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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Probably for the same reason we don't see massively expanding horse carriage industry. Nuclear is on the way out despite enormous government subsidies. Just fundamentally too burdensome, expensive, and outcompeted by modern tech.

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"Modern tech" is still vastly inferior to nuclear power. Think of it as humanity scoring a roll of the dice to discover 22nd century technology in the 20th.

Depends what you mean by "inferior". A horse-drawn carriage has less carbon emissions than an automobile, doesn't it? However, that's not the sole criteria.

It seems the "horse-drawn carriage" argument is being repeated across multitude of comments posted by your account.

What makes this comparison with nuclear energy even remotely viable?

Much like carriages, more modern alternatives have rendered it obsolete despite the loud voices that continually refuse to accept its eventual extinction.

The only superior potential more modern source of energy we're aware of that can match energy density, resource efficiency and carbon-free characteristics of nuclear fission is nuclear fusion. Other alternatives lose on one or more parameters, especially when it comes to environmental costs.

Maximum possible energy density and resource efficiency are not really considered when designing grids.

> horse-drawn carriage has less carbon emissions than an automobile

Is it? Especially if counting by miles of travel, I'm not sure about it. Also, if by "carbon emissions" I believe we mean "greenhouse gas emissions" -- including methane yes.

Horses eat grasses which are part of the carbon cycle.

Actually that "modern tech" of yours is the subsidized one. President Obama was basically trumpeting how many new and awesome futuristic jobs those solar parks will create when the government unleashes the cash flood.

Nothing competes with nuclear. It's just pure physics - atom is the biggest source of energy on this planet according to current physics. Whoever can't agree with that reality fact should see a psychiatrist.

Despite all the obstacles, nuclear constantly develops and will continue to do so, because market.

Industries can't run on calculator batteries. Sorry.

I think you would benefit from reading TFA. It looks at the actual operating costs of current designs and the dropping price of renewables and points out that the fundamental economics of the nuclear industry are not great right now. It also points out that most of the high-priced daytime usage is about to be scooped up by renewables. This may or may not be fatal to the nuclear industry, but it points to the need for substantial innovation or subsidies.

Sorry. Largest power density is still in the atom. Can't work your magic around this. The only reasonable and sane strategy is to R&D around nuclear. Whoever gets it right will rule, the others will be ruled. Not single bubble kept its integrity; renewables will burst as well.

Wishing doesn't work.

You are right about power density,

If only we had an absolutely massive fusion reactor that could passively manage its own containment.

It would be so powerful that one such nuclear reactor would produce millions of times more power than we could ever consume.

The reactor could be designed to run indefinitely. No fuel or decommissioning costs incurred.

We could site the reactor at a large enough distance from population centers that we would not need to deal with its waste.

We could decouple the reactor from power generation. Just use safe EM radiation to freely distribute power wherever it would be needed.

The reactor itself, perhaps funded by some benevolent quadrillionaire, having no operating costs would be literally "too cheap to meter".

I see what you did there.

Why are you choosing a meaningless metric to decide on the technology? Utilities or consumers don't care about energy density of fuels, they care about cost.

High energy density can in principle matter, a lot, from a societal point of view. If you only need a tiny amount of fuel to make the world's energy, then the overall impact on land, minerals, ecosystems, wildlife, etc. can potentially be very small, assuming you deliver the rest of the fuel cycle and reactors with reasonably small footprints as well. The fact that current markets don't yet value these things is more a issue with the current markets than a critique of energy density.

A sackcloth and ashes approach to civilization, where nuclear's low land use is preferred because we're also going to (for example) ban agriculture because it uses land, is a nonstarter. Society has decided that agriculture is ok, because the concerns of people are more important than the putative concerns of unfettered nature. And if agriculture is ok, so is the land use of PV and wind (which produce much more value per unit area than agriculture does.)

(A similar argument applies to materials. Compare the materials used by a renewable energy system to the materials used by industrial society as a whole.)

At global scale, these kinds of things end up mattering a huge amount. This is the basis of Komanoff's "price scales primarily with fleet size" argument. No one remembers that rule, but at planetary scale even seemingly small externalities end up driving costs. Case in point: do you know how many individual anti-wind organizations there are in Germany?

No, they don't. At a global scale, land is enormously available. So are the materials from which renewable energy sources can be built. Are you worried about running out of silicon, iron, or aluminum? If so, stop being silly. Focusing on these is just to ignore the physical realities of what's available to work with.

Considering power density meaningless puts you in direct confrontation with reality. In physics you can't create energy, you can only convert it. So from what you're converting from is the key consideration to take as that also determines the cost.

And while nuclear is expensive at first, its longevity and reliability pays for itself. As it's further developed, that initial tax will only be reduced.

As if you guys don't realize that this "renewable" stuff is pushed by a nuclear reaction that happened thousands of years ago in the core of a plasma ball that is 8 light minutes away? That is not efficient.

What nonsense. I'm not denying power or energy density of nuclear is higher, I'm denying that this bare fact is relevant to any decision that we might make about using nuclear to power civilization.

And no, power and energy density do not determine cost, in general. They might if all else were equal, but all else is NOT equal. Renewable sources can omit entire categories of equipment that thermal power plants require, and have a much lower requirement on reliability (both because the individual units are smaller, and because the consequences of their catastrophic failure are vastly smaller.)

And no, nuclear's longevity and reliability do not pay for themselves. You're engaging in a bit of confrontation with economic reality there.

Pointing to nuclear reactions occurring in the Sun and pretending that justifies using nuclear on Earth is just completely absurd.

> Why are you choosing a meaningless metric to decide on the technology?

Learn to express yourself better. It's like building a house - your first choice is what ground you build it on - quick sands, swamp, or solid rock. If you don't take power density into consideration you're not going to make the right choice and then all your efforts will be meaningless.

Denmark is almost 100% renewable (it imports some). France is 70% nuclear (net exporter). Denmark household pays 170.5% more than french household. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Here's a lecture on nuclear economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

Why focus on energy or power density (ostensibly because they affect cost) when you can focus on cost itself? The answer to that is because if you focus on cost, nuclear loses big, so the dishonest nuclear proponent has to obfuscate things and pretend that individual input that indirectly affects cost (along with many other inputs) is somehow dominant.

Read the article. The advantages of the high power density are negated by the inefficiencies of the heat cycle, construction costs etc.

Yes, it makes sense to focus some R&D on nuclear. However after seven decades, it would seem that an alternative to turbines is not so straightforward. The alternatives mentioned in the article are at least a decade (and probably much more) away from commercial use. Even then the other overheads would remain.

As with many engineering problems, an apparently decisive advantage can be overwhelmed by secondary effects.

Running only at night makes each kWh twice as costly, because a nuke costs almost the same, producing or not.

Same is true of renewables, but the cost is enormously lower.

Not sure what you mean by "nothing competes with them". There are fewer nuclear power stations in the world than there were five years ago, and there will be fewer in five years than there are today. Hardly anyone wants to build them anymore. They just don't make sense.

That is just politics speaking. Massively subsidizing renewables and smack talking nuclear is an easy pass to a political career. But reality is immutable - nuclear energy is without competition.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Check the above. Denmark is 100% nuclear free (runs on mostly renewables but it imports), Germany i think runs on about 10% nuclear. France runs in 70% nuclear. The cost speaks for itself.

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