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Comment by ianpurton | Hacker News Reader

The problem with nuclear is that their is so much FUD around it that it becomes not just expensive but very difficult to build.

Mainly due to new regulations meaning projects have to re-engineer themselves before they are even complete. Leading to delays and cost overruns.

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The problem with nuclear is that it’s slow and expensive to build and there is FUD that it is not.

But it's slow and expensive to build because of ReGuLaTioNS. If we just remove all the rEGUlaTiONS it could be fast and cheap. What's a Chernobyl?

We are all going to die! But nuclear power is to expensive, so let's sit in the roads and block traffic and subsidize Teslas for rich people.

Either we are under an existential threat, in which case nuclear power is an amazingly cheap way to save 8+ billion people, or there is some other agenda at play.

The primary constraint limiting the speed at which we move away from fossil fuels is cost. Investing in more expensive alternatives like nuclear increases the risk of the threat becoming existential, and the damage it does if it doesn't become existential, compared to investing in cheaper alternatives like solar and wind.

It is not a case of "we should do everything" because we can't afford to do everything. If we could afford to do everything we could easily do a small subset of everything and solve the problem.

Hard disagree, the primary limitation is availability of energy. There is no path to 100% solar + wind + storage without mass deindustrialization.

Nuclear would stop being expensive if it was committed to. Building 1 bespoke plant avery few decades is not a good approach.

The article is literally about showing that there is in fact enough solar and wind energy available to fulfill expected (not artificially constrained or "deindustrialized") demand.

The article doesn't have a plan for storage, and relies on a plurality of energy from floating offshore wind, which has never been relied on at any scale. There are 4 windfarms in the world generating just 193MW. You are going to bet humanity on that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_wind_turbine

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