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Comment by Accujack | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying the designs lack problems. Rather, I'm saying that they have addressed the problems you're talking about and are potentially considerably safer than old reactor tech.

>In the near future, storage will compete, as iron-air batteries come online, and long-distance transmission.

and if this doesn't happen? You're willing to risk our survival?

>Each dollar spent elsewhere, whether on building or patching nuke plants, or patching or fueling coal plants, brings climate disaster nearer.

You're equating coal plants with nuclear? Wow, you have quite a cognitive bias there. Nuclear plants have 0 carbon emissions, they don't contribute to global warming once constructed, and construction doesn't generate enough carbon to nullify that advantage.

Renewables can't meet our needs unless new technologies are developed. Nuclear CAN in its present state, and can do so even better if technological progress is made. Both must be pursued.

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There are numerous viable storage technologies, just competing for which will be cheapest. Until that is settled and the variable share reaches a practical limit, the money is better spent on panels.

Iron-air battery tech is proven. Now it just needs industrial-scale build-out, which takes time: the factories need to be built before the battery farms.

Renewables can, in fact, meet our needs with already mature technology. All that is uncertain is which choices will turn out cheapest. If it were not those batteries, it would be others, or underground compressed air, or molten salt, or liquified air.

>Renewables can, in fact, meet our needs with already mature technology.

No, they cannot. Industrial processes require far more power at all times than can be delivered by renewables.

For example, aluminum refining.

Practically all aluminum production, for many decades, has in fact been powered by renewables.

Actually no. In China they use coal, and this is the predominant way we've been making aluminum in recent years.

Nonetheless, refining aluminum at industrial scale using renewable energy has been demonstrated successfully for many decades. That somebody uses coal does not negate the fact.

Nukes and coal share the property that they are overwhelmingly more expensive, just to continue operating, than solar. Each dollar spent on a nuke, or on mining coal, is a dollar not spent building out the solar we need. A dollar spent building a nuke is a dollar that displaces exactly zero coal watts for ten or more years, vs solar that begins to displace coal almost immediately.

This is completely incorrect. Solar and nuclear power are NOT interchangeable.

Solar can displace coal for some uses soon, and it will, but ultimately both renewables and nuclear are needed.

Solar and wind are displacing coal right now, watt-hour for watt-hour. Each additional panel and wind turbine wired in means less coal burned, right now.

Nobody but you is talking about coal and nukes being interchangeable. But it is a fact that both boil huge amounts of water for steam to drive through huge turbines that need frequent, expensive maintenance, and need elaborate cooling apparatus to turn the steam back into water. Both have large, unavoidable operating costs that make them uncompetitive vs. tech that does not.

Coal has the extra cost of mining and transporting coal, and environmental catastrophe. Nukes have huge corruption overhead and life-cycle costs, and long, long delay between spending money and getting any power at all out, with a strong likelihood of never, instead, plus risk of regional disaster.

It is not a fact that both renewables and nukes are needed. We already know that nukes are not needed. (Rather, you wish that nukes were needed.) With every nuke project that collapses, it gets better that it was not anyway needed. What is tragic about the failures is that so much was wasted that could have been used to build out non-dead-end generating capacity.

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