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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a similar take here on the topic: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

To give context to who acidburn is, he's been a long time HN user, has a PhD in nuclear engineering, has worked in fission and fusion for over a decade, and has blogged about it for years. The take here is the take of an expert and not just a nuclear bro.

(“Acid Burn” was also Angelina Jolie’s handle in Hackers - if it was ringing anyone else’s bell).

Yeah I made my HN username on a whim years ago after watching that movie and didn't realize it was a dumb choice. I wanted it to be 'hackery' and anon. Oops.

I think you misspelled “awesome choice”.

I don't know acidburn but I'd argue that having a PhD in nuclear engineering and having worked in the field is likely to increase your bias towards nuclear (being a "nuclear bro") rather than equalize it. PLT PhDs will tell you Haskell is the best programming language and environmental science PhDs will tell you solar is the best energy source.

This is an odd argument. You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful. Everyone knows there's bias but if you're arguing that we shouldn't value someone's opinion because they're an expert then we're not going to progress very far in society. I'm not saying you have to take his word as divine truth but dismissing experts is extremely naive.

If you're knowledgeable in one field primarily, I think it's likely you have some bias towards that field. If you are doing a lot of research only in e.g. Solar, I think it'd be harder to provide an unbiased comparison between solar and nuclear than someone who studies power generation in general.

EDIT: At a first glance, the linked article seems reasonable if not a bit optimistic for future developments and very positive phrasing for NPP in general.

> If you're knowledgeable in one field primarily, I think it's likely you have some bias towards that field.

'It is ever the domain of specialists to overstate their domain.'

Sibling comment is basically what I meant and my general opinion about the linked website as well.

> You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful.

In certain contexts I definitely think this. Imagine you're a CEO that has to decide how to distribute profits among departments. Obviously you'll listen to the head/experts of every department to weigh your options, but you can't really trust them to be unbiased (Obviously not the best analogy but I hope it helps get my point across (: ).

His take on nuclear is that of a nuclear expert.

His take on nuclear's competitors and hence its relative competitiveness as an electricity source is substantially more nuclear bro / Fox News viewer.

We need a new pejorative to mirror "nuclear bro" for people who take any mention or discussion of any downside of wind and solar and blanket categorize them as a Fox News viewer.

There are a lot of anti-100%-renewable nuclear proponents. There are fewer and fewer full-on anti-renewable nuclear proponents.

Most of us support everything that can make low-carbon energy.

Thanks for the link, what are your thoughts on the position that France is in with a number of reactors out of action and requiring repairs? From an outsiders perspective, I am curious if it is really as simple as the French not keeping up with maintenance and it catching them at a bad time or are there issues with the reactor type or other influencing factors.

They're experiencing the flip side of the argument of picking one standard reactor and building lots of them identically. If an issue is identified, it can affect your whole fleet. In this case, they were doing an inspection and found unexpected corrosion in a safety system. They checked another similar reactor and found it too. The more they started checking the more they found. So they have to go down for extended outages and repairs, as necessary. This is very bad timing, considering the gas-driven energy crunch.

The repairs can be done, and the reactors will come back online, it just takes time. Very unfortunate, to say the least.

Kind of like those Takata airbag recalls, I suppose.

One comment on your sustainability argument, now that I know you are the author:

Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising exponentially for centuries.

For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000 years.

Meanwhile California has increased population and kept their energy production relatively stable. We may have reached a peak.

California's power grid is not in great shape.

With the increase in EVs, AC, and heat pumps, I'd expect electricity demand to increase in the next decade.

Electricity demand will surely increase. Primary power demand on the other hand will most likely go down. An EV is about 80% efficient from solar panel to movement, an ICE is only about 30% efficient from gas to movement (and you have to invest a whole bunch of energy to get gas into tank starting from oil underground). Similarly, heating with a heat pump is about three times more energy efficient than heating with oil or gas.

Today we use about 600 exajoules of primary energy per year. The sun hits us with about 3.8 million exajoules per year. 1.03^1000 is a factor of 7e12. So under that assumption, the earth would be making 1 billion times more power than we receive from the sun.

I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot of fusion too. Because the solar-derived flows (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel, fossil fuel) won't be able to keep up even if we covered 100% of the earth with solar panels!

Earth? Who said any of that will be used on Earth? OK, Earth will use a bit of it.

We will need to dismantle gas giants' moons for construction materials.

Yes, every exponential curve is really a logistic curve in disguise, but using today's energy is picking an arbitrary point along that curve.

Thoughts on LFTR? The presentation that made the rounds many years ago made it seem like it was a solved problem (1965!). That made me rethink the value of nuclear and I'm curious if it's legit.

He has written a few pages about thorium and molten salt reactors:

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html

https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

The thorium molten salt breeder reactor idea is interesting, but not a major game changer at this time, in my opinion.