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Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

Literally nobody runs storage, not at the required volumes for a North European country. To claim otherwise is just a fucking lie.

Just... what is your plan with this? The reality is, North European countries are now wholly reliant on there not being a cold winter again. If you check three simple things: the number of MW of heating demands, the lithium prices for a MWh, and the god damn ninety-fifth percentile worst weeks for wind+solar at >45 degrees North, to get the number of hours. You can do this, and ask people with money in the game whilst you're at it. The answer is not ambiguous, and it is no where fucking near regardless of what a Twitter bro with 50 MWh in a desert will prat on about. So why. The Fuck. Haven't you?

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I'm not sure what you are implying. Cost of nuclear power plant projects have been well documented in the past and there are lots of current projects to look at. The initial investment costs, cost overruns and high interest rate environment just make it very unattractive economically to build nuclear plants with current designs. There was an excellent podcast episode of The Red Line podcast recently going into details of the capex calculations if you are interested: https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/post/episode-102-the-econo....

This is not saying that technological advancements like SMRs can't change the economics to be more favorable, but it's really not the case if you wanted to start building a plant right now.

The direct comment you replied to is pointing out that besides fossil fuels, there is not only no plan, but no other real apparent options in these scenarios. Which are real scenarios and will almost certainly occur.

So either:

1) we’d need to do massive investment right now (on the order of wartime economic reorganization) for renewables, which no one seems interested in. And while plenty of people seem happy to say things are fine but that don’t even come close to penciling out in reality.

2) maybe actually get better at nuclear.

3) have some non-trivial percentage of the population either freeze to death during some “unexpected” winter storm that was entirely predictable, or go back to fossil fuels (if they can) on an emergency basis.

Or, my guess at the most likely outcome;

4) pretend everything is fine until a bunch of people die, then blame those people for their moral failings. Then start panicking.

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