Comment by mdale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdale | Hacker News Reader

The most pragmatic solution is making high pollutant energy costly. Some small set of polluters are responsible for the majority of the emissions. (1) This is only possible because of being able to chalk the damage up to externalities.

We need to set up systems to adding cost to emissions.

A substantial PR rebrand modern Nuclear energy (maybe called something else) would be needed if you wanted to get traction on that. Long gone are days where people / governments make decisions based on any objective facts and pragmatic cost/ benefit/ risk analysis.

I understand solar is competitive and full tilt on that would be good. It's got better PR right now.

Whatever we do .. install some some smoke scrubbers on dirty energy ASAP.

And probably do your 15 year R&D plan on carbon capture tech (if we had to choose one direction) as we have already done (otherwise) irreversible harm that switching to renewables / Nuclear now won't solve.

1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-percent-power...

> Long gone are days where people / governments make decisions based on any objective facts and pragmatic cost/ benefit/ risk analysis.

There are governments choosing to build nuclear right now, despite its general unpopularity in many circles so I don't know that such days are "long gone".

And how could anyone sell another nuclear plant to France when the Flamanville 3rd reactor is 5X++ over budget and 8 years behind schedule? It is hard to win any rational cost/benefit/risk analysis when you have to fight a well-deserved reputation of being absurdly expensive and very high risk!

Rebranding might help, but there are some places where these bridges are simply burnt and the industry won't be getting back in, which is unfortunate but also kind of deserved in a way.

What you will then get is an unsustainable set of shortcuts that threaten your energy supplies at crucial times.

ie, what's happening in Europe now[1]

Germany went on a spree, dismantling their nuclear plants after being scared by Fukushima. Fossil fuel plants tool their place. Subsidies to unsustainable alternatives and penalties on polluters made it so it was not profitable to increase energy supply on sources such as natural gas and fossil fuels that could ramp quickly in response to demand.

And the price of natural gas in Europe went parabolic.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/28/why-europe-s-energy-pric...

This is a very common myth but fossil fuel plants did not take their place. Wind and solar did though. Both nuclear and fossil fuel plants are a smaller piece of the pie compared to when Fukushima happened and the Energiwende happened. [0]

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Looks like the guy above me said the same thing, but at the time of writing it wasn't there yet.

Do I misunderstand this issue when if say: "The loss of 8GW of nuclear electricity generation created new renewables projects immediately that would not have been constructed if that generation capacity was not lost."

To me, regardless of the change in energy mix in the meantime, every extra GW of other renewables would have decommissioned coal generation by some significant factor (maybe not the full 8GW less coal, but quite a bit). Instead those renewables were replacing missing nuclear capacity. The only way I see that decommissioning nuclear didn't result in more coal burning to meet the country's needs would be if it was immediately followed by a huge investment that would have otherwise not occurred.

ETA: Looking again at the link hard coal + lignite 45.5GW in 2011, 43.5GW today - not great! Relative decline is good but climate change demands absolute declines more substantial than this.

> What you will then get is an unsustainable set of shortcuts that threaten your energy supplies at crucial times.

I like the idea of solar energy, but I also wonder about how safe it is to use. I'm thinking of events such as the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora[0] which reportedly caused a "year without summer[1]".

Presumably, something like this would have a major impact on solar cell energy output, and if we'd significantly depended on solar, would have catastrophic consequences for our society. Unless, of course, I overestimate the effect that volcanic ash could have on solar cells.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

You "just" need to maintain a redundant backup fossil-based energy supply system that is not used 99% of the time, simple!

Simple to say. Not simple to implement in practice and in a competitive environment. It is very hard for CEO to justify massive spending on something that has oy a 1:2000 chance or something in any given year.

I believe the person you replied to was being sarcastic

What about nuclear instead of fossil fuel and Bitcoin mining for the redundant time?

> Germany went on a spree, dismantling their nuclear plants after being scared by Fukushima. Fossil fuel plants tool their place.

Not true. Renewables took their place. Nuclear wasn't a huge part of the mix before Fukushima either. The change immediately following 2011 wasn't very large, and much smaller than the power added by renewables. Lots of plots available to see for yourself at [0].

For some reason this story is told wrong in every single discussion on nuclear here on HN.

For the record, I actually agree that the decision to accelerate the shutdown of nuclear power was misguided, since it delayed the shutdown of coal power. It did not, however, lead to an expansion of fossil energy sources.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

I live in Europe. Most notable substitution for Nuclear is Green Russian gas. I see this decission each month in my heating bill. Renewables is cool, but u know there is winters in Europe. As gas storages are not full here and our comrades from East wants to get nordstream2 certified, they are pressing with not delivering additional capabilities. As there are no serious alternatives still. I would be really happy if there would be enough capacity of decentralized green energy, but there are not. Nuclear is one of patches what we have got in our hands to live thru Fussion and/or enough capacity trully green energy. All other is lyrics

It strikes me as weird to blame a lack of natural gas all over Europe on Germany.

Germany is the biggest natural gas consumer in EU by far and the main driver of anti nuclear sentiment in EU

While it is techically true that Germany is the biggest natural gas consumer. The difference between Germany, UK and Italy is very small. (https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-consumption-by-country...)

And for example, The Netherlands, which is a lot smaller than Germany, consumes half the amount of Germany.

Coming back to nuclear energy, France, a country that is certainly in favor of nuclear energy, has failed to build one since 2002. UK and Finland are trying to build one, with similar lack of success.

So the only option for nuclear energy in Europe seems to be to keep aging power plants running and hope that they don't fail. Not a very attractive future.

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