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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

While I'm for nuclear, I hope that it's not used as a cop-out to do nothing now.

Which is what it often feels like locally. "I'm against these new windmills being built, we should instead build nuclear" is quite common to hear. Especially from climate deniers, so it's often more of a stalling technique to undermine green energy.

We need the power now. Not in 15+ years. Of course, the best time to start would then have been yesterday. But we don't have nuclear in my country (Norway), I don't believe we could be efficient in building it. I'd rather our neighbors do it, that already has it (Sweden), and then we build what we're good at, and then we share the grid (ala ACER).

A report from this week (in Norwegian) by Rystad Energy concluded that they don't believe it would be beneficial for Norway to look into nuclear at the moment. https://www.nho.no/tema/energi-miljo-og-klima/artikler/kjern...

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We should be doing all these things in parallel, yes. If we accidentally end up with "too much" low carbon energy that is fine, industry will scale to can use it up.

I don't like these arguments about not knowing how to build nuclear power plants and the whole per county approach. This is a huge project each country might only do once every decade or more, so we need a multinational team building it. If they do one every year that is better for building experience and improves safety.

For Europe (the continent and the EU) it totally makes sense to have a common grid - as it has already now. Nuclear in France, solar in Spain,... this diversity has served Europe well in the last decades.

But you are right. Those who are against windmills always mention nuclear as alternatives, but you can bet 100% they would be even more against a nuclear reactor in their neighborhood.

At least in Spain, the municipality that holds de radioactive waste or the reactors are very eager to have them because they get a lot of money either from the government or the electric utility. The biggest complainers are the nearby municipalities, that receive nothing but have to deal with nuclear being around.

And then you have things like Chooz plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chooz_Nuclear_Power_Plant#/map...), that is technically in France but is more in Belgic than France. Plants in the border like Gravelines, Cattenom, Fessenheim, or as far as possible from big cities like Flamanville, Paluei, Penly, Brennilis. In fact, Flamanville (one of the biggest planned plant in France) or Gravelines are closer to London than to Paris. Cattenom closer (and upwind) to Frankfurt or Luxemburg than to Paris. Fessenheim would be in Germany if it was build 1 mile/km to the east. They also built a lot of reactors in the highly seismic area of west Alps, but if something happened to any of them, the winds would carry the spicy cloud to Switzerland, Italy or Germany.

Okay, but aren't these countries benefiting from French energy being imported?

It helps to remind them that there is no free lunch.

If Norway really wanted to invest into more energy production, then infusing more research money into tidal power would likely results in better returns than nuclear.

Sweden mostly need nuclear power in order to stop burning oil/biofuel. The southern part of Sweden regularly need more energy than get produce, and thus the oil plant located there need to operate at almost 24/7. It is the single largest source of pollution by a very large margin. A nuclear plant in that region would also help Denmark reduce their footprint when the weather is sub optimal for wind production. More wind energy is likely not going to cause much harm (except when placed onto nature reserves), but the issue with the oil plant is also not going to be solved by more wind energy. Denmark is already well over 100% wind capacity.

Any words about what a country will do 27 years in the future are worth very little. Few or none of the politicians speaking the words will still be around.

Norway has large hydro resources. They are acting as Europe's battery, in a way. That means power sources there are competing purely on levelized cost of energy, where new nuclear cannot come close to winning.

Wind power is intermittent in most regions in Europe, without expensive storage it just extends the lifetime of coal plants that are then used as an indefinite "backup".

We need to get back to the building times of the 80s in Sweden for nuclear. The korean nuclear plants have the fastest building time these days after the chinese, so no surprise they will be building the new ones in Poland

Combinations of solar, wind, batteries, and (crucially) some e-fuel like hydrogen enables a 100% RE grid to work even in Europe, at a cost that new construction nuclear will have trouble matching. Europe, particularly eastern Europe, is one of the last places nuclear makes any sense, but even that is an expiring refuge as renewables and storage continue to improve in the face of massive demand driving them down experience curves.

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