Hacker News Reader

Comment by freemint | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear Energy becomes decidedly less green (but still greener than out of the ground Methane) when building, maintenance and decomissioning as well as fuel transports are included. [1] But once the fix costs are accounted for making it run longer seems smart.

There seems to be quiet bimodal distribution of CO2e estimates for carbon. Some are like 5 other >100 in the same unit.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Nucl...

View on HN

> when building, maintenance and decomissioning

OK, but the same applies to wind turbines. I don't see a lot of Teslas hauling wind turbines down I-80. Let's not set up double standards just for nuclear.

There's already large contemporary investment in wind and solar relative to the past, not quite the same for nuclear. A lot of processes are inherited from very old projects back in its heyday.

Also owing consideration is the many advances to those processes that could occur with more substantial investment in nuclear power.

However the primary benefit to nuclear, beyond its acceptable carbon emissions, is that functioning as a base load removes a lot of the difficultly with building enough battery infrastructure to enable solar power to power peak load and through the night. This is particularly the case for service based economies whose peak load is often after dark.

One nice thing about solar is the economics of making the night shift more expensive and less common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com