Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah this is that thing you’re talking about. This is us stopping burning fossil fuels for energy.

We can talk about everybody just riding their bike, which I agree would be better for all involved, but so far the data coming back from that experiment has been absolutely dismal.

At this point I think ignoring peoples reluctance to bear any inconvenience, and the consequences that has on policy in a democratic society, is dangerously negligent if you take the climate crisis seriously.

The data is emphatic and unambiguous. We could do more, but we refuse to, and the steps we could take to force the issue would be catastrophic and extremely risky. War is not carbon neutral, and victory is far from assured.

Building some nuclear power plants is arguably the least bad option. I don’t expect that medicine to taste good going down but I, as well as a great many around here, am in the solutions business. And this will take a bunch of coal plants offline in a fashion that we could get people to choke down.

While I agree with some of the points you make, I genuinely don’t see how your comment relates to mine.

You were insisting that we stop burning fossil fuels, withijt a suggestion on how to replace the base load. The base load must be replaced.

I inferred you didn’t like nuclear power because most folks who are focused on climate do not. EVs and nuclear power plants aren’t a panacea but they can make a dent, a big one, they’re politically possible, and we can start today.

Yes I can see how you would draw those conclusion.

I would start by saying that a) I don’t have an ideological problem with nuclear, I have an economic one. While wind, solar, and hydro (and the rest) have been getting cheaper (sometimes drastically so, as in the case of solar) year over year, nuclear has only been getting more expensive. The longer we run the plants, the more problems we learn about and the higher the cost becomes.

And no, I don’t think the SMNR will solve that, if anything I think they will be even more expensive ($/MWh) because they lose the economies of scale within the plant. It’s argued that you’ll get that price down since they can be mass produced and modular, but the 400MW scale currently being made are neither small nor mass produced. Building enough of them to actually take advantage of learning rate effects is a dubious proposition, especially with the market fragmented behind dozens of designs.

Whether nuclear retains a spot for itself remains to be seen and will be dictated (I believe) primary by the cost being brought down faster than the alternatives.

And that alternative (point b) is the modernization of the electrical grid (something that we need to do regardless of the path forward) to create larger electrical grids. The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity. Similarly with storage (hydro one solution that already exists).

“The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity.”

Are we having a serious discussion here? We’re pretty darn good at transmitting power and there are physics problems at work here that are really frustrating to have to explain over and over to people who desperately want to believe there is some silver bullet around the base load problem.

There isn’t. There is no grid scale solution. There is no mix of renewables that is going to get around the base load. It doesn’t exist.

We. Can’t. Afford. To. Wait.

We are having a serious discussion. If you have good sources showing why HVDC and/or hydro are a less economical solution please share.

But to your point about not being able to wait, I agree. So if we were to greenlight a new nuclear power plant today how long until it produces electricity? (Let’s even assume we have all of the trained personal available to build and operate it.)

The Vogtle plant took 14 years, and that was at an existing site. I’m putting my bet on a solid 2 decades if a new site is needed. To say nothing of the cost overruns.

But, let’s be generous and say 14 years. We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid, to say nothing of growing demand. We need to build something that will produce green electricity next year.

Again, nuclear can certainly have its place. But it has a bunch of economic challenges to overcome to earn that place.

> We can’t wait for 14 years to remove fossil fuels off the grid

'We' == just the US that struggles to build a nuclear plant, or 'We' including, say, South Korea with 25 reactors operating and another four under construction and due to be finished by 2030 (along with boofing up and extending some of the older plants in the same time period)?

The US could ask South Korea for assistance, of course, but they might be tied up building nuclear reactors in Uganda and potentially other one or two other countries in Africa.

It’s true South Korea is doing a little better. Shin Hanhul 1 and 2 only took 10 years (a mere 100% schedule overrun) to build. So that is better. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what that 2030 estimate turns into in the end.

They have their work cut out for them with countries in Africa, I didn’t believe they currently have the local expertise or supply chains.

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