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Comment by nestorD | Hacker News Reader

The headline feels very "water is wet" (nuclear does not produce air pollution so replacing is a net loss fir air quality) but the text is slightly more motivated in pointing out that policy should take into account the (predictable) mortality due to air quality when considering ways to phase out nuclear (which they estimate to 5200 death a year in the US if one were to fully replace nuclear power).

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Go move downwind from husab and then get back to us on the lack of air pollution.

Which is balanced against the rather significant safety risks of running plants beyond their expected lifetime:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl...

I’m unfamiliar with the publisher but the content is unquestionably written by someone who has a sub-high-school understanding of nuclear physics and is egregiously misusing numbers out of context for maximum fear.

Seek better sources.

[Replying to my own comment]

There is a sibling comment to this one which is flagged and "dead". It was inflammatory in tone but something I would vouch for in substance. My advice to its author is to not give censcorious people an excuse to mob away your views. Avoid the hyperbole.

Greenpeace, for one reason or another, has been obsessed with nuclear power to the objective net detriment of the environment. Their activism has directly resulted in a strengthening of legacy fossil fuel industries and the increased reliance on fossil fuel consumption. Absent the campaigning by Greenpeace there would certainly be more, newer, safer nuclear energy reactors in Europe today. This would directly result in offsetting need for coal power — especially if Greenpeace had applied as much effort to opposing coal as they did nuclear power.

We could have completely replaced coal power with nuclear if it wasn't for Greenpeace.

The only reason "nuclear does not produce air pollution" is because everyone pretends that there's no air pollution from the massive supply chain the plants require (and no, not just fuel. Consider how expensive almost any part that is destined for a nuclear power plant is, how much technical and administrative and safety overhead there is to everything, etc.)

In the US, nuclear power is being replaced at several times the rate it is being decommissioned...by solar and wind, both of which are significantly cheaper. Those plants are being shut down because they don't make economic sense.

The biggest problem we have right now is that bitcoin mining operators are chewing up massive amounts of power, in many areas causing coal fired power plants to come back into service because of how much demand they're placing on the grid...and states are encouraging this, because it's helping prop up demand for coal.

Of course, there is a polluting supply chain for solar and wind as well. If you do an all-in comparison on the total emissions, nuclear is about the same as wind, and is three times better than solar:

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

This reads like a silly cartoon. I wish the biggest problem we had is bitcoin mining power consumption.

Indeed - there is a range of frivolous human activities that gobble up insane amount of power, cars that are too big, casinos...

Here’s a thought experiment for you.

You have 3 power generation systems adjacent to each other. One is a massive solar power field. One is a massive wind turbine field. And one is a nuclear power plant. In the ideal conditions, all 3 generate an equivalent amount of power.

Suddenly, the sun goes down and all the wind stops. Which one is now generating the most power?

this never happens

Low sunshine and low wind are pretty common in winter. Depending on the location obviously. In some places, winter imply too much wind !

define low - usually there's always wind on a sufficient large area

Last time this discussion was here I posted link from literally that same day at 5AM here in Poland. No sun yet, wind below 5% capacity.

is Poland located on an island with no neighbours that still have wind?

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

Most of Poland's neighbors are situated around the same pond (the Baltic sea) with similar conditions. Winters are dark, and occasionally with little to no wind over the entire region.

Unless you somehow solved storage at a low enough price for it to be viable, we need nuclear or fossil fuels up here - biofuels won't be enough.

Europe has more wind in the winters than in the summers

I don't believe that's relevant? Unless someone starts selling and building cost-effective and large-scale storage here and now, nuclear and fossil fuels are the only reliable options that will fix the current situation.

Fixing this with trans-European energy transfers is a neat idea, but if you want to send power from i.e. a solar panel on a roof in Spain to my house in Finland, or wind energy from Denmark to Poland, then we'll require infrastructure upgrades at scales that haven't been seen in much of Europe since the early 50's.

Yes the grid must be upgraded, not only for transferring energy across countries, but also for electrification of heating, mobility.

Fossil fuels aren't a solution, and nuclear energy only a smaller part of it. You can see that if you look at the cost and potential in the IPCC report.

There is no way around a massive build out of renewable energy.

PS: I just checked energy charts, and saw that Poland has more wind in the winter as well

And more renewables are not solving any issues until there are more investments in grid and storage.

Alas, at least in Northern Europe, the grids are largely in private hands, and investments are kept down to the legal minimum. There's no way we go all-renewable until someone kicks that hornet's nest.

They reduce emissions already now

Poland saw recently that fully depending on neighbours for energy is insane.

*on one neighbour

During multiple months in 2021 there was much less wind than expected in most of Europe, which meant that during the night and when it was overcast, practically the majority of the continent's renewable energy generation was under capacity by a lot.

https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

Artificially inflated prices and administrative overhead causes air pollution? You seriously wrote that with a straight face?

You know what also produces air pollution? Manufacturing and transport of wind turbines. Construction of hydro power dams. Manufacturing and distribution of solar panels. Mining, manufacturing and distribution of grid batteries. By your logic, no grid-scale source of energy is good enough. I hope you're browsing Hacker News using landfill-diverted computer hardware powered by a landfill-diverted off-grid solar power array, because otherwise your objections to nuclear power apply equally to your own life.

> I hope you're browsing Hacker News using landfill-diverted

Just as an aside and a reasonable data point, I can't be the only person with a majority of formerly commercial refabbed EOL equipment (more than just computers + solar panels).

As a non urban Australian in a sparse area scoring and repurposing other people's "crap" has been a way of life for six decades .. nine for my father who is still actively trawling auction sites, curb dumps, and local tip sites.

To go off on that tangent:

If you use your own 'crap' for long enough, it's has the same impact: you just skip the step of switching ownership.

> Artificially inflated prices and administrative overhead causes air pollution? You seriously wrote that with a straight face?

What artificially inflated prices? And...No? Nice strawman, though? Nuclear power plants have a massively expensive supply chain - their capex and opex expenses are huge, the highest of any form of generation. Every worker the plant requires, every manager, every gauge, every piece of pipe - all has a carbon footprint. And because it's for nuclear, all those parts are a lot more expensive because of all the documentation, engineering and reliability, and that means a higher carbon footprint.

> You know what also produces air pollution? Manufacturing and transport of wind turbines. Construction of hydro power dams. Manufacturing and distribution of solar panels. Mining, manufacturing and distribution of grid batteries.

All the things you name immediately start paying back 'dividends', solar/wind have a fraction of the opex, and produce electricity at a far lower cost than nuclear and are dropping in cost per GWhr, whereas nuclear plants take decades to "break even", only do so if you ignore the carbon footprint of their supply chain, and the cost of electricity from nuclear is going up.

> I hope you're browsing Hacker News using landfill-diverted computer hardware powered by a landfill-diverted off-grid solar power array, because otherwise your objections to nuclear power apply equally to your own life.

So cliche a response it's literally a meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Strange, you just fell into the trap of making the exact same point I was making. It is, to any practical standpoint, impossible to exist in this economy without having some footprint of some kind at some point. If not direct, then indirect.

So what then? Are you still contending that constructing nuclear is a bad idea because the supply chain of a nontrivial endeavour has a non-zero carbon footprint?

And yes, memes are a meme for a reason. It seems strange that you think that an idea achieving meme status invalidates it? Are you trying to offer a response, or are you only interested in feeling like you want an Internet debate? I suppose if it’s the latter then… umm… well done? Well done on dodging the actual discussion at hand.

> The biggest problem we have right now is that bitcoin mining operators are chewing up massive amounts of power, in many areas causing coal fired power plants to come back into service

Other than the single time a mining group bought an old coal plant in NY, is there a single other example of this happening?

As a more positive example, I read about crypto miners who had something like shipping containers that they would put at oil wells to capture gases that weren't economical for the energy companies to use and are instead burned off.

While I'm sure some folks would jump on that because it was using Fossil Fuels, I look at as it's profitable for crypto miners to use _excess_ energy where it's produced and would otherwise be wasted, which will happen regardless of how energy is sourced.

That's pretty neat, and an interesting use of nat-gas, but I'm just really ambivalent about crypto and the miners.

The more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity (this is your proposition, if I understand correctly) will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.

Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050")...

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