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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

That's only half of a Twitter. That sounds like a joke, but honestly, it's not. $20B is absolutely nothing compared to the costs of not taking immediate action on climate change.

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I think people are quibbling with the "immediate" part of that plan. It's 10 years later and we don't have a single kwh being used in lieu of carbon-based power, the opportunity cost of that $20B overrun is massive.

That's basically my reservation. I'm not knee-jerk against nuclear, the new ideas in that field like molten salt reactors intrigue me, but at this point it's not such a new technology anymore, we have the better part of a century of historical data to evaluate it on, and it seems that its promise of abundant emissions-free energy on the cheap just hasn't panned out.

It’s not a new technology, but it’s a technology built so infrequently that none of the benefits of being an old technology have been able to develop. We don’t have people experienced in creating the plants, we don't have standard templates to base designs off of, and we don’t have economies of scale.

Mind, we’re not going to get any of those things in the world we live in due to combination of over-regulation and NIMBYism making it impossible to even start a nuclear power project in an efficient manner. So it’s kind of a moot point. But we most certainly don’t have a century of seeing what it would be like if we actually tried to make nuclear power work. We have a century of seeing what happens when we cripple nuclear power due to people’s lack of trust in it.

13 years is immediate?

Let’s please not have our future depend on building giant, fragile things that are obsolete technologically and financially before they are even completed.

Wind and PV have some challenges, but they get online fast. Plus they are both riding down a steep cost S-curve, so (for the foreseeable future) the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets.

No one could say that about Nuclear with a straight face…

> the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets

Same as for Nuclear, but not building any new ones for decades and then only 2 reactors will not help.

>13 years is immediate?

Yes. Please tell me the alternative solar or wind solution which can provide us with a carbon free grid in 13 years. There is none. You have to hand wave and pretend that maybe the next 13 years of battery technology will be fundamentally different than the past 30 years since the invention of the Lithium ion battery. Even if we had the battery solution today we don't have the global manufacturing capacity.

Solar and wind go online fast and turn stable grids into pricy unstable ones as you increase their share of production. Meanwhile Nuclear is ready, today. And if you cut down on some of the regulatory burden it could be built sooner.

You are comparing apples to oranges. We don't have the global industrial capacity to deploy nuclear at scale either. And the intrinsic technology challenge is more difficult with nuclear.

Do you work at the press office of the construction company? 20B is absolutely nothing? Holy crap

You have to read the whole sentence, not just the first half.

I think their point was not so much that 20B is nothing, but that somebody cough cough no names cough paid way too much for a used social media network.

No. My point is that $20B is nothing compared to the cost of climate change[1].

[1] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/article...

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