Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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> few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap

Nuclear has never managed to be cheap. The really big nuclear buildouts always had a national security subsidy: either for energy security (France), or for nuclear weapons (US, UK, USSR, China, and also France). This is partly why non-weaponizable reactor designs never became popular either.

> They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent.

This isn't quite it. Energy production is always going to be dominated by capital owners because it's a capital-intensive business. Doubly so for renewables. No, the real reason fossil fuel companies keep pushing for hydrogen is so they can sell hydrogen produced from natural gas as "green", after they've dumped the inconvenient carbon atoms into the atmosphere.

The medium term real, important uses for renewable hydrogen are (1) Haber process (3H2 + N2 -> 2HN3) and (2) steel production by reducing (removing oxygen from) raw iron ores.

Edit: btw, I think the underlying paper is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411

As much as I’ve been rooting for nuclear, I think the ship has sailed. If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it.

Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula.

Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s literally a hundred alternative there. I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference, we don’t need to restrict that to existing dams. But there’s lots of options there and many are very viable.

So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive.

If you look at planned energy projects, the market has very clearly spoken. That doesn’t mean it can’t change, but I don’t think it’s likely.

> I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference

Not really economical unless you've got some suitably-shaped geology to build most of the storage vessels out of.

The lithium issues may be addressed by sodium-ion, which is now mature enough that you can buy it on aliexpress.

"Suitably-shaped geology" means a hilltop, depression optional. Without, you can scrape off the hilltop itself, and use the material to build a levee.

There’s sodium ion, molten sodium, iron air, probably various options with iron or aluminum. There’s literally dozens of promising battery chemistries for grid storage where weight and density don’t matter.

22% of US power is generated via nuclear. Is that not significant? More than renewables, almost as much as coal.

That was built in the past, I’m talking purely about future potential for nuclear.

> So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive.

Ontario is a great counter example.

We have something like 60-70% of our power from nuclear, representing most of the base load. We're building more plants soon too.

Electricity is cheap, and used to be even cheaper before it was privatized.

And we have no nuclear weapons program supporting these plants.

Ontario has cheap nuclear because it's nuclear fleet was build in the best possible time, the past.

Even china [0] renowned for pushing projects through and "getting stuff done" hasn't been able to push the price and construction time of nuclear down enough to make them cheap and easy to build.

[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...

Ontario is a great example where no no nuclear projects have been built or proposed at a competitive price. I stand by my assertion that nuclear is dead in the West until shown contemporary numbers to the contrary.

>If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it.

Because it can work rain or shine. Wind or no wind.

What happens if we have no wind and have a lot of clouds for a few weeks in an area? The storage is limited and nuclear can still produce. Yes, I understand other areas can likely pick up the slack, but nuclear doesn't have that issue. At a minimum nuclear is a good thing to have as a back up even if we have sufficient renewables.

Also, don't forget climate change is supposed to cause more extreme weather events. We don't know what impact that will have on wind and solar.

Not entirely free of operational problems. France has repeatedly had to dial down their reactors when the river cooling water was too warm.

Solar still produces on cloudy days.

The answer is a combination of storage, overbuild, long distance interconnections, and diversification ( which mostly means we keep some natural gas plants around, not new nuclear.)

Solar can produce on cloudy days, but can be greatly reduced. I've seen estimates at 10-25% of the normal rate on a very cloudy day. If there is no wind being generated at the same time it could cause issues.

Sure overbuilding might work, but only getting 10% of the solar and 0% of the wind would require such massive overbuilding it would probably not be practical.

I did mention interconnection. While it can help, there can be extreme weather over large parts of the country at one time. We have fires in Canada blocking out some parts of the North East. Imagine if there was a large fire happening in California and a hurricane in the south. As climate change continues that is only going to get worse blocking out solar in large chunks of the country.

The problem is determining the correct amount of storage. If we get 10% of the normal solar along with no wind for a week or two would there be enough storage? I'm guessing not.

It is good you agree that we need some diversity. So many people are radicals and say we don't need an alternative. I agree with your sentiment, but think we should also have nuclear not just natural gas. Nuclear is reliable and clean. Why use natural gas if we don't need to?

> I agree with your sentiment, but think we should also have nuclear not just natural gas. Nuclear is reliable and clean. Why use natural gas if we don't need to?

Because natural gas is cheap and nuclear is not. If you’re using tax payer dollars, you absolutely can be wasteful and choose the more expensive option. That may even make sense when you factor in the cost of the carbon dioxide pollution. We’re not there yet, but it could come back around, especially if you implement a high enough carbon tax, which I’ve always advocated for.

I think you can get potentially very long term energy storage via pumped hydro, so I expect that would help as well. But natural gas can also be fired up occasionally on those very cloudy days when the wind is also not blowing. The pollution might not matter if you offset it via other means or you use green hydrogen or ammonia or something to that effect.

Since we already have a lot of natural gas power plants, we might not need to build any more, just maintain the more efficient ones in working order.

> If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive

Did they ever get rid of the rule that prohibits nuclear from being cost competitive? Its opponents got it so if they ever found a way to make it cost less the money explicitly had to be spent on new safety measures. Which obviously not only makes it impossible to reduce the cost but also removes any incentive to try.

What legal jurisdiction are you saying this was a rule in? I’ve never heard of this

US.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html

Google doesn't want to find a more specific link right now, but you can see the implication from the definition: If you find a way to make nuclear cost less than something else, now it's economical to make it cost more in order to reduce radiation exposure, with no lower limit where you can stop.

Rooftop solar in Australia is now cheaper in some jurisdictions than transmission per kWh. Meaning, if I tried to build a nuke or any other centralized generator and I gave the electricity away for free, rooftop solar would still be cheaper per kWh because consumers don’t need to pay to maintain transmission infrastructure..

Of course, only when the sun is shining. But it’s an incredible Lego block we’ve got to play with in building this new energy system, zero marginal cost generation.

> Rooftop solar in Australia is now cheaper in some jurisdictions than transmission per kWh

That is mind blowing to me. There’s definitely an argument to be made for decentralizing the grid.

When I say nuclear, I don’t mean as the primary fuel source, but as a few strategically placed plants to serve as back up until large scale battery storage gets sufficiently commonplace until it is no longer needed. Eventually every house will have its own large battery and solar panels on its roof. In combination with grid battery storage, increased panel efficiencies and huge amounts of solar and wind farms eventually the need for backup nuclear energy plants will be next to zero and would probably only exist as small, mobile units that could be moved to disaster zones. Obviously I’m talking on a massive timescale here, we probably won’t get to this point this century unless someone really does make a room temp superconductor and then we can just pipe energy from the equator to where it’s needed.

> and then we can just pipe energy from the equator to where it’s needed.

Superconductors aren't the limiting factor for that, on paper we can already make a 40,000 km long 0.5Ω power line for costs comparable to current annual fossil fuel mining (Chinese annual coal alone is expensive enough for the aluminium).

The problem is geopolitics and that it's a megaproject.

Interesting, I knew there was talks about piping energy from Morocco/Sahara to the UK but didn't know anything about projected costs or feasibility. Politics is the worst.

Sahara to UK (or equivalent) is a necessary, but not sufficient, early step to learning how to do a full-scale planetary grid.

It will highlight many of the engineering issues and some of the political ones, and ideally will seem like an overpriced mess when we reach the level where we even want to optimise design and process for a full-size grid.

For a true planet scale grid, think half a trillion dollars of aluminium, 3.75 years of current annual worldwide production: its doable, just not what you should jump into without smaller scale experiments.

> a few strategically placed plants to serve as back up until large scale battery storage gets sufficiently commonplace until it is no longer needed

I suspect battery storage will reach that point before any nuclear plant started in the West today generates its first watt: about 10-15 years.

I really hope so!

do not underestimate the agendas for centralization of power and control

do not underestimate the sticky pull of collecting ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶^C ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶subscriptions from people

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