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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

Another point for using nuclear power to replace fossil fuels as soon as possible and after that replacing nuclear with renewables.

Now we're replacing nuclear with renewables, which is just ass-backwards.

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Other way round: since it takes 5-20 years to get a nuclear plant built, the rollout of renewables needs to happen as fast as possible, and maybe the nuclear industry can catch up.

If nuclear made economic sense it would get VC funding.

> If nuclear made economic sense it would get VC funding.

This isn't the next unicorn startup, we're talking about energy sovereignty and the future of humanity. If the only thing we care about is the economy we'll never get out of this....

Well 20% of US uranium production capacity was sold for charitable donations to the benefit of a certain former Secretary of State. I’m not sure how much has been plundered during more recent administrations, but I wouldn’t count on anybody with real authority to do the right thing. Time to join team Visigoth.

More accurately a sale was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), chaired by the Secretary of Treasury and requiring the signatures of the Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, State, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, as well as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and Office of Science & Technology Policy. All signatures being equal. It is impossible for any Secretary of State to approve of a sale like that alone.

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/international/the-co...

Right? strange to assume nuclear power plants could be built over night! while discrediting that renewable on components production levels could be easily scaled.

No, correct way around. Rollout of renewables to the scale that nuclear can achieve in 5-20 years is practically impossible.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

> the scale that nuclear can achieve in 5-20 years

This is just fantasy. "Can" is a very long way away from "will". And almost all of the reactor projects currently under construction have time and cost overruns.

The best case for the UK in five years is that we manage to finish constructing one (1) reactor that is currently under construction.

Worse yet, it is the only one of eight plants announced by the government in 2010 to have actually begun construction (which started at the end of 2018). And 2010 wasn’t even the first government announcement about wanting a new reactor.

“Can” is a very long way from “will”. But “impossible” is even further. That’s my point.

Wind and PV grew by roughly 200-240 gigawatts in 2020. Total current worldwide civilian nuclear reactor electrical capacity is about 400 gigawatts, with another 60 GW under construction and about 100 GW planned.

Even if renewables stop their current exponential growth and only grow linearly, even assuming a mere 25% capacity factor for renewables and 100% for nuclear (neither of which is true), even assuming all currently planned and under construction reactors are completed and no existing reactors are turned off, renewables still exceed nuclear by about 2028. I’m expecting it to be a lot sooner than that because I expect the two (different) exponential trends in PV and wind to continue for at least another doubling period.

I’m still in favour of expanding nuclear power: it’s much safer than generally believed, it saves on storage requirements and intercontinental HVDC (we might get enough battery factories or extra copper/aluminium mines in time but I don’t want to count chickens before they’re hatched), and while it’s expensive it is (currently) still cheaper than batteries.

But I’m not expecting nuclear to be a big player, I just like diversity of supply for its own sake.

> If nuclear made economic sense it would get VC funding.

Of course it wouldn't, VCs only care about things that have a potential for rapid growth. A nuclear plant doesn't (and neither do most businesses that provide value in a sustainable way).

A nuclear plant can grow rapidly, but when they do it tends to make a lot of people very angry and is regarded as a bad move.

Smartest thing to do would be to allow the US Navy to run and operate land based nuclear reactors based on their technology. Build good will for the Navy and maybe use the money to finance their operations. They've operated miniature nuclear reactors for decades without a single incident. They seem to be decades ahead of the public sector in terms of technology

The US Navy Nuclear Propulsion program more or less self-regulates.

I'll add that naval reactors are small and floating - one of the advantages of the "small modular reactor" designs is that the production time and cost are both much less than that of large plants, which makes the risk calculus much more palatable for investors.

Nuclear is ridiculously more expensive than renewables. Now is when you replace the fossil fuels with renewables, while you still have fossil fuels in the mix to provide base load capacity, and once we’ve hit the threshold where we need more base load, and if storage hasn’t gotten cheap enough, is when you start bringing a few nuclear plants online.

Maybe in the US it's ridiculously expensive, but not in the civilized world.

Where is this civilized world where nuclear is cheap and fast to build?

In Finland, brought from Areva-Siemens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Total cost to owner (TVO) for this 1600 MW EPR will be little less than 6 billion euros and the rest of the cost (5 billion euros) will be paid by Areva i.e. French citizens as taxes. Building of the plant started 2005 and after the latest delays the reactor is supposed to go critical for the first time during January 2022. It was supposed to be ready during 2010.

As you can see: Cheap and fast to build.

Areva figured that this was an easy way to open the European nuclear power plant markets after the political damage to the industry due to Chernobyl. They did not take into account the fact that a lot of the professionals required were already retired and at the same time the safety regulations were much tighter than before.

> After the construction of the unit started in 2005, Areva began constructing EPRs in Flamanville, France, and in Taishan, China. However, as of 2019, the construction of the EPR in France is ten years behind schedule.[35] Taishan 1 in China became the first EPR to start power generation on 29 June 2018,[36] and the second one (Taishan 2) came online in 2019.[37]

Sounds like it has a lot to do with the regulations/regulators.

It has a lot to do with the regulations and probably more to do with the fact that in Finland they require the regulations actually to be fulfilled. This was written in the contract and Areva-Siemens was aware of the requirements at the time of the signing. They gambled and lost.

Interestingly the City of Helsinki is now considering compact nuclear reactors as a replacement for the energy source required for district heating.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12098463 (in Finnish only)

Currently they are running on coal which is to be replaced by a bio fuel (wood chips) based power plant by year 2024. Many are not happy about the projected increase of traffic from trucks bringing in the bio fuel. The nuclear option will not happen due to too many diehard Green party voters in Helsinki but it is a sign of the times. Even the Green party in Finland is at least partly supportive to nuclear power.

We probably agree that the reactor in Taishan might be less safe than it is designed to be, might have some critical stress parts made of cast pot-metal, and so forth.

Do you believe the regulations/regulators in Europe are acting reasonably? You could try to argue that extreme risk aversion is the better failure mode, but that’s hard to prove in the long term.

Extreme risk aversion is costly and probably causes on average more damage to the people than operating based on a realistic risk assessment. Problem is the out of proportion fear of ionizing radiation fuelled by the campaigns of the various Green movements.

I am pro nuclear power due to the fact that producing the same amount of energy using coal power causes more loss of human lives. This has been true even when comparing just the real radiation exposure from the fly ash of an operating coal powered plant and the maximum allowed radiation exposure from a nuclear power plant. It is still true when comparing the loss of lives per produced energy when both the Chernobyl accident and the Fukushima accident are accounted for.

> [...] Building of the plant started 2005 and after the latest delays the reactor is supposed to go critical for the first time during January 2022. It was supposed to be ready during 2010.

> As you can see: Cheap and fast to build.

How is 17+ years (with a 12+ year delay) "fast"?

It is not. And the total cost of 6+5 billion euros for the nuclear power plant is not cheap.

Due to the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents any nuclear power projects today are always an uphill battle with the increasingly difficult to fulfill regulations. At the same time there will be strong political pressures from outside sources like Greenpeace.

If the safety regulations for cars were as stringent with respect to the risks involved there would be no cars at all. Even walking on the streets would be forbidden without using a helmet.

Russia ? Floating nuclear power station

Russia probably does not count as being a part of the civilized world. Even Finland is a questionable case due to the polar bears walking all over the streets of the capital Hell-sinkit.

> Russia probably does not count as being a part of the civilized world.

From the rest of your comment I gather you were joking, but please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It's really easy for it to turn into nationalistic flamewars, which are particularly tedious and nasty and also relatively avoidable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I like Renewables but, on a simplistic napkin math, nuclear is stabler, produces more and for longer, something like 2x or even 4x cheaper.

That said, if people consumed less we would not need that much energy / impact.

As more people buy electric cars they will consume significantly more electricity than they did before. There’s also many on here talking about switching home heating to electric heat exchangers.

Reducing electricity consumption is not going to happen. The bulk of the green movement today hinges on tons of net new clean electricity generation.

There may be differences about mobility in the future. Also I read that house insulation was the way to go. Semi passive temperature control.

Once you reach the point where renewables cannot be added you have no base load left. The fossil fuels weren't there to supply base load, they were there to fill in when the renewables weren't producing. Adding nuclear at that point would make no sense.

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