My deleted response to Pirate Wires' Nuclear Disasters | Hacker News Reader

My deleted response to Pirate Wires' Nuclear Disasters

proofinprogress.com

18 pointstimdaub19 comments

I've no idea who either of these people are but it does seem like the author of the article that the OP was deleted from, Mike Solana, is undermining his very reasonable previous stance [1] by censoring counter arguments rather than addressing them:

[1] https://reason.com/2022/05/15/mike-solana-wants-you-to-commi...

Quotes:

It's just words on the internet, right? What do we have to be afraid of?

There's a broad cultural obsession with policing tone and thoughts.

etc etc

Yeah, this is pretty standard behavior for him.

yeah I found that pretty funny and it was the reason I re-uploaded my answer. Bit surprised that he'd "delete" my response because I'm not a subscriber. For the record, he left another free subscriber's answer online

- https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1648292545040982020

- https://twitter.com/timdaub/status/1648297715703373824

Nuclear can be used as peaker plants.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nuclear-powered-peaker...

They just don’t bother because running at 100% is effectively free, due to the incredibly low cost of fuel. That brings me to the other problem with this article. Nuclear fuel is light and easily transported, so they could source it from multiple countries.

The incompatability of renewables and nuclear is often overstated.

The real issue is that all the solutions (storage, import/export, green hydrogen, batteries, curtailment etc.) would allow you to build lots more renewables than nuclear so it's silly to build more nuclear.

Doesn't have quite the same impact on existing, non-end-of-life nuclear though, though with continued cost reductions it is getting there.

This is true of gas turbines and coal at this point too, though.

We clearly need something to stabilize power output, and nuclear is extremely competitive with solar+wind+battery for weeklong storms/weather patterns that lead to low power output and high demand.

Those storms happen about once a year. The only sustainable options on the table are massive energy storage projects, or nuclear.

I’m all for putting batteries on the grid, but they typically only smooth out 4-8 hours of load, not the 4-8 days most places need once a year.

Diversity is where it's at! Heatwaves can also drain the rivers that cool nuclear plants! We need a more resilient grid and diversity of production is probably the answer here, isn't it?

NPPs could use so called 'dry cooling towers'. They are just less efficient, so you'd need more of them, which takes more space, is more expensive to build, and so on.

If you nuclear plant is only competitive 1 week a year (as the total cost of solar + wind can outcompete its O&M costs the other 51 weeks), then it needs to amortise the capital over about 30 weeks of operation once you take a small discount rate into account (even assuming an indefinite lifetime).

Then your $5000-$10,000/MWh energy is competing against any other 8 day storage option which costs less. Which is all of them.

On top of that, even using brown coal for that week is only adding 20g of CO2e/kWh to your energy on average. Better to do the 98% renewable grid first and then decide whether you're building the nuclear plant or storage

Delaying the transition by a couple of years while you build the plant is equivalent to running the 98% solution for half a century while you figure out something for the last 2% (which could still be a nuclear plant).

Not just Kazakhstan but Australia has uranium, and excess electricity can be sold (as it already is). I'm all for renewables, but the arguments against nuclear aren't all that ironclad.

I'm glad the author posted their point of viewer however, it's always helpful to understand where others are coming from.

You're right. I just thought the nuclear debate in the last few days was so heavily in favor of "nuclear is silver bullet for climate change" that I felt like publishing my thoughts too. It's not all gold that shines.

Nuclear is probably the most expensive energy source for powering a grid at present, and nuclear advocates have tried to get around this by calling for deregulation, but that's just not plausible. Given the catastrophic failure mode of nuclear power, the plants have to be over-engineered relative to all other power systems, and that greatly increases costs.

Let's take Fukushima as an example. If they'd just put the emergency diesel generators (very heavy) on the roof of the plant rather in the basement, there'd have been no hydrogen explosions and meltdowns, as the seawater would not have destroyed them. However, this would increase the plant's cost due to the need for greater structural stability for such a configuration.

Not only that, uranium fuel rods are expensive to manufacture and expensive to handle, and storing them after retirement is another long-term cost. Granted the ~21 tons of uranium fuel consumed per year in 1 GW output nuclear complex is much less that the equivalent ~4.2 million tons of coal in a 1 GW output coal plant, but the preferable option is a solar/wind/storage system that consumes no material at all (not counting battery maintenance and turnover, I suppose, but there are recycling options). On top of that, if demand is high uranium prices can fluctuate wildly as the pre-Fukushima years demonstrated.

So, let's agree there's no reasonable argument for cutting costs on nuclear due to the various scenarios (terrorism, accident, sabotage, cybersecurity, etc) that could lead to catastrophic failure. If the goal is to maintain a reliable electricity grid in a fossil-fuel free world (and even grow it as electricity replaces crude oil and natural gas for transportation and industry), it's hard to argue that nuclear is a better option than wind/solar/storage deployed at scale.

Of course, you need a lot of wind/solar/storage to equal the output of a 1 GW nuclear complex, and at present costs for reliable 24/7 year-round output from the two systems are roughly comparable. In the long run, however, the former is the far better option.

OP handwaves away issue of nuclear safety, incorrectly labelling it a straw man, and with it, the very real possibility of nuclear accidents. If there was a Chernobyl-scale nuclear accident in Germany, it would drastically shorten the lives of tens of millions of people, and it would make half the country uninhabitable. But all this is academic, because nuclear power can not economically compete with renewables.

> Nuclear is probably the most expensive energy source for powering a grid at present

No, not probably and not at present. Since the first experimental reactor went online, nuclear power has always been the most expensive way to generate electricity.

> OP handwaves away issue of nuclear safety, incorrectly labelling it a straw man, and with it, the very real possibility of nuclear accidents. If there was a Chernobyl-scale nuclear accident in Germany, it would drastically shorten the lives of tens of millions of people, and it would make half the country uninhabitable.

IMO Solana's article is a maximalist position and I trust that no "nuclear-unsafe" argument would ever get through to him. It'd just be "agree to disagree.' Besides, there are great arguments that make the "nuclear is a silver bullet" argument of his bad if one exposes all of the nuances that went into the German decison - and that was my idea with the response.

You're complaining about your comment to a blog post being deleted... I'm not seeing where on your blog I can comment ?

"Look, France had to shut down their Nuclear plants in the hot summer of 2022 because the heat wave made the river's water levels unsustainable for cooling. Even discounting the safety concern here, a melting-down nuclear power plant doesn't produce energy either."

Thrice untrue:

- that's a few of their nuclear reactors (your sentence means : "all of them")

- I'm not sure how/why you segue from shut down to melt down.

- that's not a set in stone thing, there are other ways to design and/or cool reactors. Assuming rivers would be flowing was a mistake, and isn't a hard requirement.

That's the one item on your list I'm confident about. Based on your abysmal take on it, I'll discount your other points too: you're either untruthful or incompetent, on top of being hypocritical about censorship.

After reading it, I'm not sure the original article deserved a response.

It's like an attempt at a comedy shock-jock blog for libertarian nerds about halfway down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. And apparently people pay money for this?

> From Statista, mortality rates per energy source (per terawatt hour): hydro, 1.3; natural gas, 2.82; biomass, 4.63; oil, 18.43; coal, 24.62; and finally brown coal, 32.72.

I was going to say that their stats must be out of date if it doesn't have renewables but no, they just didn't quote the figures for wind and solar from their own source as it makes a mockery of their entire argument.

Btw. I don't have a book in Nuclear/renewables. Not sure if my friend Mike can say the same.

He is very right you've convey almost nothing in your response. You mock people opposing the shutdown then say you have a more 'nuanced take'. Nothing wrong with clearing long comments that offer no actual value, but are so long and confrontational that they seem like they deserve a response.

you are so mean

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