Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

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Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it.

Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage (studies prove that unlike the river dams it is often confused with, geography for pumped storage is plentiful)).

Meanwhile tariffs like https://octopus.energy/agile/ reduces the need for that storage for easily shiftable demand sources like heaters/electric car batteries [edit in response to coldpie].

Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even in spite of the war. If up-front cost is your only concern, gas+solar+wind wins on all fronts.

It also takes ~20 years to build a nuclear plant, while new solar capacity can start taking meaty chunks out of current gas usage after 12 months. Given that western countries are between 40-60% gas powered these days and we don't have 20 years to avoid climate catastrophe, it leaves only two obvious choices of power source to decarbonize quickly - solar + wind.

> but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it.

Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point.

We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland.

> Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage).

Do you have any sources to back up these figures? I’m genuinely interested.

How is hydrogen a viable storage form when you cannot burn 100% hydrogen and fuel cell aren’t available or cost effective at utility scale?

How are batteries a viable storage form when there isn’t enough global manufacturing capacity to store energy at scale?

How is pumped hydro a viable storage form when you are limited by geography and can’t really build any more?

In fairness, in a renewably powered world Finland is going to be a really bad place to be. It's one of the worst places for energy (I'd call it the energy butthole of that world but I'll reserve that label for Russia). Solar is seasonal and wind is relatively sparse there.

What this means is you're going to lose your heavy energy intensive industry. Going with nuclear won't save you from that, if you're then competing with industry in places where solar is available all year at costs likely to be below $0.01/kWh.

>Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point.

Not really. Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again (10x solar's LCOE).

Theres a reason only France tried that - and that is strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt.

Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options are economically infeasible.

I have to say that an ignorant #2 is a pretty anti-climate position to take.

> Not really.

Oh, really? What's your solution to producing non-polluting power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

> Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again

Can you explain how you've come to this conclusion?

We recently turned up a new nuclear power plant in Finland and they did nothing but turn up and down the generation levels when doing tests. Looking at the graphs, I can see output has varied between 3,3 and 4,3 GW this week.

The local wikipedia article on nuclear power states that power output can be regulated 5%/min, which is faster than almost all other generation methods.

> Theres a reason only France tried that - strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt.

Are you saying that Areva went over budget because they build us a load following nuclear plant?

> Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options dont work.

Pray do tell what those available storage options are. Give us the real skinny then, none of that FUDD.

>Oh, really? What's your solution to producing non-polluting power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

Gosh you really didnt read anything I wrote did you?

I did.

You didn't read anything I wrote, nor did you raise any of the points I raised.

> paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage).

I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order.

(To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)

Why are you skeptical? A blanket statement without an argument to back it up is not addressable or useful.

Because they've never been deployed at the scale we're talking about. They're unproven. Hydrogen is inefficient to make and hard to store safely; current battery tech isn't efficient enough and has resource limitations; pumped hydro requires certain relatively rare combinations of geographic properties. Are those solvable problems? Probably, hopefully, some day. Meanwhile, nuclear works right now and is well understood.

Those are vague, nebulous, handwavy arguments. Some (like the inefficiency of hydrogen) are dog whistles that fall apart on close examination of the applications for which hydrogen would be suitable. The geography for OFF RIVER pumped hydro is not rare at all; it's present basically anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief (feasible even in deserts), in enormous amounts.

The generic problem with "it can't be done" arguments is you are claiming all possible ways of solving a problem don't work. This is a very strong claim, and is not backed up by such vague arguments.

Woah, ease up, friend! We're on the same side! I agree these storage solutions are all worth investing in. They're going to be great solutions for many areas. I just think nuclear is a great and proven solution for many areas too. I absolutely don't think "it can't be done," I just think we should hedge our bets a bit and rely on the fantastic, proven solution we already have, in case the other solutions don't pan out.

Nuclear is not a great and proven solution. It's a terrible solution, because it costs too much. All sorts of terrible solutions are available if we discard cost consideration. Cost is an inescapable part of engineering.

Nuclear has the disadvantage that they've been trying for longer than either of us have been alive to make it cheap, and it hasn't worked. This real world evidence can't be easily dismissed, especially when competing technologies have crashed in cost by orders of magnitude over that time.

Note that my position here would be revised completely if nuclear were, unexpectedly, to become much cheaper. But at this point I can't take mere promises of cost reduction as anything other than sales talk of that kind that has proven false too many times in the past, too many times to accept the facile excuses that it's always someone else's fault.

> It's a terrible solution, because it costs too much.

That's a reasonable position, and I think reasonable people can disagree here. I disagree for two reasons:

1) I think (could be wrong) the cost is largely regulatory. I suspect (could be wrong) that we could streamline that without sacrificing real safety and dramatically lower the cost.

2) Even still, the cost is absolute peanuts compared to the cost of climate change. Even the famous $30B Georgia plant cost less than the world's richest individual spent so he could smash a social media network against the wall like a toddler with a Tonka truck. The US Military gets about 100 of those plants in funding every single year. It's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things, when you're talking hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage about to smash us in the face. IMO we need to stop counting pennies here and really actually tackle this problem.

But yes, absolutely agreed it is relatively expensive compared to other solutions, and it should be a priority to get that cost down. I just don't think it's so expensive that it's disqualifying. And, again, I think reasonable people can disagree here.

(1) there is an often heard argument, or at least excuse, but it has problems. First, the cost problem is pretty much universal. Nuclear has stalled out everywhere (even in China it's experiencing cost problems and is underachieving). This suggests issues that go beyond local regulatory burdens. Second, what's the alternative? Just trusting the builders/operators to be good boys? That won't work. Appointing Philosopher King Regulators who can tell ahead of time just what regulations are actually necessary? How can they do that?

I will agree that one particular regulatory framework in the US could use serious rework or even revocation: NEPA, the law that requires laborious environmental impact statements. It's sand in the gears for dubious benefit for not just nuclear but all sorts of efforts. The big regulatory lawsuit that hit nuclear back in the 1970s involved NEPA (the "Calvert Cliffs Decision").

(2)'s first sentence would be a valid argument if the choice were between nuclear and climate change. But that's not the choice being made. That nuclear is better than climate change is damning with faint praise, the "it's better than a poke in the eye" of energy arguments.

As for naval reactors... putting a nuclear reactor in a ship increases the overall cost of building and operating that ship, compared to burning oil. And this is true even though burning oil is very uncompetitive for grid power generation. There's a reason the majority of the ships in the US Navy are not nuclear powered.

Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part.

A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs.

And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement).

Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?

That was always the killer for CANDU. If industry has to carry the whole cost of research, education, regulation, and training operators, our market is too small to support it. And the big buyers all have their own (weapon program adjacent) programs. We might have a renaissance with SMRs, but we’ll be contributors, not independents.

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