Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear reactors are desirable targets for hostile forces, like Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which was targeted by Russia. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-ukraine-she...

View on HN

Any electrical infrastructure is a strategic target. If it's not a power plant, it's a substation.

If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, you can't bomb all of them.

I mean, you can try, but then energy shortage is not on top of the list of problems that the population has.

If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, that also doesn't actually let you address realistic power consumption patterns.

If we're talking about not-yet-extant technology that would allow solar to meet 24/7 demand at grid scale (like power storage that costs 1% as much as it does now), we might as well be talking about small-scale-fusion power, which is also resistant to being bombed and is generally better than solar+batteries for other reasons.

No? How many ovens, washing machines and dryers usually run at 2am when it's dark?

Sure people don't charge their Tesla at noon when solar production peaks, but saving that until the evening when the 15 miles use of the car battery need to refill is not a significant engineering challenge. Running a nuclear power plant is magnitudes harder.

The difference is its not easy to turn a nuclear plant 'off', quickly, and even then it still needs power to keep the spent fuel cool. If the plant loses backup power (which is finite) then you'll get a disaster with the spent fuel pool boiling off and the fuel itself igniting spreading radioactive ash for miles.

The point is it's very dangerous to have a nuclear power plant in the middle of a warzone.

Yes, but the consequences are different. If Russia destroys an Ukrainian nuclear reactor, there are grave, long lasting consequences for the Ukraine and possible larger parts of Europe, we still have enough contamination from Chernobyl still. Russia did destroy large parts of the rest of the Ukrainian power infrastructure, as they targetted it, when they weren't shooting at hospitals. But the power infrastructure is mostly back up, at least partial repairs were achieved. So quite a difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com