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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Not finished reading yet but this uses the outdated stats that claim nuclear kills less people than solar and wind. Which isn't a good sign.

It's also claiming that centralisation equals efficiency. Is this really the best argument nuclear has to offer?

Okay so that wasn't very good. Just standard renewable bashing disguised as being a fan of the sadly neglected nuclear.

The key thesis seems to be: renewables came down in price because they were subsidized.

I'd argue the opposite is true, they were subsidized initially because it was obvious they would become price competitive.

What even is the point of writing an article about what we should have done decades ago (which I actually agree with) if your super weak conclusion is just "well renewables might not be perfect".

It's hard to tell if this is first generation climate change denial or just secondary effects of decades of propaganda. Still dangerous nonsense though.

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The point of nuclear power is like government funded health insurance.

It’s a safety net that isn’t profitable (or shouldn’t be), but provides enormous value provided it’s well run and limited in scope.

Both those things are "profitable" at the societal level.

Nuclear has two problems. One, for people who choose to ignore externalities, it's not competitive with coal (though it's obviously cheaper if you include them). But if you do include externalities, it hits problem 2, it's still more expensive than building lots of wind and solar.

This leaves it in this awkward position where only the people who believe (or claim to believe) renewables are this intermittent, subsidy driven boondoggle support it and all their arguments allegedly in favour of nuclear in the end boil down to "renewables are crap" which isn't actually true but is a very well funded alternative fact.

Wind and solar face the problem that you can't just start generating power as needed when you're running low. It's good to have a hedge against that scenario which itself does not produce much carbon, because people die when power outages happen. It's just the safe bet to include nuclear power for now until we can be more certain of our ability to generate enough power to scale with growing populations.

Why would we risk not having the infrastructure to be flexible in case of uncertainties? Can we say for certain that weather patterns will not change in a way that affects wind and solar in the future? It just seems like we shouldn't just dive in head first without an alternative.

Wind and solar are condition dependent, nuclear runs all the time, consistently.

Comments like yours is why I have a simple but working solution to the discussion. When we ban consumer from buying cars that consume fossil fuels in 2025, we should also ban consumption of energy produced by fossil fuel. No more coal, oil and gas in the energy grid. We also have a full stop in subsidizing fossil fuels in the name of "reserve energy", where governments are paying companies to be ready with fossil fuels when the demand in the energy grid goes beyond supply.

What happens next happens. What ever subsidies my own government need to pay in order to prevent blackouts will have to be paid to any non-fossil fuel alternatives. If batteries is cheapest then use that. If overproduction is cheapest, use that. If nuclear is cheapest, well then that will be that.

Subsidy driven fossil fuels has to stop. If nuclear is cheaper than building lots of wind and solar, then wind and solar has a problem.

I had a comment similar to this a couple of days ago. Kill hidrocarbons. Let's see where the world moves.

Of course, this makes sense but the problem with is it's unpalatable for the political climate so it will not happen.

It did raise some cynicism in me when it was the green party here in Sweden that favored the system of using oil power plants as normal and acceptable method for reserve energy. Looking at the EU political landscape it seems that the green movement has doubled down on the model of using cheap renewables when the weather is optimal and cheap fossil fuels when it isn't.

There isn't much interests elsewhere to actually ban fossil fuels. The right are interested in nuclear, but I have strong doubts that they would accept an actually ban on fossil fuels in order to get there.

> Looking at the EU political landscape it seems that the green movement has doubled down on the model of using cheap renewables when the weather is optimal and cheap fossil fuels when it isn't.

This is a perfectly sensible approach for reducing greenhouse gasses as quickly and cheaply as possible.

It feels like they would be attacked if they took some high-minded but impractical approach and they get attacked if they're sensible and pragmatic in achieving their goals.

Already built fossil fuel plants that arent burning fossil fuels regularly are an ideal backup to fall back on when and if required. Why do you think this is bad?

> Why do you think this is bad?

Sweden used to operate on hydro and nuclear, with a few fossil fuel plants operating for a short duration during the winter. Now some of those fossil fuel plants have been put to operate almost for the whole year, with only a few periods being offline during very windy days. Optimal weather only occurs that often. Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing from the energy sector, not decreasing.

Being dependent on fossil fuels has many other negative aspects. A lot of that fuel is now bought from Russia, which as recently as just a few days ago have started to give political conditions that those buying gas from them must do so through their new and quite controversial pipeline.

An other major drawback is pricing. With an ever increasing instability in the energy grid the price for stability goes up by those who can create supply. The energy also need to be transported from further distances which introduce more middle men who want their cut. In addition, with more energy be trading there are those that earn money from just energy market speculations, extracting even more money from the customer.

In addition to all that, if we listen to climate change scientists we get a pretty clear message that we can't afford digging up more fossil fuel. It need to remain in the ground. We don't have the luxury to continue burning fossil fuels and hope that some time in the future we can fix what we break today.

TLDR: burning fossil fuels is bad and being depending on burning fossil fuels is bad.

> uses the outdated stats that claim nuclear kills less people than solar and wind.

What's the latest data on this? I had also assumed this was still the case.

If you follow the link he provides to himself, then follow that link to it's cite, then follow that link to the source he's trying to cite you'll see they actually updated their numbers and now show nuclear as behind wind and solar (though obviously still far ahead of gas and especially coal):

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I'm not even sure they ever had solar and wind, around that time it was fashionable to say "nuclear is safer than any other power source" and link to studies that didn't even include renewables. edit, actually confirmed this as the intermediate blog still has the old table screenshoted which shows nuclear in the lead, but only against coal oil gas etc, no renewables other than biomass (some of which is good and some of which is bad, it's a wide category).

But regardless of that, there were a few studies calculated around 2012 that showed solar and wind as slightly worse than nuclear per TWh as they hadn't scaled up and been producing for as long and the deaths are generally front loaded, while the generation is constantly growing and the stat naturally biases against new tech that has a construction phase before generation starts.

The article mentioned “nuclear power kills fewer people per electricity produced than any other energy source” which matches the data from the link you posted.

Nuclear accounts for 4% energy at 0.07 deaths, while solar and wind are at 2% 0.04 deaths and 1% 0.02 deaths respectively.

Deaths due to nuclear and renewables are both negligible. There's no point in discussing it where there are common sources causing few orders of magnitude more.

It would be interesting to know if the difference in deaths between solar, wind and nuclear is from how the mining of rare earth minerals differs from mining of uranium. Is it because of the quantity, the different countries where the mining occur and related safety regulations, or something else?

But regardless of how we cut it, if we include hydro with renewables then nuclear is safer. Arguably hydro has one of the highest rate of human life per produced unit of energy, depending on how one want to account for deaths caused by failing dams (intentionally and unintentionally). If we only look at accidents and compared chernobyl in 1986 with Banqiao in 1975, chernobyl had around 100 deaths and 68,000 people displaced. Banqiao had 26,000 deaths and millions of people displaced. If we include later deaths caused by illnesses such as cancer, chernobyl is estimated to have about 4,000 deaths while Banqiao is attributed to about 145,000 deahts.

It is simply a fact that elevated 492 million m3 of water has a massive amount of destructive power, and is to a degree harder to make safe than a fission reaction.

Banquiao isn't a sound case here.

It "took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most people were busy with the "revolution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

The "Cultural Revolution" began in 1966.

In such a context an otherwise avoidable catastrophe may happen.

This Revolution followed the "Great Leap Forward" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ), with famines. "In the subsequent famines of the early 1960s popularly attributed to the Great Leap Forward, Henan was one of the hardest hit and millions of lives were lost." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henan#Modern_Era .

Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" (same source).

Predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so.

Moreover the exact amount of victims of the Chernobyl disaster remains an open question, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

I am unsure how well USSR in 1986 were as an operator of nuclear reactors in what can be describe as occupied Ukraine. It is distinctly possible that in that context the accident could have been avoided, or that it was always doomed for failure.

Through looking at the list of dam failures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...), I am less certain that the technology has been demonstrated to be safer than nuclear.

The Chernobyl disaster root cause is difficult to assess ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Safety_test ), however given the sheer amount of active nuclear reactors in USSR at the time one may consider that this country wasn't completely inadequate. The USSR wasn't in great shape at the time but Chernobyl added to the mess (Gorbachev famously declared "The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union" ): the pre-Chernobyl era wasn't as chaotic, this disaster suddenly broke many things.

As for the safety hydro and wind are clear winers (solar coming next, nuclear following): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Don't neglect that those stats take into account UN figures for nuclear victims, which are WAY lower than many other estimates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the... )

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