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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous. Think about how many people have to be involved in their operation, versus the operation of a solar farm.

People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?

Their cost of construction per GW is not competitive with wind and solar - it's typically thousands of euros per kw. Whereas wind and solar can go from construction to energy production (and carbon paypback) on a timescale of months, nukes take years to build.

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> Nuclear power plants are not "carbon free." They have significant operational needs (indirect emissions), making them of the most expensive sources of electricity available today, and by some estimates their indirect carbon footprint is enormous

The United Nations Economic Commission For Europe released a report in 2021 on the life cycle emissions (including construction, operation, and decommissioning) of various power generation options and found nuclear to be the lowest overall at 5.5 gCO2eq/kWh [1].

[1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf

> Nuclear power [...] indirect carbon footprint is enormous

Do you have sources for this? I completely concur that nuclear energy is too expensive, problematic and by now much too late to help with the climate crisis, but from what I found it is quite competitive with wind and solar in total CO2 emissions per kwh of energy (the numbers I found were all between 5 and 25 gram Co2/kwh for these three, compared to >500 for any fossil alternative).

This makes sense to me since turbines and panels also need to be manufactured, transported and installed, after all...

> People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?

While I agree with you in general, the amount of uranium needed to run a power plant should be orders of magnitude smaller than is necessary to build and equivalent solar farm

Amount of uranium 235, maybe. Amount of ore and environmental degradation, no.

But I do worry about the 8g/m^2 of cadmium mounted on top of houses some of which will burn down.

Estimates of nuclear put the carbon footprint between 15-50gCO2/KWh, compared to about 450gCO2/KWh for gas

Both uranium mining and renewables mining have issues - I'm not going to debate or compare them because I don't know enough about the topic but due to the energy density of uranium I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear was better overall

Cost is the real issue - the cost and timescales of nuclear reactors are massive issues, and they are significantly worse short-term investments than wind and solar.

However, energy storage is not a solved problem, so until it is nuclear is not competing with wind and solar - it is competing with gas and coal, to which it has advantages in almost every category (excluding cost)

I agree they must be taken into account, but the obvious counter is to take the cost of energy storage into account for solar/wind, which currently weakens its position significantly.

Long term that cost will go down, but it's always going to make the calculation much less simple than it seems at first glance, solar might be the cheapest form of power at the moment, but it's not the cheapest single source to run an electricity grid by a wide margin.

It gets much easier to think about if you picture the solar and wind owned by parties A, and storage and long-distance transmission by parties B. Then, it is just a matter of responding to spot price. The capital expenditure by A and B combined is less than for refurbishing existing nuke plants, never mind building new ones.

Interestingly, there is work being done to extract uranium from seawater, which while more expensive that mining at the moment, is starting to prove to be economically viable for certain reactors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recove...

I see research from 2012 showing it's 10x the price of current methods but maybe the price could come down and then.... the usual nothing useful that ever comes of Nuclear research.

How much of that economic cost is tied up in regulations and NIMBYism?

>Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?

I'd be willing to wager significant money that on a MW for MW basis, the environmental impact is higher for solar just due to the energy density alone.

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