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Comment by dukeyukey | Hacker News Reader

My understanding that is wind/solar are significantly cheaper than nuclear is on a cost basis. The costs required to build and safely dismantle nuclear plants are major cost contributors. The downside of course is lack of baseload, which nuclear can cover quite happily, albeit at a higher cost.

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But are they cheaper when you add the batteries? Doubtful. I hear maybe by 2030.

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-buil...

So run easily-tunable gas turbines when needed, nuclear if you need it, and renewables for the bulk of your energy. Perfect is the enemy of good here.

That's not a particularly good solution, since it doesn't halt climate change. We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production in several states. We're reaching the point where those peaker gas plants are the main source of emissions that we're trying to eliminate.

Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you start saturating the market during peak production, only part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this constraint

If nuclear can handle what we currently use gas for, all the better, and I'd be totally down with that.

> We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production

What do you mean by that?

Solar panels produce energy in a sine wave. Once the peak of the sine wave exceeds energy demand, you start hitting diminishing returns. The fluctuations in wind production are more complicated, but it's subject to the same problem. You can over-produce to make up for the troughs in energy demand, but the nature of overproduction means that a portion of generated energy goes to waste. This is already happening in California: daytime energy production is saturated.

This is why most renewable plans assume that there will be some silver bullet that makes energy storage effectively free. Without some way to turn an intermittent source into a consistent source, it'll be very difficult to decarbonize with wind and solar.

That’s the real problem today - there is no ability to compromise. Everything is a zero sum game :(

Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get other renewables to a place where they can address issues like predictability and reliability, then we look at de-commissioning nuclear.

But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your toolset is just bananas.

Which is an unfair point because we have yet to see what costs are associated with safely dismantling and replacing all those miles upon miles of solar panels and wind turbines will be. Nuclear has been deployed on a larger scale for a long time so the costs are known.

How many miles of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery backup are needed to produce the same amount of energy as a single nuclear plant? I imagine if you do the math at scale, it turns out to be negligible, if not more expensive for renewables.

Old wind power plants are often repowered. Wind turbines that have reached their EOL are replaced with newer and more efficient ones, significantly incrasing the output of the plant:

> “Repowering is happening and will increase. It’s a great opportunity to get more energy from today’s wind farms. Repowering reduces the number of turbines by a third while tripling the electricity output. And it preserves the existing wind farm sites which often have the best wind conditions. Governments need repowering strategies that set the right framework and ensure efficient permitting procedures for repowering”, says WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson.

Most of the material used in wind turbines can be recycled:

> Wind turbines are a valuable source of resources which can be reused in the circular economy. 85-90% of a dismantled wind turbine are recycled today, including the towers, foundations, generators and gearboxes. Most of these materials are made up of concrete, steel and cast iron which are easy to recycle and for which there is an active circular economy market in Europe.

https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/what-happens-...

We've been running electric wind turbines for 70+ years (and non-electric for thousands) at this point, the costs are well-known. Less so for solar panels, but still decades. And the bonus here is that neither can fail catastrophically the way nuclear plants do.

As for size, sure, nuclear plants are more compact. But you can't build nuclear plants on top of people's houses, or in the North Sea. Investors and actuaries have done the math, and renewables are just plain cheaper per Kwh, at least in today's landscape.

This rebuttal doesn't measure up.

You can't compare wind turbines from 70 years ago to today. (I noticed the convenient deemphasizing of solar farms. Look up issues with abandoned solar farms.)

The last point is moot. Land is abundant in America. I also question the hand-wavy "investors have done the math"

No kidding. Search for abandoned wind farm - it’s pretty frighting. Fiberglass is not easy to recycle.

Same with solar cells. I see them putting up thousands of acres of solar cells in the Nevada desert - will be fun to see what happens 20 years from now. Local cities who leased the land out to those farms are making money now - but are they going to get stuck with an expensive clean up if those companies go bust in 20 years because the market changes, subsidies have ended, etc? It’s nuts.

Besides the material wastage you mention, also think of the habitat destruction this causes. One small nuclear plant can replace many acres of noisy, ugly, inefficient and bird-killing windmills and panels

If wind farms are so wonderful why isn’t there a huge one off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard?

People bristle at terms like “virtue signal” - here’s an opportunity for our “elites” to show some real leadership.

I won’t hold my breath.

> inefficient

Ironically, wind turbines are more efficient than nuclear power plants. Solar panels are not, but at least they do direct energy conversion from sunlight (whereas the nameplate efficiency of nuclear power plants additionally ignores the requirements of the fuel processing chain that starts with removing mountains of ~500ppm ore these days).

Nuclear is more expensive per KWH basically entirely because of the regulatory environment. Not because of anything physical about the method or its fuel; it's not more expensive in France, for example. Get the costs of regulatory compliance down and nuclear becomes the cheapest power source for both capital and ongoing costs.

France's reliance on nuclear is almost 100% government-and-geopolitics driven, to avoid relying on foreign states for energy imports, the market has little to do with it. I can't speak for how much regulation is needed or not, but given nuclear failure is catastrophic, I can see why we should err on the regulated side. Nuclear is incredibly safe, but only because we made it safe by spending on it. Solar/wind just doesn't have the same risk profile.

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