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Comment by a9h74j | Hacker News Reader

> There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid

Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once.

I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.

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France's energy supply is 70% derived from nuclear power, exporting huge amounts of electricity to the UK. Their system is under immense pressure currently due to heatwaves, causing rivers to dry up and heating the water that is required for cooling. There are other problems being discovered, as the article mentions:

>...the recent discovery of stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units. A dozen reactors have been shut down, and no one knows how long it will take to fix them. It may take years. Meanwhile, the heat wave and drought in Europe this summer have forced other units to go offline, since river water flow no longer suffices as an adequate coolant. Altogether, French nuclear capacity has been effectively cut in half.

Heatwaves caused by other countries burning coal and gas due to people that prefer burning burning coal & gas and causing climate change

Countries like here in Germany, where we have problems delivering coal to our coal plants due to low water levels caused by climate change caused by burning coal, poetic justice

Well it isn't just power plants contributing to global warming, vehicles (which France has plenty of), agriculture etc have a massive impact too.

> stress-corrosion cracking in pipes located in the critical cooling systems of numerous French nuclear units

Yes, the term of art "common mode failure" calls attention to failures (and latent contibutions to potential failure) in multiple deployments not being statistically independent.

> Not to start the usual HN debate

Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit.

In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.

AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity, and does not censor lesser-severity events as outside its scope. AFAIK the whole meaning of the discipline is to not brush things off.

No one is advocating for any of our current status-quo systems, but that is what we have, for now.

> AFAIK safety engineering, at its heart, allows for different levels of severity

That sounds to me like exactly the opposite point to the one your were making upthread? Yes, that's true. The possibility of generation shortfall due to weather in a wind or solar-dominated grid environment is, for sure, a problem to be solved.

Yet it is nonetheless at a "different level of severity" than a nuclear meltdown. Saying that is not "censoring" discussion of anything, it's literally engaging in the discussion.

I was attempting to be generous in advance to multiple views and did not wordsmith or use qualifying words well enough.

Uh, plenty of politicians and people in the media advocate for making wind and solar a majority of the grid.

This simply isn't true, or at least not in the way you're imagining (which makes it, I guess, an unintentional strawman).

First "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover if you want to invoke a "catastrophe" per the upthread phrasing. And that's much harder to do, statistically.

It also discounts that "majority of the grid" doesn't mean "without backup/storage solutions". Those gas plants aren't going away, they're just going to end up mothballed as (to be fair, very expensive) peaker plants. People are working hard on storage solutions like batteries and pumped hydro, wider grid connectivity for cross-continent buffering, etc...

It's totally a solvable problem (quite frankly it's significantly more solvable than "nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive", which is the real thing holding reactors back). There will be no "catastrophes" in a renewable-driven grid, there just won't.

So please stop with the FUD, and stop reading sources that are feeding it to you. Nuclear has a place in the world, but it has to get its act together and compete in the market. You can't just argue that its competitors won't work, because it's wrong.

> "Wind and Solar" doesn't have a single failure mode. You're now looking for failures of multiple days with minimal wind and high cloud cover

That happens all the time.

> People are working hard on storage solutions

Glad they are working hard, but that doesn't mean the technology is there yet, or will be anytime soon

> nuclear is an order of magnitude too expensive.

Because of all the ridiculous regulations in Western nations. South Korea and China have solved this problem.

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