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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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