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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable. More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source that costs more than a clean renewable? What about factoring in the costs of the waste and decommissioning of nuclear power plants?

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You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

And the huge win provided by nuclear power is it's geographic independence and consistent output. Nuclear plants work regardless of wind speed, and give the same output in the Arctic circle as they do at the equator. And this output is consistent, it doesn't fluctuate with weather or day/night cycles. This eliminates the need for storage, which is something we don't currently have the capability to build at any substantial scale.

That's what people don't realize when they compare costs of nuclear vs solar + wind. The reality is it's costs of nuclear vs. costs of solar + wind + thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy from rural areas to population centers + massive amounts of grid storage to accommodate intermittent generation.

Where are the production, commercially viable uranium-from-seawater plants now?

There are none. Only one or two lab bench scale reactors at universities.

The Pacific Northridge National Laboratory was able to extract uranium from seawater at $200/lb, as per the linked article. This is an order of magnitude greater than the price of conventional extraction, so it makes no sense for commercial providers. But uranium extraction amounts to a negligible fraction of the cost of nuclear power, so even if economies of scale fail to bring the price down this amounts a fraction of a cent increase in the cost per KWh. Not to mention there's at least hundreds of years worth - thousand of years if we use reprocessing - worth of conventionally accessible uranium.

If output is the same, and HVDC is now available, should we actually start building them in the Arctic? Pros: no population centers, lots of cooling, no hurricanes. Cons?

Transmission losses and the cost of building thousands of miles of HVDC. Just build them where there is demand for energy, and save the money that would otherwise be spent on transmission infrastructure. Not to mention the difficult logistics of constructing power plants in the middle of nowhere.

In many regions, solar is not a viable option. The other renewables cannot compete in terms of scale. We should have been innovating in fission for the last 40 years, but we weren't. Stupid. Fusion almost seems more likely than large-scale fission growth at this point.

Nuclear is stable and doesn't require enormous storage which many localities don't have the capacity, resources or place to build.

Furthermore, full decomissioning and waste storage costs are included for the whole lifecycle, so that argument is moot.

> how does the nuclear power hype train continue?

1) The conglomerates profiting from nuclear are not the same profiting from renewable energy.

2) Renewables can be very decentralized. Nuclear is the most centralized. This changes the balance of power.

3) A small set of people paid to push for some ideas on the Internet can shift public opinion a lot.

> Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy...

How nice to ignore inconvenient facts like Europe's skyrocketing energy costs.

Driven mainly by gas costs.

The demand for gas is increasing because the wind isn't blowing as much as they thought it would. You still need the entire fossil generation system as a backup for renewables for when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow. Until there is grid scale electrical energy storage, renewables simply increase the cost of the whole system.

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