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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

> Safe and abundant electricity is possible, but we have to invest in it.

We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years. In my country nuclear (which we have none of) is just a dream, but often pushed with those having an agenda against renewables to muddy the discussion.

Calculations I've seen also places the cost of nuclear far above our hydro. As in the price a consumer would have to pay per kWh. Not sure if that even takes into account the massive government subsidies to build it.

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> We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years.

Well we will also need it in 15+ years.

The best time to plant a tree is 15 years ago, and that will still be true in 15 years. The world (hopefully) isn't going to blow up within the next 15 years, so there's no reason we shouldn't consider 15-years investments anymore.

Fossil fuels reserves are going to collapse in the coming decades; even if solar energy prices keep falling, it won't be enough to compensate; any given country has a fixed capacity for hydro power, and it's rather small.

Right now nuclear may not be the cheapest options. But in 15/30 years we're going to desperately wish we'd explored absolutely every realistic option we had.

Germany added more than 10GW of solar alone this year, next years number will be probably significantly higher. That easily equals 1 nuclear power plant, even if you calculate extremely pessimistic. By going with solar (and of course wind), Germany adds the equivalent to a nuclear power plant every year to the grid. In a few years, even the equivalent of several nuclear power plants. Amongst all other advantages, that is significantly faster. (Not even looking at China, they add more solar as the rest of the word combined)

Yes, I don't disagree. But with a finite amount of money, it's often not possible to do both. Nuclear has a huge risk (as in project risk, not thinking about safety) and a long lead time. It's no wonder why other options consistently get prioritized.

I think there's probably diminishing returns?

There are only so many rivers you can dam, so much surface you can put solar panels on without taking away from agriculture, etc.

And a full-renewable approach also has huge risk, it relies on storage technology getting much better in the future, otherwise you need either fossil fuels or nuclear to cover dips. Diversifying probably makes sense.

Sweden is already doing good, they can afford investing lingterm

Any semblance of carbon capture is going to need copious amounts of the most cutting edge nuclear energy we can think of. Breeder, thorium, MOX fuel, etc. Having an edge on that is going to be worth a lot in 20 years.

Why? Carbon capture seems to fit renewables much better.

Carbon capture economically speaking doesn't make anything desirable. We're essentially throwing money at making a problem go away, it's pure spending. So the cheaper, the better, and the sooner the better. Everything else is irrelevant.

So solar and wind are probably are a better bet, and intermittency/storage doesn't really matter.

> Fossil fuels reserves are going to collapse in the coming decades

Source? Quick internet searches seem to say we have more than 50 years left of coal, oil, and natural gas that we know we can extract. And that will expand as we find more and get better at extracting it.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese...

https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

To be clear: we do need to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage. Just saying that, so far as I can tell, we're not going to run out of anything in the next 30 years.

Just speculation, but...

What is the lead time in developing new fossil sources?

What is the time to profitability?

How long will there be political will to greenlight new developments?

Depending on those we might run out of the option to increase production of fossil fuels in less time than we have physical reserves for.

It costs money to extract those reserves. It even costs money to maintain existing wells that have already been dug. If prices drop below a certain level, those reserves won't ever be accessed.

> We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years

In 2010, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, opposed nuclear power because it would only come online "in 2021 or 2022".

That would've been great to have last year when gas generation went up an order of magnitude!

Exactly - I've been seeing this argument for 20+ years - and we're going to see it for another 20 years.

> Calculations I've seen also places the cost of nuclear far above our hydro.

It's by far the most expensive power source in common use, and becoming less competitive with other sources every day [1]. This is quite a surprising choice for them to make in 2023.

[1] https://311mieruka.jp/info/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/20data...

Here's the numbers where I live: https://www.nve.no/energi/analyser-og-statistikk/kostnader-f...

  Hydro: 40 øre/kWh    
  Windmills on land: 40 øre/kWh    
  Solar on ground: 63 øre/kWh  
  Windmills in ocean: 69 øre/kWh  
  Solar on big roofs: 76 øre/kWh 
  Nuclear: 78 øre/kWh  
  Coal: 126 øre/kWh

(100 øre = 1 NOK)

Do these costs include storage for wanting electricity from solar at night or wind when there is none?

It is Levelized cost of electricity which is a standard way of measuring cost for energy investment.

Levelized cost of electricity is the most favorable metric for intermittent / non-dispatchable generation sources, though!

Do those nuclear costs include all real decommission costs (check the difference between budgeted and real costs thanks to the UK running case), real complete and sure waste disposal costs, provisions/insurance for accidents... ?

We need it now and in the future. Cleaning up many industries amounts to increasing energy expenditure in order to turn pollutants into benign side products. There is no reason to expect our energy demands to go down and every reason to think they will continue to rise in massive amounts. Especially if you expect the poor countries to continue to industrialize and modernize.

*WR plants take too long to build, tie-up too much capital for too long without ROI, and have messy logistics.

It's fast and cheap to deploy zillions of solar panels. It takes a bit longer to truck in the massive components of wind turbines and do a site install. We're already at 30% renewable production of all electricity worldwide. There isn't a compelling rationale for needing nuclear energy, more often it's individuals fixated on it because they want it. Business people or a nonprofit running an energy utility will look at the possibilities and the opportunity costs, and find nuclear isn't a very good fit given the alternatives apart from rare circumstances.

We need the energy in 15 years as well, maybe even more than we do today.

Renewables is just a fancy term for "energy whenever the sun shines or the wind blows". This is factually not always the case. We need energy that is available regardless. And that's where fossil fuel and nuclear excels. Fossil fuel's downside that it kills ~3 million people per year. Nuclear's downside that it scares (not kills) ~3 million people per year.

We could certainly add more combined cycle natural gas turbines to existing plants to meet demand in geographical regions that are unsuitable for wind and solar. Those generators are (comparative to nuclear) fast and easy to onboard to the grid, with (comparative to nuclear) far less safety considerations

But those emit CO2???

Yes, as do many things that we need for modern civilization

The point is to reduce carbon emissions, even if it's more expensive.

I thought the point was to generate enough electricity to sustain civilization

They said that back in 2008 too. We also need the energy in 15 years. Of course nuclear will be costlier than your already provisioned hydro. Hydro is low hanging fruit and has already been mostly tapped out where possible.

Only not tapped out in the Congo and New Guinea from memory.

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