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Comment by mqus | Hacker News Reader

The myth that nuclear is cheap needs to die[1]. Nuclear is only "cheap" because of government subsidies that mandated its low price per kWh. The actual cost is far above most other options. So if we subsidize anyways, why not subsidize cheaper energy production methods?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source (but also take a look at https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12... from the IEA/NEA)

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On the other hand, nuclear is only “expensive” because we make power plants pay for ~all externalities and put aside huge amounts of money in advance to cover the (projected, though sometimes not comprehensive) cost of clean up and decommissioning.

That process sounds entirely reasonable. I expect it isn’t applies to all power sources, but it should be.

Yes; no nuclear proponent asks for that process to change for nuclear but only for the same to be applied to other sources. I just listened to an NPR program about methane leaks in Louisiana from fly-by-night operators that drill, make a profit while prices are high, then abandon shop leaving the drill sites spewing methane without capping a thing off when they shut their business down because the market price makes it unprofitable to continue drilling and selling compared to other energy sources. Then rinse and repeat. Apparently hundreds of thousands of these (growing by thousands more a year) and Louisiana hasn’t wizened up to asking for a full deposit of the costs to cap off a site before granting a drilling license; the cost is punted to the taxpayers and even then the state only gets around to capping off a tiny percentage of the abandoned sites.

If you know of any defunct methane sites i'd like to photograph them. I'm in central Louisiana, only the top and bottom eastern side are kinda "too far" for a trip to photograph in a day.

Here’s a map of abandoned oil wells; they’re referred to as “orphaned wells” in the official nomenclature and there’s a state-maintained registry so they should be easy to find.

They’re all over the state. Probably can’t walk far without tripping over one!

[0]: https://www.nola.com/news/environment/new-federal-office-wil...

I am writing this from a naïve perspective, but isn’t nuclear more competitive when you factor the negative externalities that come with fossil-fuel generation sources? Wind/PV etc. are far cheaper, yes, but are also subject to more fluctuation in availability. Though I suppose PV/wind plus battery or geothermal take care of that concern.

Who do you think cover any and all negative externalities when wind and PV combined "fluctuate" to pretty much zero for a solid 96 hours, as happened in the UK in winter 2021? Batteries for that scale are a simple fucking lie.

The non-intermittents get to name their price. Except for nuclear, of course. EDF were forced to sell at 45 Euros / MWh when the market rate was over 600 last summer, because the private sector is more efficient, so can't be allowed to compete with reactors whose capital cost was paid 40 years ago by a government.

The whole European energy system is a fucking mess, trying to ignore this obvious fact that grids cannot be allowed to fail. Now, go to an manufacturing conference in Europe and the atmosphere is a fucking funeral. Try selling to customers when your plant produces half of what a US or China plant does, at irregular intervals, because it's at the mercy of metereologists. Go on. Try it.

Easy. Hydrogen.

See that would be reasonable, but Germany decided to go one step further, to throw away even all the CAPEX they had already spent in the past.

Also, all of this due to pressure from the Greens party, which must be respected for the ruling coalition to operate. I will never understand why Greens think that nuclear reactor problems are just as bad as global warming. Tried talking to some voters, got nothing back except "humans are bad". I guess we're far, far away from a solution if the political parties built around global warming do not understand the problem.

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