Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

To be fair to both sides, the electricity prices at the time when the decision was made was very different from today. We had prices in the south of sweden 2020 that was as low as around €0.02 per kw/h, compared to over €0.3 in 2022, and in 2020 the price trend was looking to be going downwards.

If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclear power as much. It will be a gamble to say what prices will be in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years into the future, and any gamble involve a cost in one way or an other. The previous government made one bet, this government is doing an other.

View on HN

To be fair electricity prices vary throughout time. Basing a long term decision on a short term price is foolish.

Worse case scenario is the government has to subsidize the power station, best case is it helps prevent serious economic issues by providing power.

The increase of energy prices in Europe doesn't seem to be short term anymore. It reflects a new geopolitical reality, that has almost zero hope of changing soon again. Sure, energy prices will decrease over time, but it will be a very slow process, until we get even in a similar region as a few years back. Governments will have to subsidize not just energy creation, but many more activities, unless we are ready to loose a lot of the wealth and equality we have left in the population.

All prices are short term in the short term.

Worth a lot to not be dependent on Russia for energy.

Sweden is not dependent on Russian energy and is the largest electricity exporter in Europe.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...

Sweden is not, but it's neighbours are in one form or another. Electricity is best replacement for coal and natural gas.

Nobody depends on Russia for renewable energy.

Backup generation for renewables is usually gas powered. And you need the backup because renewable energy is not exactly a stable source of energy.

Currently yes, but hydrogen is so easy to make from electricity that it predates sensible electrical generation methods by 43 years.

We didn't bother making hydrogen in large quantities because there was no point when we already had a convenient supply of a flammable gas, not because it's even remotely difficult.

Until recently I occasionally heard plans about building wind farms in Siberia and exporting Hydrogen to Europe. Luckily that's off the table now.

It's foolish to wear a seat belt based on short term speed fluctuations.

I can't tell what's happening. You made a sarcastic remark replying to me but it's agreeing with my point

So you think you wear a seatbelt to protect yourself from smooth driving?

It’s probably fair to say that energy demand over the next ten years will increase significantly.

The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society.

In such a scenario, it’s hard to imagine prices being the same if demand increases by even a single digit multiple of the present.

Energy demand will not increase in the next decade. It will, instead, fall, as it has in recent years.

Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for other energy uses that will be collapsing.

You appear to be contradicting yourself, but I imagine you don't think you are, so you might want to elaborate.

He is not contradicting himself. You have to remember the awful efficiency of thermal engines.

Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines.

On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a different source. That barely have any losses from the primary energy input.

Since we should keep the oil in the ground that current thermal engines uses, the energy input will be from a different source when we change from burning oil to electrical engines. The primary energy input should be from the wind, sun, elevated water, nuclear bonds and geothermal.

The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.

You basically can't get 90% efficiency from burning oil in a power plant. E = 1 - Cold/Hot, where cold ≈ 300 K and hot ≈ 1300 K (gasoline-air fire), giving theoretical maximum efficiency of 77%. In practice much lower, what I've seen is just over 60% even in the best combined cycle power plants.

If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.

True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirected elsewhere.

> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years

We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.

Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.

Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.

In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.

There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.

Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.

> because people just shop based on price and features

But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?

There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.

The Linus Tech Tips labs is already doing wonders in their market niche, I really really hope it all works out for them.

They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)

I guess part of the problem here is that everything changes so frequently. If technology moved so slowly that generational change in craftsmen was the major source of a change in quality, then you could actually use word of mouth and other external sources of information. Nowadays, the experience of a year or two ago really doesn't necessarily tell you much about the quality of the products that are available now.

Everything else is getting cheaper, at an exponential rate, but nukes are getting more costly.

Thanks for that

Petrol burned in a car is energy, not electricity.

The fact that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable. The other comment is probably more on point about conversion effeciency.

> that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable

This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics.

Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.

I bet what is going on isn't that surprising to industry insiders, or the people who make profit-loss decisions about whether to fund power plants or not.

This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".

The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.

If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.

Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch. China! Authoritarian alleged communists! That is what policy failure in the EU has led to.

Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?! The whole let the current generation reap the profits and the market will magically figure things out got us into the current mess in the first place. The nuclear industry is not being held to higher standards relatively than other means of energy production. Wind farms must jump through significant buerocratic hurdles despite the fact that the potential dangers are massively lower.

To give an example of hurdles for wind power: there are some wind mills in the harbor region of Antwerp that aren’t allowed to generate power during the day because one time a single protected bird flew against the turning arm. They’re only allowed to use them when the birds are sleeping.

Are buildings in Antwerp allowed to have windows? This data from Canada in 2013 says for every bird killed by a wind mill about 1000 are killed by "Collisions with Houses".

https://birdwatchingbuzz.com/do-windmills-kill-birds/

Interestingly the article claims that the power lines that connect the wind mills kill more birds than the wind mills themselves.

> Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?!

On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.

The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.

Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com