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Comment by kitsune_ | Hacker News Reader

We can't build reactors fast enough. And electricity is only a part of what generates emissions. It's no where close to a solution. Looking up the world's energy numbers, how much of total energy production and emissions are from electricity, how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant, how many nuclear power plants are built per year etc. will show you this.

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China is gonna build 150 reactors in 15 years for 440 billion dollar. They lack the defeatist attitude common in the West and it shows.

West: China invented gunpowder and failed to exploit it.

China: West invented nuclear power and failed to exploit it.

... and in the same time they build even more hydro and other renewables, with even more money. china is just using everything to stop being that dependant on coal. it's just that their governement just does not care and builds everything, because china needs more energy every year. they quadrupled their energy needs in the last years.

just because they build nuclear does not mean that they don't build other stuff.

CGN has exponentially increasing cost overruns and delays like the rest of 'em. It's just cheaper to have the cost overruns and delays because of their low cost of financing - which in turn is a big ol' chunk of the underlying problem behind the rash of state bank insolvencies that was the big news before the real estate insolvencies eclipsed them

Let's ignore the fact that uranium is a finite resource and that existing reactors have EOL dates and assume that the west, India and the rest of the world matches China and the world collectively build 600 reactors in the next 15 years, for 2 trillion USD. Congratulations, you barely doubled the amount of reactors and their share of the world's energy production rises from around 2% to 4%.

Meanwhile the world needs to hit net zero emissions in around 2050. I'm agnostic about nuclear power but it's not the solution to global warming. Rich nations still need to reduce their emissions by 10% per year over the next decade and the developing world has to do the same starting around the 2030s.

If it were important to us, we could build modular reactors on a massive scale. There are several manufacturers with serious designs. And yes, electricity is "only a part", but it's a big part. A solution needn't be a singular one to make a huge difference. Personally, I think nuclear isn't our best choice. But it is a viable choice and we could make it work.

I disagree with this. Capitalism stands between what is important to us in the aggregate and what we actually do.

"Serious designs" are nice but no pathfinder demo plants yet. And all that stretches the timescales.

^ This. Also, It's the Wall Street Journal, so consider the source, its own by Rupert Murdoch, whose media companies, until very recently were climate change deniers, so from a rather crude sort of climate denialism, they will likely move to supporting technical "climate fixes" spruiked by the fossil fuel industries. This is a more subtle way of sabotaging real climate action.

Why do you say that? Not agreeing or disagreeing, just curious what the fossil fuel industry might have to gain from pushing adoption of nuclear power.

WSJ pushes a lot of "Carbon Capture" stories and Nuclear fusion stories. (Chevron is one of Nuclear Fusion's biggest investors)

    Each day more than 2 million people pick up a copy of The Wall Street Journal or read it online, more than any other newspaper in the country, except USA Today, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

    “More than three-fourths of them have a college degree, and their average household income is $234,909.

These are affluent individuals who are executives or business owners.

The Wallstreet Journal will never push an idea unless there's money to be made by its investors or affiliates, in the short term. and in the short term, I mean over 10 or 15 years.

A forest has more value, in the short term, cut down than is does if left alone. Petrochemicals have more value, in the short term, if they are being pumped, refined, and processed (and then that carbon is captured) than it were just left alone to begin with.

The absolute truth about dealing with the current climate crisis is that doing it right will not be profitable, in the short term, it will be an enormous undertaking across many fronts, and scientific disciplines, political agreements across nations states, etc.

So building new nuclear power plants, expanding carbon capture technology, and planting more trees are not real climate action?

What exactly is real climate action? Hoping that renewables and batter technology can scale up to completely decarbonize energy use?

Investing in less CO2 intensive building technologies. (The carbon dioxide emissions from the production of concrete are so high that if concrete were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 behind China and the United States.)The central ingredient in concrete is cement, which is made by crushing limestone and clay and adding iron ore or ash. The mixture is heated in a kiln to more than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, a process that consumes vast quantities of fossil fuel.

When heated, the calcium carbonate in limestone breaks into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, which is released into the air. The calcium oxide is ground with limestone and gypsum to make cement.

Half of the CO2 emissions in the production of concrete come from the reaction that breaks up the calcium carbonate and the other half from the fossil fuels required to heat the kilns and transport the materials.

Things we should also consider. Getting rid of cars. Investment in mass International and intranational public transit.

Meat alternatives that require less physical space. reining in massive fishing fleets (half the oxygen and half the carbon captured comes from the ecological systems in the ocean which we ravage) Invest in renewable energy, like tidal, solar, geothermal, etc

Even if we were to go 100% nuclear tomorrow (which just isn't possible, we'd (the entirety of earth) would run out of nuclear fuel in 90 years), that would account for about 1/4 the carbon emissions of the planet per year.

Climate change is more than just the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it's about how we as a species, integrate with the rest of the species on this planet.

Why do you think the fossil fuel industry wants nuclear power? How do they benefit? They appear to have gained immensely from the halt of nuclear power deployment in the west.

E.g. France famously decarbonised it's electric grid in a couple of decades after 1970s due to the energy crisis using nuclear power. How did this help fossil fuel companies? On the other hand, Germany has continued to be more reliant on coal and natural gas for electricity generation after deciding to abandon nuclear power post-Fukushima and pursue energiewende. Or remember BP, an oil and gas company, and it's whole Beyond Petroleum thing trying to make people believe it was into renewables?

If we are going to hypothesize conspiracies, then just looking purely at outcomes over recent decades, it would make more sense that the fossil fuel industry supports RE and RE targets, rather than CO2 targets or nuclear power, because the former works out far more favorably than the latter for their industry.

Electricity is only 28% of global emissions.

If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.

Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors.

This isn't hard math.

> Electricity is only 28% of global emissions.

Then how do you intend to decarbonize other energy uses without electricity? Want to replace gas furnaces with heat pumps? electricity. Produce hydrogen for shipping or CO2 free steel? Electricity. Charge everyones car battery? Electricity. So on, right?

> This isn't hard math.

Or 4 billion years:

https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

The carbon industry wants delay on decarbonisation. New nuclear projects are poster children for delay, because the industry has been mostly incompetent at shipping and lacks urgency.

We can't build reactors fast enough because of the NRC, not because it's technically infeasible or unsafe.

The NRC literally has a mandate to drive cost up. It's a pathological exercise in regulation.

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