Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Greenpeace

Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting against nuclear weapons and their testing (which so annoyed the French government that they simply murdered an activist) and nuclear dumping, both of which put considerable quantities of radioactive material into the air and water.

Chernobyl has been in the news again since the site was occupied by Russian troops. That and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla... have apparently taken shelling damage but as yet no leaks have been reported. The potential for an accidental or deliberate disaster that covers Western Europe with radioactive material and takes out a season's agriculture remains.

Is everyone happy with Iran having a buildout of a dozen or more reactors to replace their oil usage?

More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

View on HN

> Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting

That may be, but the simple reality is that they and many like them have been fearmongering against nuclear for decades while being far more accepting of coal and case.

> Is everyone happy with Iran having a buildout of a dozen or more reactors to replace their oil usage?

I am. Iran would have had peaceful French built nuclear power with French handling nuclear bringing nuclear fuel and taking nuclear 'waste' home.

This was agree on by Iran and France. However the US in its infinite wisdom prevented that.

And then when Iran said, if France was not gone do it, they would do it themselves. The US and Israel basically fell over themselves claiming this was prove that Iran was building nuclear weapons.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

That's not a law of nature. Its an act of deliberate policy and history.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

Comparing Nuclear and Solar cost is like comparing the cost of rain to the cost tap water. It is fundamentally stupid.

- Nuclear provides a stable continuous source of power and matches existing power grid.

- Solar need more than three time the capacity for the same level of power, need profound infrastructure changes and required to be associated with Lithium Storage or/and Power2Gas or/and water pump storage.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

France has been able in 20 years to create out of nowhere more than 30 nuclear power plants covering more than 50% of the country energy needs for a fraction of the cost of an EPR today. Privatisation, loss of Engineering knowledge and mainly lack of politics support are the element to blame here. Not nuclear energy itself.

> Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting against nuclear weapons and their testing

Good. Then they should stick to their fundamental and go protest a bit against Nuclear weapon testing in North Korea. That will make them much more relevant that when they do support the construction of (Russian provided) coal and gaz power plants in Germany.

Sticking to their fundamental might have helped to prevent the shit show we are now in: now Germany cannot even afford to stop few Gaz pipelines from Russia without putting the country in the dark.

It is unclear how much nuclear energy costs to the public in France. There is no cost transparency so I don't know what you base that on.

> There is no cost transparency so I don't know what you base that on.

Electricity cost to the final user is the only metrics that matter.

Anything in the energy market is heavily subsidies: petrol, gas, RNG, everything, not only nuclear.

France was having one of the lowest electricity price in Europe for more than 2 decades mainly due to Nuclear[^1]. This is not anymore due to the European common energy market.

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/59f1e791-...

> Electricity cost to the final user is the only metrics that matter.

By that logic the difference between solar and nuclear doesn't matter since the cost is the same.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know the cost of nuclear in France since it gets lumped together with other profits/losses. This is unfortunate because it makes comparing very difficult. The claims you made are therefore unsubstantiated.

The cost of nuclear energy is actually in the law since EDF has to sell some of its production at cost to other providers. The evaluation is done by the CRE.

What did France use for the other half of its energy? Why didn't it just use nuclear for everything?

Why does the answer to those questions make your claims about renewables needing storage nonsensical?

> What did France use for the other half of its energy? Why didn't it just use nuclear for everything?

Energy is was more than 70% nuclear in France. The rest is mainly hydro, solar when available and a bit of Gas [1]. Some reactors were built before and after this 20 years nuclear rush, this is why 50% in my previous message.[^2]

[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/regional-data#producti...

[2]: https://twitter.com/superbello123/status/1505287449995579396

Okay, so your comment was less correct than I assumed.

France peaked around 75% of electricity from nuclear. Energy is bigger than just electricity and generally includes transport and fuel for home and industrial heating, which puts Framce back around a half of energy from clean sources.

This 75% of electricity is (perhaps not coincidentally) very close to the 80% that many people feel modern renewables can provide without any major storage issues. Because that 20/25% leeway means you can just use fossil backup to fill any gaps where your clean supply doesn't match your demand.

But, the anti-renewable types who point to nuclear to justify their outdated opinions on renewables never seem to care that nuclear was only ever part of a larger system. They meticulously count every penny spent on grid upgrades and storage for one, but not the other. Pumped hydro and nuclear is a classic combination for decades.

They'll attack time-of-use pricing as some kind of attack on liberty even though its a standard thing to do with excess nuclear capacity overnight, in places like France, for example.

Use various energy sources to be rock solid. Anyway it's balanced in Europe rather than in France.

Not only that, the potential risk that contemporary nuclear energy (worse yet, older tech) keeps increasing as the world becomes more complex. You could make a list very very long by jotting down the threats that would be caused by and directed at a nuclear installation of any size.

Frankly, I don't trust the Human to manage the risk of a nuclear installation. Look what Humans are doing elsewhere in every other domain. We don't need the sun to be brought to Earth.

This is quite simply contradicted by evidence. And newly built nuclear plant would be incredibly safe. And if we actually build really modern plants they would be absurdly safe.

People make way to big a deal of how amazingly complex nuclear plants are. Its not some magical spell that prevents demons from entering the world.

And the potential of accidents even in case of terrorist attack (or whatever fantasy scenario) is far smaller then people want to claim.

But OP isn't talking about newly-built plants. OP is doing what many pro-nuclear folks do, which is to posit a counterfactual history where we built dozens (hundreds?) of nuclear plants in the 70s. That would leave us with many, many obsolete nuclear plants reaching the end of their intended lifespan all at once over the last few years. (Nuclear plants were typically permitted to operate for 40 years, although may have successfully applied for extensions and continue to run today.)

They were not "permitted" to run 40 years, they were planned for at least 40 years, that's completely different.

Any time extension is a tradeoff, there's nothing wrong with extending the lifespan if the regulators are okay with it.

It looks like I was imprecise with my language. It looks like plants are licensed for 40 years. Extensions are for an additional 20 years. (!)

> there's nothing wrong with extending the lifespan if the regulators are okay with it.

Perhaps! Unless regulators make a mistake, or are pressured politically or by industry to extend licenses when they ought not be. I'm not sure I'd want to go into a hypothetical 2030s where the US had scores of nuclear power plants to decommission two decades after the end of their original lifespan.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21

The risks _are_ managed. Pretty much every reactor in existence has a negative void coefficient (the more the reactor heats up, the more it is moderated, lowering total energy production, hence lowering heat, etc.) Pretty much every reactor in existence is in failsafe: if power or control is lost, rods close, reaction stops. Pretty much every reactor in existence is not powered by its own output: if your reactor starts going wild for any reason, it won't be able to keep itself powered up. You shut off the small generator outside (and by outside, I mean it is physically _outside_ the reactor building), and it stops. Pretty much every reactor in existence has walls solid enough to block a plane crashing into it. Hell, Zaporizhzhya has been shelled repeatedly and is doing... fine. (As in, the reactor, not necessarily the people).

So, no, nuclear energy is about the safest means of producing energy we have today. Offsetting environmental damage to third world countries to mine your rare earth minerals for solar does not get to make you feel better about it. Nuclear installations are not handled like a shitty startup that goes "wE'Re AgIlE wE'lL dEaL WiTh iT iN tImE". The IAEA is absurdly stringent on their requirements. The ASN in France puts such harsh conditions and requires every crucial safety equipment to be not just doubled, but tripled. There is no domain in which we are more demanding.

>>There is no domain in which we are more demanding.

Interesting perspective of relative risks in life. Makes me think of Boeing's 737MAX that should have gone through a new type certification process and was instead allowed (by regulators in multiple countries) to apply software to make it seem like it flies like other 737s. This saved on pilot retraining costs, and resulted in a couple mass deaths. We don't seem to be coherent with risks.

The death toll of nuclear energy is only a minute fraction of the casualties brought about by coal and oil. The most pessimistic estimations of deaths caused by all nuclear power accidents that ever occurred and waste that has been produced utterly pale in comparison to the insane human cost of the fossil fuels. And thanks to their greenhouse gas emissions the worst of it is likely yet to come. And the sun generates its energy output as a result of nuclear fusion, not the nuclear fission of a chain reaction. We'd very much like to bring the sun to earth because controlled sustained fusion could potentially solve the majority of our energy troubles. Unfortunately thus far we've brought it in the form of thermonuclear weapons.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

In practical terms: solar panels might cost less per peak W, same for inverters, same for batteries but costs to reach self-sufficiency for real [1] are still simply absurdly expensive in both absolute capex terms and expected operational life.

Actually I have a small p.v. with lithium storage as a guarantee for blackouts, not counting the battery in monetary terms I'll pay it back thanks to self consumption, I can shift most big loads in the sunny days etc, but not all. A battery big enough to ensure full operation in comfort conditions (witch means being able to heat the house in winter, cook something in early morning or in the evening etc) + some backups (grid or generator) when there is not enough Sun during the day would cost 30-40k euros. And would still be a fragile system with around 10 years of fully operational life, after some parts of the system might still be operational with enough performances to be kept, but batteries, the most expensive and unrecyclable part of the system will be not. Changing them probably means change battery inverters since voltages and other characteristics might have changed in new batteries, witch is again another important costs of the system. And that's just at private home's level, at scale for industries etc it's simply technologically impossible so far. For those usages we have only fossils, when possible nuclear (need abundant water ready available, significant hydrogeological stability etc, can't be done as easy as place a big diesel or gas generator on ground) or again when possible classic hydro power.

P.v. costs are going down in part because of evolving scale in part artificially because of economical moves (like having skyrocketed prices of oil&gas with various excuses but in reality just for a deliberate speculation) and nuclear costs soar just because instead of being done by a single State are done by various private companies that work between them for profit. We can't really run a country on renewables so far and we will not in the near future.

[1] too many use a classic dumb tricks "hey, with a p.v. system you'll produces more than you consume", witch is true in kWh/month terms, witch is false in time distribution of such production concentrated between morning and early afternoon and zero in the rest of the time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com