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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

The only green solution to our current energy problem is more nuclear power plants. We have to stop relying on coal, wood, oil, gas and the rest of the “dirty” materials.

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Except nuclear is expensive and takes decades to build, runs on non renewable materials (a good percentage of which come from Russia), leaves waste that is deadly for 100.000s of years, and promising new technologies will need decades to reach maturity.

Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?

Oh wait! And will stop working if your rivers should run dry, as happened in France this summer.

Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.

Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.

It was not because the river were dry, but because the river where too warm.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...

> France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.

It's just an conservative artificial limit set to ensure that Nuclear is indeed the most ecological source of power since it even has higher standard than anything else.

In case the power is really needed, this limit could be lifted. Oh, this is exactly what happened https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-asn-nuclear-reg...

This argument sounds like "oh, in the end it doesn't matter, we can just continue on!". But this is completely wrong. You cannot dump 50°C hot water into rivers without consequences, and very far reaching consequences at that. They are already very very borderline, because we are talking about something slowly creeping towards 30°C already, in large quantities.

Which also means you have to plan accordingly for all the new nuclear power plants, otherwise you are building a new ruin, pretty much. For the "near" future you can assume the dry and hot periods will continue like that, which means that long term projects like nuclear power plants have to be planned accordingly. Considering the accelerated progress of climate change that should include a lot of risk "buffer", if not a different approach to deal with the cooling water, for example.

If you use the ocean for cooling, that isn't an issue.

Can't tell if you are joking or not.

Ocean temperatures are already on the rise and causing havoc.

> Can't tell if you are joking or not.

I could say the same about your comment! The ocean is a big place with more than a billion billion liters of water, you can't meaningfully heat it up with a power plant.

With that logic, you couldn't build any power plant with air cooling either since it would heat up the air.

If you want to make a general argument against all power generation that's fine, but singling out ocean cooling specifically doesn't make sense - especially since ocean and air temperatures obviously affect each other.

Wind and hydro are probably more practical in Sweden.

Geothermal is not having a heyday because it depends on the same sort of expensive-to-operate steam turbines as nukes do, so is uncompetitive.

Anytime steam turbines have to compete with no steam turbines, the steam turbines tend to lose.

Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean anyone should use nuclear. Perhaps we could come up with ways to distribute renewable energy globally?

Right, there is never any legitimate justification to build new nukes.

At the moment, existing nukes can still be operated at competitive marginal cost, neglecting original capital cost, and carefully not counting continuing subsidies in opex. As renewables costs continues on down, even just nukes' subsidized opex will be unsustainable.

Well, I agree with you that they’re expensive and take time to build, but they don’t leave that much waste compared to what we’ve been told and their materials have more or less the same problems as the ones from renewable ones (batteries, non recyclable blades, exotic materials for solar…).

I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs. I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.

We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)

Geothermal doesn't really work for most places, since you'd have to drill down for tens of kilometres to get the required temperature. If you can use it then great, but it's a rarity.

> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar

Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.

Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.

> doesn't take up half the country in surface area

Surprisingly, this argument is wrong. I have once verified the math for replacing all of vehicles in Germany with electric vehicles. Charged with 100% solar. The required surface area for solar farms would be about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded (used typically in personal cars, AFAIK freight and public transport run on diesel without such additive).

But yeah, according to EU studies a zero-emission grid with nuclear for base load is way cheaper than without it.

> about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded

To be fair, that is a metric fuckton of land to start with. In the end there's only so many watts per square meter available and a physical limit on conversion efficiency, so you eventually have to expand outwards to to compensate for ever growing demand + land used for battery capacity (which may or may not be negligible). Meanwhile population increases also keep continuously driving up the scarcity of land.

Sounds like an interesting calculation though, do you still have any notes on that?

The main advantage of nuclear power plants is constant power output at basically zero emissions combined with a super small footprint. Having a constant power output is worth a lot, that's why it makes sense funding them.

If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/

This book is from 2008, and, while reportedly very good for its time, now out of date.

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...

In particular, nobody back then anticipated how quickly solar PV prices would drop.

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...

I agree, the book is a little outdated with regards to PV panels pricing and efficiency. However, the solar constant remains the same and so does the problem with the intermittent nature of solar power production.

Don't get me wrong, I very much support renewables. I just don't see how renewables could supply our entire energy demand without sufficient energy storage capacity. That's why I think a hybrid solution that includes nuclear power plants is the way to go.

I don't have a suitable answer to your question but I wanted to mention that I also wonder how come there isn't more discussion about implementing/improving tidal or wave power. There are numerous innovations that might be possible in the horizon, including possibly using fusion, but other alternate approaches such as decentralization and energy storage are also interesting yet seldom discussed.

Tidal power has not been demonstrated to produce much output, and anything that relies on salt water is expensive to maintain.

It will power increasing levels of energy consumption necessary for desalinization without any practical limit.

>Except nuclear is expensive and takes decades to build

Nuclear energy is expensive, nuclear power is cheap.

Or put another way: Sun shine at noon is free. Sunshine as midnight isn't.

> Sun shine at noon is free.

Have you been to Sweden in winter? What sunshine are you talking about?

how did people build nuclear reactors in the 50s then?

Calder Hall was run for 50 years, well past its 20 year expected lifespan. they shut it down because they thought coal, oil and gas would be cheap forever.

the gen2 reactors were even better and more efficient.

gen2 reactors like the rbmk are still running today and producing economical and safe power.

why would nuclear power today be more expensive, take longer to build, and be less safe than technology from the 1960s?

someone's not telling the truth in this story.

I don’t think anyone is saying that it’s less safe, it’s just that our standards (and fear) have increased. 1960s vehicles didn’t have airbags, now we don’t buy cars without them.

They were cheaper than solar and wind in the 1950s. Now solar and wind is cheaper. It's not that nuclear doesn't work. It's that it's a worse solution.

The "runs on non-renewable" is not a good argument, because the amount of uranium we have would last hundreds of thousands of years.

The fact that it is not evenly distributed is a real concern, though.

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