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Comment by Georgelemental | Hacker News Reader

> But we have cheaper (solar PV + storage is cheaper, soon others will be too) and safer alternatives.

It is not, not at the scale needed to reliably replace fossil fuels. This just isn't true.

Solar and storage get cheaper as they scale because they are highly iterable simple technologies with low consequences of failure. Solar has gotten cheaper by 15% compounded over the last 30 years. Batteries are getting cheaper by ~20% per year for the last 20 years. This trend is likely to continue.

Nuclear does not enjoy the benefit of scalability because it is complex, highly regulated, and the risks associated with failure are large.

Neither is nuclear. And solar PV is vastly easier to scale up. The peak rate of fission power plant nameplate capacity construction was ~1985 and at that peak rate it would take something like 60 years to build what is needed globally.

You can't "scale up" the frequency and regularity of sunny days in a year, the weather is beyond your control. In contrast, nuclear fission is one of the most predictable physical processes known to science; you just need to build the plants.

You can scale with the average number of sunny days in a season or year, and with improving grids and longer batteries, why not?

"Average" is great until you get a two or three-sigma week.

Because there are no batteries that can run a country for five months.

In the Nordics, there is no PV production for five months of the year. Two months have marginal production rates.

Zero times any large number is still zero.

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