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Comment by freemint | Hacker News Reader

And what about the non-democratic world?

Do we want every country to run nuclear power plants?

Would you want foreign governments and countries running nuclear plants in your country?

One way to help with that would be to have nuclear plants in trusted countries, but will they stay trusted and will other countries accept being dependent on a one sided dependence on power?

Those questions are (in addition to cost concerns) why nuclear is not a tech i see helping the world moving forward.

Solar/renewable could foster entirely energy independent countries with a ton of storage or my preferred option, a global grid having sun 24/7 and robust to seasons due to production on both hemispheres. That way we are all interconnected and keep trading even if long distance trade becomes verboten.

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The major polluters, (India, China, USA, Russia) already have nuclear weapons. If we could just switch those powers to nuclear energy, I'd think it would offset most of the world's carbon emissions.

The 'rich will take care of the poor' plan hasn't panned out so well. Then there's the price, the long build-times ... We're building a workable solution that will spill over into energy-independence wherever the (no-cost-fuel) Sun shines. No carbon, less that has to be captured.

>Solar/renewable could foster entirely energy independent countries with a ton of storage or my preferred option, a global grid having sun 24/7 and robust to seasons due to production on both hemispheres.

That's pretty cool but I'd rather we achieved energy independence this millennia.

Anything but renewables brings global catastrophe and civilization collapse nearer.

Collapse of civilization would deliver a kind of energy independence, but maybe not the kind you want.

Power from renewables is so radically cheaper than anything else ever known that not building it out as fast as possible costs strictly more. That building out renewables fast enough might fend off global catastrophe is an extra benefit.

Building nukes would steal capital from building out renewables.

Why is a nuclear reactor in the sky "renewable", but a nuclear reactor in France isn't?

I will direct your question to a uranium miner.

In any case, NG aside the important distinction nowadays is between technologies with and without substantial opex: NG, nukes and geo are on one side, wind and solar on the other. And capex, same division except NG generation infrastructure is readily retrofitted for synthetic fuel.

Wind and solar are so radically much cheaper all around that it makes no sense to talk about building anything else.

Because for one we literally pull some resource we have a finite amount of out of the ground, while for other one, we do not.

Building under sea cables between asia and europe already exist, an undersea cable between NA and Europe would be profitable, so would be a cross Mediterranean power connection.

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