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Comment by liketochill | Hacker News Reader

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability, and that cost is low per MWH.

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> Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind

There's also the aspect of "how much sun is there?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy_in_Finland

There are a number of issues with photovoltaic solar cells that close to the Arctic Circle.

> There are a number of issues with photovoltaic solar cells that close to the Arctic Circle.

What they need up there is a way to generate electricity from darkness.

Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof.

Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really expensive.

Currently 3% of global electricity comes from Solar and 16% from hydro with Nuclear only proving 10%. Scaling Nuclear to a significantly on a global scale take not just massive construction and new regulations, but also training etc, we simply don’t have the time.

Solar works great in some countries, but Finland? I just don't see it working out there.

Yea, though apparently they get 0.3% of their electricity from solar which seems crazy to me.

Actually you need to go southern france northern italy that you get higher solar potential https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PV-solar-electricity-pot... big problem is that when you need most electricity(winter) solar is basically 0.

There's sunlight around the clock furing summer. Many summer cottages are off-grid and get all elecricity using solar.

Not for the people who would have liked to drink the water used to clean the panels (cf the projects in deserts). Everything has some drawbacks and it s useful to diversify.

Your off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear uses vastly more water than solar power per kWh.

“Nuclear Energy consuming roughly 400 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, 320 billion gallons of water were consumed by United States nuclear power plant electricity generation in 2015.” And that’s direct consumption in cooling towers, nuclear indirectly uses power in other ways.

By comparison the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project in Riverside County estimated 2/3 cup of water per megawatt hour.

Most of the water used by nuclear is used to run the heat exchangers, and gets dumped straight back into the river it's drawn from. This looks like it's the source you're quoting [1]. It's pretty clear that nuclear power is a tiny fraction of water usage [2]. Furthermore, in water-constrained areas nuclear plants can be cooled with wastewater [3]. And lastly, plenty of nuclear plants are cooled with ocean water, which obviously has zero shortage.

The notion that nuclear power is going to significant affect water supplies is without merit.

1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/styles2/#:~:tex....

2. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/styles2/images/...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

I agree it’s a trivial amount of water and both can go without using water, the point was solar is on average vastly less.

However, wastewater is just water. Look at a long river and towns upstream dump their wastewater into rivers that towns and cities downstream collect as municipal water.

Nuclear is over 4x safer than solar [1]. As far as "not having the time", we'd still be using natural gas to accommodate wind and solar's intermittency unless some breakthrough in storage technology happens. Batteries are mostly going to go to vehicles, not grid scale plants. Other storage solutions like thermal batteries, compressed air, or giant flywheels remain in the prototyping phase and aren't even proven to be viable at scale.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

Your looking at “Rooftop solar” not grid solar.

Which is misleading in several ways, both because it ignores the majority of solar power and ignores how safe that power will be over time.

> All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability

Does this include the higher security needs around nuclear facilities?

I left out the construction costs, the Arkwright Summit farm, $125 million.

The Solar Star project was $2 billion.

This Finnish Nuclear site appears to have cost $12 billion.

That makes wind look really good, and solar at least on the same order (and still safer).

There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down.

The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources.

The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.

Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production.

Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.

Latvia is still climbing out from under Soviet domination. Rich countries should lead.

4 years planning, That is normal before for starting construction. There are environmental studies to be done first to ensure any damage to the environment the work would cause can be mitigated. There are permits to be issued which must include the mitigation measures. Some design work must be done to get the permits so they know what they are permitting. Land must be purchased, transmission right of ways granted. Enough design work must be done to place the order for long lead time equipment, such as wind turbines. How many, how big, where do they go for best ROI? Some of these permitting steps face opposition and negotiations must take place. This is the process real world infrastructure projects face.

No one uses batteries for large scale (eg overnight) storage. They are used for grid stability (eg, 1/2 hour supply).

Reliability comes from solar and wind power redundancy and geographic distribution. If your collection area is over a few thousand square kilometres it is very rare for there to be no wind and no sun. Make it a few tens of thousand square kms (which modern high voltage transmission achieves) and your reliability is higher than coal.

Except when the North Sea wind was weaker than usual in 2021, triggering an energy crisis that has persisted to this day. This impacted almost the entirety of Europe and led to a spike in gas prices, since, surprise, all the backup plants rely on gas and coal.

Evidently you failed to read "redundancy and geographic distribution".

That there is North Sea wind power, howsoever intermittent, is a pure good. Tying it into a larger network makes it better. The solution to local deficits is more localities.

There is not infinite transmission capacity in all directions. It is difficult to get permission to build new transmission lines, which are also expensive.

Build. More. Transmission. Lines.

Transmission lines are not expensive at all compared to nuclear power. This nuclear plant cost $12B and it is a cheap one!

Compare that to the SunCable is budgetted at $14B, (AU $20B in the article = US$20B) which is an undersea(!) HVAC cable all the way from Australia to Singapore (3,800km!) AND a 3GW(!) solar farm[1].

By comparison, the distance from Spain to Scotland is 2400km. And when the wind stopped in the North Sea, Spain was setting records in terms of the amount of power generated from wind farms[2]

[1] https://www.intelligentliving.co/australian-undersea-sun-cab...

[2] https://www.evwind.es/2021/12/03/27-8-of-electricity-came-fr...

You cannot depend on nuclear 24x7x365 as we’ve been able to see in France and Germany the last few years. Hot temperatures in summer cause the temperature of the rivers to increase so much that the water cannot be used for cooling and so these plants have to be shut down. That’s only going to become worse.

That seems like a problem that can be accounted for in the initial design. I’m sure you can design a plant to be cooled down by even 99C water, and if the river is that hot we have other problems.

I.e., by increasing cost. But nukes are already not competitive. Increasing cost makes them less so. Their competitiveness is already in sharp decline as alternatives get ever cheaper.

> so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is.

It does insofar as it matters for capital. Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years (but probably more with cost overruns in the billions) before they see a ROI? Especially when the cost per MWH from a renewable project that will be online in 2 years with less risk is already comparable if not more competitive.

but is a renewable project that matches the capabilities of a nuclear project (to the same degree of reliability and availability) really the same cost?

you gotta compare like-for-like. If the solar project that takes 2 years only provide power half the time, then you need double the size to provide the same amortized level of power at night. You also need some form of storage. And that's if you don't have a spate of bad weather preventing it from working - so to amortize that problem you'd need to build yet larger...

No point comparing like for like. The end game is a stabile balanced grid. If that is fulfilled by 100% intermittent or 100% deterministically dispatchable does not affect anything in regards to the end user. All they want is reliably the cheapest power at the time of consumption.

That follows if you are playing Sim-City, or I suppose if you think giving the government absolute control over energy production and you want to leave the market completely out of it. I'm just talking the world we live in.

To answer more directly though, yeah the power is the same cost. Perhaps when renewable penetration into the energy market is saturated, there will be a greater demand for base load at all those times renewables aren't producing at peak, and that will be reflected in those nuclear MWHs becoming very profitable even at a higher unit cost.

The South Australian grid is a great example of how well this approach works.

It's mostly (>60%) a mix of solar and wind power, with some gas that fills in the gaps - as well as batteries for grid stability. Still importing some coal power from interstate, but that is decreasing too.

The investment has been incremental - so much smaller amounts, with much less risk and therefor more attractive to investors.

A large part of this (since 2018) has been done by a conservative state government, who have been highly supportive of the renewable transition.

https://theconversation.com/against-the-odds-south-australia...

You have a great point. Who is funding the building new nuclear plants these days? I imagine it is mostly governments or government backed utilities.

I would absolutely never invest in a nuclear project but I sure am glad they are there to keep the lights on when the weather doesn’t cooperate for wind and solar.

A mix of different sources is the key to a robust grid, and nuclear is a great part of that mix.

As a side note on British Columbia site C 1000 MW a hydro dam is currently looking like it will cost 16 billion and take about 10 years to build, those numbers could easily be for a nuclear plant.

I reckon that's a reasonable way to think about it. I often see people blaming irrational nuclear fear or environmentalists for the lack of nuclear development, but really if they want to see it be optimized as part of the solution in the future, they should be advocating for expanded government subsidies or direct funding because right now that's the obstacle, the fact that nuclear isn't part of a purely market solution.

If you look at the electricity market in Ontario, zero development of new plants is part of a market based solution. They had to form a new government agency the Ontario power authority to sign long term contracts so that companies can secure loans to build infrastructure. The market price was politically influenced with many charges being hidden outside of the hourly price in an “uplift” charge and nobody had confidence that prices would be high enough for long enough to get their ROI.

Markets are interesting for economic dispatch based on marginal cost, but then real world constraints such as rivers that must flow and a lack of infinite transmission capacity in all directions kick in and it starts to look a lot like what it replaced. I guess it works where it works

    Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years

This points out one of the sad flaws of the human race and ultimately, it's probably the one that will lead to our downfall.

We're absolute crap at thinking long-term.

Look at you, talking about ten years as if it's eons. You're not wrong, of course! Capital doesn't like to invest in projects ten+ years before ROI.

But ten years is not a long time. We should be thinking about many, many things at least ten years in the future. Hell, forget ten years. We should be plotting our energy strategy with an eye to the next hundreds of years.

Of course, we won't, because we're humans and we really struggle to think past next week. And those of us in democracies have designed a system that literally punishes politicians for thinking beyond the next election cycle.

The future is not that predictable.

Who in 2000 would have guessed solar and wind would be radically cheaper than coal? No 100-year plan would have mentioned them.

If small-scale hydrogen-boron aneutronic fusion becomes unexpectedly practical in 20 years, all the other plans go out the window.

Shit, we didn't even understand the implications of improvements in fracking and other improvements in extraction efficiencies from 'dirty' hydrocarbon sources would have, in the mid-oughts peak oil was on the horizon with nothing feasible that could fill the coming gap.

>statistically the safest

The worst case of nuclear, it is worse than the worst case of solar/wind. So even if it were rational for humanity, it might not be rational for a country.

I'm having trouble picturing how it is safer than solar though.

The statistics wrap rooftop solar into the “solar” mix so all those DIY/fly-by-night installers who don’t use safety equipment while working at heights and end up killings themselves make solar by far the deadliest energy source in terms of deaths per MW capacity installed.

Bullshit. Coal and petroleum are way deadlier than rooftop solar, even without diluting it with industrial solar installations.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

Nuclear isn't (historically) "statistically the safest", and any major accident or hot-waste-related problem may worsen its case.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Fuel costs are "not brought up" because they are so much smaller than construction and operation cost, not because they are small.

Nuke fuel cost is huge compared to operating cost of solar and wind.

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