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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

Heavy discussion a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282632 (742 comments)

And another one here 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32298994

It seems to me that the nuclear lobby is particularly active these days. My impression is that the window for nuclear is rapidly closing. The alternative (wind, solar and batteries) is becoming cheaper and cheaper (even Texas is adopting it). Soon nuclear will be completely irrelevant.

My issue is still with storage.

It doesn't matter how "green" your energy production is if storing it requires you to turn an entire continent upside down for the battery minerals.

That's even more of a problem with the uranium ore required to feed into fuel rod production, however. Battery materials like lithium-iron are also quite recyclable.

The United States today has close to 100 GW of nuclear power plants installed (almost all built decades ago). Most uranium ore bodies seem to hover around 1.0 - 0.1 % uranium by mass. Each GW appears to require about 200 tons of pure uranium (enriched somewhat from the natural 0.7% U235). Assuming we take an average, that's on the order of (200 tons of ore/ton of fuel) * (20,000 tons of fuel rods per year) = ~4 million tons of ore per year (non recyclable).

Batteries seem like the better option.

You don't need to focus only on batteries. You could also generate heat and store that for later use or hydrogen or other synfuels. Once you give consumers price incentives to follow current production, many things are possible (for instance running washing machines when power is cheapest etc.)

Storage batteries are now LiFePO4. Lithium, Iron and Phosphate are all incredibly common worldwide. The latter 2 are already being mined in massive quantities for other uses, batteries would not use a noticeable portion of that output.

Battery minerals are not an issue, as you say. I'm still worried about the electrolytes and stuff - not in scarcity, but eventual pollution. They don't typically advertise them and I have a hunch they are nasty stuff.

It's never an "or" thing, it's an "and" thing, we need both. The more renewable we have, the better, but for a base-load it's hard to have this everywhere and batteries are far from an ideal solution. We don't need nuclear to replace wind/solar, we need it to replace the oil/coal/gas which we can't seem to get rid of for that base-load.

And Texas has a lot of sun during moments with peak usage (aircos) - so it you'd have to be an absolute moron not to see the advantages there, but for example in Germany they're going backwards here, they use coal and gas to replace nuclear - in a time where our primary focus should be on producing as little CO2 as possible - which is just another level of stupidity.

How about the world installs such an excess of solar/wind/renewable that the even the lowest variable takes care of the base-load?

I don't know ... call me suspicious ... but having Ukraine and and Russia fighting in amongst a nuclear reactor gives me the willies.

Something previously unthinkable. Until the unthinkable becomes thunk.

You don't know what's around the corner. And those in support of nuclear have such a hard-on about it that they're starting to sound like the crypto cult. I'm not convinced.

> And those in support of nuclear have such a hard-on about it that they're starting to sound like the crypto cult.

Please don't. There are plenty of valid reasons to support more nuclear power, there are plenty of valid reasons to oppose it, but there are no good reasons to go ad hominem.

Come on. You have to get some body blows in occasionally.

Ok, apologies ...

Who is the "nuclear lobby"? I'd be interested to know about which industrial interests are pushing the government for nuclear investment. I was under the impression there weren't many, especially compared to the fossil fuel and environmental lobbies (although nothing really compares to the omnipotent fossil fuel lobby, I guess).

I suppose it depends on the country, but nuclear power (with the exception of the just-approved SMR) is generally produced by large industrial conglomerates.

The US lost its own companies due to mergers, but there is certainly an industrial complex in, say, France, where Areva was bailed out and restructured by the state, or Japan, where TEPCO enjoyed a close relationship to the government.

A Google engineer on their science/climate team moonlights as a registered lobbyist:

https://www.thirdway.org/memo/how-advanced-nuclear-got-on-th...

(The article provides a really interesting window into a real-world lobbying project IMO.)

Or you know tech nerds have looked at current "green" solutions and found them wanting and want action now with reliable proven energy sources? Until there is grid scale power storage that can handle a week long outage and peaks and valleys of typical grid system most of us will be skeptical of wind and solar as the main solution.

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