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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Building enough nuclear power plants to power a country also takes decades and is very non-trivial. The quicker we reach 90% carbon-free, the more carbon budget we have left to figure out the remaining 10%. Renewables are the quickest, cheapest way to do that.

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The research and tech actually exists for large scale nuclear power. It's essentially a solved problem, unlike large-scale energy storage.

We can always create methane or ammonia from hydrogen. That's a solved problem. The only research left to do is to bring down the price.

I.e. the "only" remaining problem is to do it at large scale at a reasonable cost.

Right now there is little demand for storage because we don't have sufficient renewable generation capacity. It is no surprise that storage technology hasn't been deployed at large scale and is still relatively expensive. But since we know how to build MW scale electrolyzers it's really just a matter of building more of them.

You can do hydrogen, but ammonia production is like 16% efficient?

Efficiency is less important than cost. Maybe ammonia is so much easier to transport and store that it's worth the efficiency penalty.

If I have this right, Ammonia is 2x more expensive than petrol per tonne, and has half the energy density of petrol, so it seems to be 4x more expensive?

I am not sure how to compare with hydrogen, as you say costs for it are in storage and transportation

But if we look at actual nuclear projects in finland and france, they are expensive and mostly failing and take far too long (think decades, not years). End storage of fuel rods is also not a solved problem of nuclear power, esp. in germany.

So I would rather take the fast-to-build solar and wind plants and research "large scale" energy storage alongside. Storage also does not have to be large-scale, you can just subsidise a lot of decentralized storage and invest in more flexible energy consumers (aka wash your clothes when the sun is shining).

>Building enough nuclear power plants to power a country also takes decades

People in Germany said these things 10 years ago too. If Germany had started building nuclear in quantity 10 years ago then they would be coming online now and would get cheaper with each new plant. Instead you will have crippling and deindustrializing power prices for years to come.

If we had continued building renewables in quantity ten years ago we would be in much better shape now too. Unfortunately we did neither.

I don’t believe it is possible to run Germany on only renewables

1) without massive subsidies

2) without huge investments in storage tech (research and production)

3) without building solar/wind in outside places like North Africa

Nuclear fission solves all of those problems and is a known ( and safe) technology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605106

Large scale nuclear power with current tech isn't feasible, because of the lack of good uranium sources

To be fair, we could build breeder reactors.

This is an insane take, there is plenty of uranium globally. Whoever says otherwise is lying.

There may be plenty of uranium. However there isn't plenty available for easy extraction.

"Is nuclear energy green" Sabine Hossenfelder

I respect Sabine but I am skeptical about the paper she puts forth about limited uranium supplies.

See the late Prof. MacKay’s work on the subject, considering fast breeder reactors to reuse the fuel and ocean extraction of uranium: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_164.shtml

I am talking about current tech, not Future tech

Breeder reactors and seawater mining are current tech.

Also, this seems like an extreme luddite attitude. Imagine refusing to use a steam engine because nobody has demonstrated infinite coal reserves exist.

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