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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

I still remember the outcry when the EU banned incandescent bulbs in 2009.

CFLs were crappy and full of heavy metals, Halogen was half-assed, LEDs were expensive, too blue and too weak.

People were defending their radiant heaters in full force, but everybody underestimated exponential development in a market suddenly put into full force solving this.

By the last stage where 40W bulbs were being phased out, nobody was interested in them anymore, because LEDs were simply better with cheaper TCO.

Solar and battery are still on exponential track down the cost curve (with wind saturating, but still going strong).

Nuclear and fossils are not.

The energy world will look very different 10 years from now.

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I think nuclear would be, if the seventies had not happened.

Well, Chernobyl was a bit later as far as I am aware.

Yes, 26 of April 86.

And mushrooms and wild boar in Bavarian forests are still contaminated.

I’ll take contaminated mushrooms and wild boar to climate change and the large scale disease brought on by fossil fuels. Nuclear is much safer, even accounting for these absolute outliers.

> I’ll take contaminated mushrooms and wild boar to climate change and the large scale disease brought on by fossil fuels.

It's a good thing, then, that that's a false dilemma and nuclear and/or fossil fuels are clearly not the only options on the table.

As a reference, Germany already relies on renewables to supply around 60% of their energy needs, and it's production is still ramping up.

Also as a reference, German electricity prices are up and their Co2 emissions are up due to unreliable renewables.

If you look over the last 10 year, renewables have reduced the CO2 emissions considerably in Germany, reaching 50% in 2020. However, while 2020 was a record year with a huge increase vs. 2019, 2021 was back on the 2019 level, as the weather was very average.

I used to be anti nuclear, then I was pro, but by now I‘m back to anti. Main reason being that it‘s too slow to move the needle by now. Any new nuclear project by now - even if we’d change public sentiment and regulations today - is so time, planning and capital intensive that by the decade it goes online, it‘ll be outcompeted by overprovisioned solar roofs + battery storage even in the worst locations except maybe the arctic circle.

Without proliferation risks and however you get rid of the radiated mess.

I believed the same things in the same order (anti, pro, too slow), but I'm not anti nuclear now. Let it try and compete. We'll get a better electricity supply either way. Yeah, letting it persist wastes time and money, but so what? Every other system we have in life has a lot of waste too.

I would be strongly antinuclear if the nuclear industry somehow manages to persuade politicians to shut down wind, solar, and battery technologies, though. But that's very unlikely.

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