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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

The other issue with solar/wind of course being that it’s not a suitable electricity source for base load on a grid :-/

Of course it is, with suitable storage. And probably cheaper than nuclear for that.

I don't really want wind turbines and solar panels to cover the whole planet. I used that to calculate some numbers for canada, and we'd need about 64k average offshore wind turbines, and 3200 square kilometers of solar farms.

Canada is comprised of 9,984,670 km^2. I don't think that your 3200 km^2 is going to make that much of an impact.

It's a whole 0.5% of the area of farmland in Canada. Think of the children!

If one more reactor goes down nuclear isn’t either in your country. Germany has to run their load balancing gas plants right now to fix your nuclear fever dreams.

And what is the probability of a reactor going down unexpectedly versus a weather event that causes renewable sources to stop producing?

I think we learned the answer to that question last winter down in Texas.

You back up the renewables with hydrogen-burning combined cycle plants.

A combined cycle plant costs around $1/W. A nuclear power plant costs around $10/W.

Why do you want to spend so much more money than you have to, just so you can split atoms?

France currently runs its nuclear plants at 60% due to maintanance and heat. In the last years the amount of times they had to shut down a nuclear power plant due to to warm cooling water has increased. Given where global warming is going that will happen more and more.

Texan politicians didn't miss a chance to blame wind power for the outages. Unfortunately, those initial lies are still circulating. The primary cause was that the pipes supplying natural gas froze. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

The frozen pipes were a problem specifically because the wind farms weren’t producing.

Replace the wind farms with nuclear power and the problem goes away.

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