolutely no place for such a massive solar farm.

The numbers I quoted were just for NYC, and they weren’t adjusted for the winter sunlight problem. To power the entire metro area would likely require 40,000 acres. To cover the entire region likely 60,000 acres. This land does not exist.

40,000 acres is roughly 8 miles by 8 miles.

It isn't that big an area in the scheme of things. If you try to find a single place for it it probably won't work of course, but it is a tiny little fraction of the developed land already devoted to New York.

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/03/large-scale-so...

New York State is 35 million acres. You don't think 0.2% of that, including rooftops of existing buildings, might be useable for solar/wind/battery storage? And again, NY already uses tons of out-of-state energy.

No, I don’t. Even if it were possible to acquire that much land, and it isn’t, the land isn’t suitable for solar.

1) Offshore wind

2) Rooftop solar

3) National grid improvements that make transferring power from renewable sources further away more efficient

4) There are massively huge areas of empty land within 100 miles of NYC. This map shows roughly the 100 miles west of NYC. Take note of all of that unused space, which is most of it: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7560624,-75.4552232,170414m/...

You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts.

And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.

Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.

I agree, but not with the "50%" number.

“Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.

https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...

The how does Denmark manage 60%, and Germany 50%?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...

Technically, from your own numbers... Denmarks intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent.

I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.

Germany is a net-exporter of electricity to France. Especially in summer when nuclear reactors have to be shut down, because the water temperature in the streams they use already is too high or when the tide is too low, or in winter when the rivers freeze.

They export cheap wind-generated power to Norway when the wind is blowing, and import it back for a higher price when it isn't.

Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and population density also helps.)

"This article is a list of countries and territories by electricity generation from renewable sources every year. Note that most countries import and/or export electricity, so the percentage figures do not reflect the percentage of consumption that is renewable based. "

Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.

Are any of those nations comparable in both population and land mass to the US?

As the Texas power outage demonstrated, the US grid is not monolithic. Having more interconnected regional grids actually makes it easier to get individual regions to high renewable percentages while allowing the market to continue to mature lower cost storage. Storage is slightly behind the solar manufacturing S-curve in terms of dropping costs, but once a number of EV supply plants start ramping up, I think that cost optimization will strongly drop storage costs.

Is there a reason to believe that a solution that works on the scale of a reasonably sized country suddenly stops working on the scale of a tight federation of states or comparable size?

Here in Sweden we have a date when nuclear plants will be gone. We got a date for when internal combustion engines will be gone from the roads. We have a plan for when the sum of green exports of energy will exceed that of total consumption of energy.

We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy, nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order to address the stability problem from renewables.

1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil for now, natural gas in the future.

2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist if the total amount of green export over a year is higher than the import.

3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to change from year to year based on what currently sounds like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech. This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it ever get built.

The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100% renewables.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Coun...

I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a 100% renewable grid is possible.

Theoretically, yes.

With enough batteries and 2x-3x power production over demand you can have 100% renewable grid.

It might require to cut amazon forest and cover it with solar panels, but possible, yes.

One does not need 2-3x average power production over average demand. With some combination of transmission, batteries, and (importantly) hydrogen storage, the overcapacity and curtailment needed can be quite modest.

Is it possible to create enough gas powered power plants and hydrogen storage facilities to have 100% of a nations capacity running for several weeks during the winter? Yes. Can it all be generated from ocean based windfarms with pipelines? Yes. Will it be cheap? No.

Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the storage facility, or the gas powered power plant. Remember that return of investment only occurs when demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies like it does today with oil.

Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side it would be interesting to hear about operating large liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.

> Will it be cheap? No.

Any energy system large enough to power the world will be a very expensive thing. Fortunately, the world economy is also a very large thing, and can pay for it.

We can say with some confidence that while this renewable energy system will be expensive, it will be less expensive than a nuclear energy system that serves the same purpose, and likely cheaper than a system with any substantial amount of nuclear energy.

> Given the lack of commercial built and operated hydrogen wind farms

This is a completely bogus argument in an environment where natural gas is still plentiful and legal and its carbon largely untaxed. The CO2 tax needed to get to wind farms + hydrogen being competitive is likely much less than the CO2 needed to get nuclear to be competitive (against natural gas).

With renewables your base load comes from stored power or potentially trade; that is, connecting Americas to Africa or Asia.

As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able to fill it up with solar energy.

That’s only because nuclear hasn’t seen serious investment in generations. That’s why solar and wind has come down.

China seriously invested in it heavily, met a modicum of success in building a wave of nuclear plants, but near the middle of the full plan decided to halt any new construction. I think even with low regulation, and a focused investment it was turning out more expensive than the alternatives.

Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.

Loan subsidies passed under GWB were supposed to result in a nuclear renaissance in the form of Westinghouse's AP1000 GEN III+ reactor. The 2 projects started under Obama have been unmitigated financial disasters. One was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground, the other is about to come online after going 2x+ over money and time budget.

All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.

Casey Handmer has a related take: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...

> The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.

There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?

You're not responding to the premise of the article: subsidize existing nuclear, not new nuclear. You're taking on an easier argument, but instead you need to clarify: how is allowing carbon-free existing nuclear fall due to price a good thing for the climate?

I am perhaps missing it, but my takeaway from the article was that doesn't seem to actually specify existing nuclear, preferring to talk about nuclear subsidy. If it were only existing nuclear I would mostly agree on keeping it save for certain certain end of life reactors (e.g diablo canyon built near an earthquake fault).

Solar and wind are nuclear power. We keep the reactor 93 million miles away, in a huge gravitational containment system, and even so tens of thousands of people die from cancer caused by the radiation every year in the United States alone, despite two layers of shielding and multiple kinds of voluntary prevention protocols.

There is no renewable energy source that is faster than simply maintaining existing nuclear capacity. Lots of nuclear power plants are at risk of closing. A small subsidy to keep them open until we build out sufficient renewables to shut down all fossil fuels is a freaking steal considering the effects of climate change.

> Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets.

I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.

Rooftop photovoltaics alone could produce 40% of US electricity: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/eyes-on-environment/the...

You don’t need to cover the whole planet.

Current US electricity. To decarbonize transportation and industry, we will need 200-300% more. That drops rooftops to 10%, and that does not account for night and winter (overbuilding and storage).

I guess you also don't need insurances for nuclear plants. Nobody will be able to pay in the worst case.

Actually, nuclear power plant operators have special liability protections:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Act

Nuclear power plants aren't just an all-or-nothing kind of risk. There is plenty that could go wrong and either halt its operations or affect its environment. For instance, a lot of plants increase the average temperature of the rivers they dump their cooling water in. That issue has become more threatening over time since climate change is doing the same.

US plants have to insure for disaster up to $200 million. The taxpayer is on the hook for the rest.

In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

Butter and guns my friend

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