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Comment by notlukesky | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that would move the needle on a massive societal level is reliable nuclear energy in every city and country. But is that too hard for startups to tackle? Or it doesn’t fit the narrative? Every other climate “tech” just nibbles at the margins if that even. And the byproduct of mass nuclear energy adoption would be that the issue is solved and there would be no more climate mongering amongst the conference crowd. They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause. That would also lead to less justifications for war from the war crowd if all the world had true energy security. Maybe that’s why?

Reminds me of this previous initiative:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence

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Why do people keep spouting this nonsense? Yes there is a place for nuclear in the mix, but renewables have already moved the dial in a lot if countries. I the uk about 40% of our energy is from renewables, mostly wind at 25% and biomass for much of the rest. Or does that not fit your narrative? Or do you not consider that moving the needle? It's a damn sight easier, quicker and cheaper to put up wind turbines and solar panels than it is to build new nuclear reactors as well

Sharing this not to say it’s true, but it’s my understanding of the EU’s biomass numbers.

As I understand it, a substantial portion of the biomass is wood pellets. These are harvested from the American south causing deforestation, are transported over the ocean with non-negligible emissions, and then burned in non-clean stacks releasing carbon, but they are accounted for as green. So you get a dirty burn, dirty transportation, and deforest a region as part of these numbers.

A quick search turned up this article: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/us/american-south-bi...

Its hard for me to accept that this narrative is correct, but I've struggled to find anything that explains how EU's biomass is net good for the environment. Do you have any insight?

The core issue is that they are unreliable when there is no wind or sunlight. Storage at scale is still not affordable or available for the whole world. The recent electricity issues that western Europe faced are indicative of the failings of unSustainable energy.

"Renewables need to be supplemented" is a very different claim from "the only thing that would move the needle ... is reliable nuclear energy" (emphasis added).

Nuclear energy can't solve the problem on its own either, because you still need plants to deal with rapid changes in demand. We shouldn't be working towards a silver bullet, we should be using a lot of different technologies together to solve the problem.

You just need nuclear and existing hydropower, which boils down to you just need nuclear. It's not politically probable or realistic though, but we really just need nuclear technically speaking.

Nuclear can also follow loads, but there's no economical need to build them to do that (in almost any market).

The recent electricity issues are because Putin invaded Ukraine and reduced the gas supply. Which is nothing to do with sustainable energy.

"We said we were running on renewables, but we were also dependent on burning Russian gas, and we plan to keep burning gas for the foreseeable future, sans the buying-gas-from-Russia part" sounds like a pretty important detail to talk about sustainable energy, IMHO.

The problem is that a lot of the claims of "Renewables providing X percent of energy in country Y" are massaging the numbers. See the countless examples from Germany over the last decade (I'm including one of the most shared examples of this at the bottom of my post), suddenly shown to be highly deceptive by what has happened over the last year with Russian gas imports to Germany.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-about-...

This isn't true and you are also probably confusing energy and electricity

Edit: wow, since I'm receiving instant downvotes, here's the evidence.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Nuclear reactors are expensive because we don’t build any of them.

Solar and wind occupy way more land for the same power production and can’t produce baseload power without battery storage systems that cost 5x as much.

Nuclear reactors are expensive mostly because the regulatory requirements make them expensive. There is a lot of room for advanced nuclear (e.g. gen III reactors) that can address a lot of the problems and bring down the costs. Unfortunately, we don't have a clear regulatory pathway here yet, but there is some progress being made recently.

Bingo. Solar panels were outrageously expensive 15 years ago, but that didn't stop us from investing in them as a technology.

We are big believers in Nuclear energy, and it's part of the RFS.

But many other sectors need to be electrified for nuclear power to have its decarbonization impact: buildings, industry, transportation etc.

> They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause.

You've nailed it. The people in power don't want to fix these problems. They'd like them to get worse, actually. "Never let a crisis go to waste" has the corollary "if a crisis doesn't exist, create one."

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