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Comment by BostonEnginerd | Hacker News Reader

I do think that space efficiency and good availability for nuclear are a reasonable argument for that technology. That doesn't mean we also shouldn't be putting solar onto every flat surface in the country, homes, businesses, parking lots, etc.

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Each nuke plant in the US uses up a whole square mile. Worse though, is that it costs overwhelmingly more to build than the solar generating capacity that would displace it. Furthermore, you burn enough coal in the time it takes to build it as would pay for another matching solar farm.

Renewables aren’t cost constrained, they’re constrained by the rate at which we can buy and install the panels, turbines, storage, etc. We literally can’t build renewables fast enough, so not only can we build nuclear alongside renewables, but it’s the fastest way to reduce our emissions while also securing our energy supply and diversifying our energy portfolio. It’s not renewables versus nuclear, it’s renewables and nuclear.

It's not like nuclear plants are getting built in a fortnight either. In fact the ridiculous lead time on getting a nuclear plant generating electricity is one of the biggest problems with pitching them as a solution to climate change. We have already dithered far too long on this, we can't wait 20 years to reduce our carbon output, solutions need to be built in the next 5 years or less.

Please re-read my above comment--I'm very specifically and explicitly not proposing forestalling renewables for 20 years while we build nuclear plants! I'm proposing we continue building out renewables at full tilt while we also build nuclear plants at full tilt.

If a $250 million subsidy gets you 2GW of solar/wind backed by pumped storage in 5 years and 1 GW of nuclear power in 20 years it doesnt really make much sense to split a $500 million pot of subsidy money 50/50 between the two.

We would get more GW for the buck by using subsidies to really accelerate the expansion of green power generation that is already cost effective without subsidies (solar/wind/pumped storage) rather than throwing money at a form of power generation that wouldnt even exist without subsidies.

If the subsidies were distributed on the basis of stability, GW output and availability then that would be efficient, effective and fair but that would kill off the nuclear industry entirely.

Right, but you’re assuming that solar and wind are capital constrained, and I asserted above (twice now) that they aren’t (that spending more money on solar and wind isn’t going to get more solar and wind deployed because we’re already building it out as fast as we can).

More capital would finance building more factories to enable building out faster.

That’s not how that works. See the chip shortage for example. It takes a lot of time to build out factories, train personnel, etc.

At any given time you have a rate of capital expenditure you are willing to devote to the crisis. Some fraction of this maxes out production capacity of wind and solar energy equipment. The rest is spent on something else. It can be dumped on building individual nukes, or invested to expand wind, solar, storage, and fuel synthesis equipment production.

Only one of those choices feeds an exponentially increasing capacity to respond to the crisis.

Except that's not the net effect. When you spend $20 billion on a nuclear plant it becomes a lot harder to also spend $5 billion on the same net capacity of solar.

There are plenty of much lower hanging fruit available than a nuclear plant. Insulation, residential thermal batteries, trains, cycleways, green hydrogen infrastructure, solar water heating, CAES projects, variable load upgrades to aluminium smelters, etc. etc.

I'm all for increasing public spend on green energy, but until there's enough money for the cost efficient things, then nuclear is just helping the fossil fuel industry

I repeat: solar and wind aren’t capital constrained. We’re already installing solar and wind as fast as we can, so spending an extra $5B isn’t going to get you any more solar or wind, so we should spend the extra money on other clean energy sources.

You could build production capacity and the panel for less than the price of nuclear and in less time. We're not constrained to only silicon or cadmium panels either, there are more expensive or less efficient (but still vastly cheaper than nuclear) chemistries that are made from abundant materials.

Or just do any of the other things on the list I mentioned. Getting 400 commuters out of cars and into a train is an instant 4MW saving.

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