Hacker News Reader

Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

It is telling that a country with basically none of the American barriers to nuclear (NiMBYism, slow construction) is also shifting focus to solar and wind. It’s just simpler. You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power.

A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.

View on HN

I was going to say... if a country like China, with its massive engineering/building capacity and authoritarian "efficiency" cannot hit their nuclear construction targets, it is quite telling how difficult it must be in reality to build nuclear reactors in general.

I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.

I think the unsaid story is all the coal plants that got built at “unsustainably low levels of utilization”. For whatever reason regional governors reallly liked building coal power plants, needed or not.

And if the only factor is cost, coal is the way to go. So so cheap if the pollution is somebody else’s problem.

Article seems to suggest moderation of nuclear post Fukushima caused shift to renewables when PRC simply wants as much clean domestic energy generation as possible. No one expected renewable prices to drop this fast, or PRC to kill real estate to free up millions of construction labourers whoes skills can transfer into renewables but not nuclear.

Currently, PRC now largely hitting nuclear construction targets fine after switching to domestic nuclear. What PRC couldn't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically, because industry seems to be a mess. 2010s nuclear ambition under 13th 5-year plan was delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over original pursuit of western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues like US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy), adding delays, forcing PRC planners to switch to domestic tech, which is now coming online at expected pace. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 total reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. IMO as more nuclear comes online, and associated nuclear expertise, there's likely going to be faster improvement on nuclear side. Not unlikely next gen nuclear will beat economics of renewables + storage.

Renewables plus nuclear should be the way of the future. Nuclear power when renewables are not available and some sort of storage (pumped hydro, heat in salt etc) when renewables are active.

Nuclear is great as a baseload, but as wind and solar reach overcapacity, peakers will be more useful to react to changes in weather. But by then, energy storage will be economical and scalable enough to obviate gas and coal for this purpose. Renewable takeover is a foregone conclusion at this point.

That said, from a conservation point of view, nuclear is something I’m in favor of

It’s what I was trying to get across. Use nuclear where you would use a peaked plant and then direct the nuclear entry into storage when renewables are active.

My point is that nuclear isn’t suitable for peaking, and given the lead times and capex for building new plants, and the rapidly declining price of storage, it makes them an undesirable financial investment especially when you consider that renewable overcapacity will shift the need from baseload to backup. The better bet is storage, with gas peakers tiding us over for the next 1-2 decades before they are obsolete too

It's ironic that we're only now seeing renewed pro-nuclear sentiment, as a backlash to the mistakes of the German Energiewende (and the preceding decades of stupid anti-nuclearism), just as renewables and battery tech are becoming highly affordable. They're now cheaper than nuclear in most (probably all) cases.

Hopefully we avoid trying to fix the dogmatic mistakes of the past and in so doing, make a new dogmatic mistake in the present. Anti-nuclear policies were wrong back then, but I think the time for nuclear has probably passed.

You are forgetting energy storage, the grid, the duck curve, etc.

But I don't necessarily disagree with you.

> You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power.

And you don't spend 10,000 years hoping & working to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 95% of fuel (unburned) & decommissioned reactors debris you wind up with in the end.

There are good tech answers to try to decrease these problems, but they'd involve building more advanced nuclear fuel lifecycle reactors. Which no one is going to fund. Especially since waste seems to be externalized from generation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com