Comment by rewgs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rewgs | Hacker News Reader

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Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage.

The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find?

And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows...

And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond?

I could go on.

That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.

Why isn't nuclear power the answer to climate change and energy shortage?

We would need to build thousands of nuclear plants, adapting each plant for its location (so you can’t mass-produce a single design), and we don’t have the skilled people to do that. In addition, they will take decades to build, we lack enough fuel for those plants, and we still haven’t solved the disposal problem.

Solar panels, batteries, and wind mills are comparatively easy to produce at ridiculous volumes. They’re a cheaper, faster and cleaner solution.

Why do you have to adapt each plant for its location? or just find a suitable location and build a bunch of such plants and transmit the power to where it’s used.

Buildings are also “adapted for each location”, but there is still an entire corpus of standardized techniques to do that that massively reduces costs compared to literally solving the problem from scratch at each site.

And why is it the case that “we don’t have the skilled people to do that”? If people value it, they’ll pay for it- and people can learn new skills in response to market need / pay - there is no predetermined number of “ad-tech software engineers” for example, they were “created” by the people themselves responding to market forces (pay)

From what I’ve read it has to do with the way the plant has to cope with water. Water needs to flow through the plant, which means you cannot put it just anywhere. At the same time the plant cannot be prone to flooding and its design must be such that even with a meltdown the radioactive material will not reach the water table. Both of those are not straightforward near abundant supplies of water.

Maybe you could have a universally implantable design, and maybe you could train people with the relevant skillset. The point is: we haven’t, and we aren’t, so other ways of generating green power are easier and cheaper. Nuclear will play a role for sure (the climate crisis is such that we need to do all the things) but it won’t cover more than 10% of our energy needs. I would be glad to get a rosier outlook on nuclear though.

One aspect of customization is regarding cooling - large nuclear plants can't be self-sufficient, they need to integrate some large natural supply of water. Rivers are different than lakes which are different than seaside; each river is different, etc.

I'm having problems squaring this with the real world examples of France and Germany

>Nuclear power is the largest source of electricity in France, with a generation of 379.5 TWh, or 70.6%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

>France is Europe’s biggest net electricity exporter in 2019, says report

>French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices.

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/electricity-export...

>Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 11.63% of electricity supply in 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

>German power export surplus shrank 46.2% in 2020

https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-electricity-statisti...

Because nuclear is effectively done for.

The dream was "power too cheap to meter". Didn't come true back then, and it turns out after you account for safety systems like a containment building and backup cooling, it's far more expensive than alternatives.

To make things worse, making nuclear remotely profitable relies on running it as close to 24/7 as possible. Given that renewables exist and produce cheaper power, nuclear only gets to offer anything when renewables aren't working, which makes it even more expensive.

Economically, it's extremely risky. Why risk billions on a plant that might profit 20 years down the line, when you could build solar or wind faster, and profit faster?

Politically, it's not great because construction times are very long, so any politician that starts building them probably won't be there to see the benefit, and may have their work stopped by a successor.

Practically, we can't build it fast enough. It's a big, complex, specialized tasks that few people do because there's not much market.

Because nuclear depends on a lot of cultural and societal factors to be safe. As Asimov once said:

> The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Nuclear can be safe but look at the failures of the USSR on Chernobyl to see how it depends completely on a country's culture and willingness to pay for this safety. Or even Fukushima, in a country very risk-averse and rich, corners were still cut even with the responsible engineer calling out that the sea walls were too low.

Should we trust governments around the world that each single one of them will keep their nuclear power plants safe for the foreseeable future until we can move away from it (let's say 50-100 years)?

I'm on the camp that no, we can't.

Because it's pretty expensive and time consuming to build and people really don't like to have a nuclear power plant near them.

This. Even France is not able to double its nuclear power output and go completely climate-neutral this way. Let alone India, China, or Indonesia.

While the time to build is certainly true, is the cost truly more expensive than that of effects of climate change? I suspect not.

South Korea seems to manage building a nuclear power plant in six years or so, they don't have to take decades to get online.

It might be more expensive than the alternative solution to climate change: renewable energy + storage.

Because something that is certainly, but slowly and progressively dangerous is much better than something usually very safe but then catastrophic

It is definitely a step in the right direction, but given the current demand the development is too slow.

Just look at China, with ~50 nuclear plants (just 5% of energy production), while they have thousands of coal plants. It's practically impossible that they can shift to a reusable carbon-neutral energy production methods.

Also, China can build a hundred coal plants in a year, but there's no way it can do that with nuclear.

The realistic picture is that growth cannot be sustained and there will be dire consequences due to other factors too.

(climate change, migration, wet bulb temperatures, crop failures, people being too good at capitalism, etc.)

Just 5% = do what you did 20 times and the problem is solved. They only need 1,000 plants.

Compared to all the construction China has done in the past 50 years, it doesn't seem that difficult a target.

> Also, China can build a hundred coal plants in a year, but there's no way it can do that with nuclear.

That isn't a law of nature. They can build hundreds of plants of any type in a year.

The stuff of nightmares... and it's all true. Well said.

Well said. It may be that we should do nothing and accept our fate. In the geological frame of reference we are just an instant from extinction.

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