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Comment by mcronce | Hacker News Reader

This presupposes that economics are the most important thing.

That isn't really the case.

It doesn't matter how much money you have when the climate burns to the ground around you, while energy sources that work when they want to fail to provide for your needs.

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It is funny how the same people (the nuclear lobby) who used to argue against solar due to economics (too expensive) are now arguing we should not consider economics anymore. The thing is though, at the moment most countries still produce significant portions of their elecricity from fossils. So if we want to remove them as quickly as possible, we should use the solution that gives us the highest capacity for a fixed amount of money (assuming we have only fixed funds).

Moreover because nuclear is so CAPEX driven both in cost and CO2 budget, it takes a long time to become carbon positive. So we would actually increase CO2 in the short term by building nuclear power plants.

So the best current strategy is to build up renewables to replace fossil as quick as possible, keep existing nuclear running, and develop storage. If the current trends of the cost for solar and wind continue, we might not even need much storage because building overcapacity is so cheap.

Coal producers love every nuke project: that represents a solid decade more sales, vs. wind or solar that would start displacing coal immediately, several times as much in the end for the same investment, and then radically less opex.

This isn't really accurate. There's a reason that fossil fuel companies/executives "embrace" intermittent renewables while running decades-long smear campaigns to turn public opinion against nuclear.

That was the old way. Now that coal is clearly doomed, nukes are their lifeline.

How does building overcapacity help when those sources aren't producing at all?

Building overcapacity is required with storage. It doesn't help without storage.

This is often the unspoken part but I agree that it's one of, if not the most important aspect for our energy needs. I understand economics can't just be thrown out of the window but I feel like a lot of governments don't see the big picture and invest in these solutions "at a loss" now so we can not have climate catastrophes that make our planet uninhabitable, at least to large chunks of the population.

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