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Comment by andersa | Hacker News Reader

I checked out their program, but they were anti nuclear power, so there was no way to vote for those fools.

An approach I've had to EU elections is that tiny, single-seat parties often do invaluable opposition work through parliamentary requests and access to internal documents.

It's why it's sad to see Pirates lose their representation, even though their program isn't great.

"Then I checked out the Green Party, but they were against it too. Then I checked out the Social Democrats, and they didn't speak out about open source. Then I check the other parties, and did not vote."

You can't expect to agree on all issues with a party. Weigh their programs (and voting history; I cannot stress enough how a party's history is a much better indication than their program) according to your views, and pick the top one. Otherwise your vote is lost to some party you probably share even less with.

> Then I checked out the Social Democrats, and they didn't speak out about open source.

"Not speaking out" is not against. But being anti-nuclear is clearly a stand against.

Any party can't have binary decisions on everything, and that's fine, this means business as usual on an issue by issue basis. But where they _do_ have a binary stand, it matters.

I do agree with the parent comment though, in today's day and age needing huge coal free electrification targets in short timeframes to save the planet, being explicitly anti-nuclear power is a clear red flag, and doubly makes no sense for a digital technological party to have this stand.

> and doubly makes no sense for a digital technological party to have this stand

I sometimes wonder if these politics taking over fringe parties are deliberate attempts to destroy them. Because yeah it doesn't make sense that they would make that part of their program.

Why would it be foolish to be against nuclear power?

Because it's the greenest and safest form of base load power we have right now. It may be more expensive but the loss of human capital vs burning coal and the reliability vs renewables makes it more valuable, and that's on top of diversifying Europe's fuel sources which is a good thing.

If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so. When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world. And it is a question of "when", not one of "if". Mistakes, boeing-like profit-maximizing strategies, terrorism, war. A heavy explosive on a nuclear power plant effectively creates a dirty bomb. I think these arguments shouldn't be wiped under the rug.

Always wondered why nuclear plants are not built in uninhabitated regions to mitigate risk

They usually don't start inhabited, but then the people building and working at it want to live closer, which pulls in the support roles of stores, which bring more people, etc etc etc.

If you build somthing in the middle of nowhere, and employ people there, the somthing will create a local population.

There are not that many big enough inhabited places left in Europe. And if you build them in Siberia, you're back to square one - dependency on the current tyrant in charge.

Especially when we think about the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is currently occupied by Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

And yet it was Kakhovka dam causing disaster. So should we stop building dams by this logic?

It's not only the dam (which was helpful for keeping the power plant cooled down) that was destroyed by the russians. There is also evidence that they planted explosive devices in the power plant. The whole power plant is taken as a hostage.

The huge difference is the lasting time. Few days or a week the water has gone and you can start with repairs/rebuilding. But after a nuclear disaster all is polluted for foreseeable future and not usable even if all infrastructure and buildings are intact and look safe.

Which is not true, if you look into for example Three Miles Island reactor meltdown, where from outside point of view, there is no difference and only 600 meters exclusion zone from the reactor.

Furthermore nuclear disasters killed dozens of people, while water related disasters killed thousands of people. Another reason to ban dams.

Nuclear disasters worldwide killed thousands - tens of thousands of people.

And yet France continues to exist...

I love that France uses the same strategy for Nuclear power as I did with SimCity back as a 12 year old. Look at where the Chooz power station is for example. If their reactors had a melt down it wouldn't be France (for the most part) that suffered.

To be fair, it also isn't only France that benefits from those reactors. Energy prices in Germany would be even worse without nuclear power plants right next to the border.

> If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so.

But flying is still the safest way to travel, despite a few tragic accidents. This logic doesn't make any sense.

> When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world.

Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly 50x50km and life is actually flourishing in there. You can see it as a tiny natural reserve which are numerous on earth and are generally seen as a good thing.

> but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic.

That depends on the type since not all nuclear power plants are the same design. Here in Canada the CANDU style is very safe in design and uses natural uranium fuel not plutonium. or even thorium.

That's a good analogy. If there is a problem with nuclear it is a BIG THING(tm) that makes the news and gets people scared. Just like a plain crash. But those events are extremely rare. Meanwhile coal/cars get to slowly rack up many more kills and the general public doesn't care.

> It may be more expensive

That's also largely due to nuclear having to pay for its externalities while coal and even "renewable" energies get to shrug them off.

Safety arguments aside, the main sources of uranium are outside of Europe, which means dependence on countries that we have weaker treaties with. While not the end of the world, it really doesn't fit the path to energy independence.

Makes sense

Not really. There's enough uranium in Sweden to cover this. It's just not something we care about since nuclear isn't big enough.

Which is a lie. I.e. Czech Republic is on the same place with available uranium as Kuwait is with oil.

Europe has an energy crisis and modern nuclear power could have solved it, if we hadn't stopped researching it because of a bunch of fools.

It's foolish because, you don't have to be on the extremes of being against or for.

We face huge coal free electrification targets in short timeframes to save the planet. A rational administrator would focus on the larger goal, and decide on a project basis.

Being explicitly anti nuclear, in today's situation, that too for a young technological party (without the 75 year old past that greens have no choice but to cling on to) — is a red flag / potential sign of hidden administrative irrationality.

Let's please not start this nuclear discussion again. All arguments have been said and are clear on both sides and these discussions on HN don't lead anywhere.

Apparrently not enough has been said if the viewpoints differ so wildly.

Exactly. If I wanted to vote for green politics there are existing options. I don't.

Renewables + batteries scale way faster and cheaper than nuclear these days.

Battery plants at the scale of conventional nuclear power plants are very few so it's not as proven as a technology. Ideally we should build both since we don't want the EU to be dependent on a single material for its base load (i.e. lithium or uranium).

I really doubt that battery plants for longer duration storage will be lithium based, something redox-flox based will be the future. But with batteries (especially grid scale, where energy and power density matter much less) there are a multitude of feasible options, some more, some less economic, which means in case of material shortages we can switch in the medium term. I also think hydroelectric storage is an underappreciated opportunity, which, if there is a serious issue with chemical battery supplies, could be reasonably quickly expanded.

It's also silly to use batteries as base load, as is the concept of base load in general in combination of cheap, but non-dispatchable, renwables, which is one of the things that hurts the economics of nuclear plants.

Nuclear is cheaper than renewables+storage. Europe routinely has periods of 2 weeks with little to no wind across the continent (<10% capacity usage on wind power) during winter, when solar production is abysmal. You'd need batteries to store MONTHS of production, and build massive amounts of solar and wind power plants that would all overproduce at the same time and thus not be profitable in the slightest when they're at capacity.

I dont necessarily disagree with you, but there is the safety concerns that need to be addressed for the nuclear energy option to become more acceptable. A nuclear powerplant must be able to explode and not kill a lot of people and render a large piece of the earth uninhabitable. If you solve that for me, then I will wholeheartedly agree with everything you just said.

Right now renewables scale with gas turbines.

Yes, there is some investment in batteries, but due to how the market is structured, they are either equivalent of local large scale UPS, or mainly operate grid frequency stabilization while fossil fuel plants spin up or down (some of the "spin down" support can be also done with modern wind turbines, as they can operate as "sinks" on energy).

Unless we reset the way energy market operates in EU to prioritize dispatchable-but-fossil-free[1], I think we won't see neither proper nuclear resurgence, nor appropriate battery build up.

[1] My personal idea is that we should promote and prioritize sources that offer stable and dispatchable power without emissions. Such conditions would be fulfilled both by nuclear and renewables combined with energy storage, promoting build up of energy storage.

You're not up to date anymore I'm afraid. Two-three years ago your comment would be correct, but things change FAST in this area. Grid-level battery has changed a lot. Look at this graph: https://archive.ph/Vj2py

That's a great link about what's happening with grid-scale battery storage ("giant batteries the size of shipping containers"), supporting solar and wind power replace other source of energy in states like California, Arizona, Texas, Florida.

Sorry, should have been more specific about location (thought it was implied from topic of discussion regarding EU Parliament).

But as it is now, that's not something that is happening in EU, as far as I know. Some of the more recent projects turned out to have a tendency to go on fire.

As for USA, I have no idea how well it works out, as USA seems to have wildly different market setup than EU. My usual sources show under 1% for California.

I'm not aware of anyone having a solution for "batteries" at the required scale. We'd need several TWh of storage, there could be a month without wind.

The only reason nuclear scales so slowly is because of the bureaucracy.

There can't be a month without wind. That's just not how any of this works.

Actually there can be a year without a wind - see low winds in Europe in 2021

"Low" is a far cry from "no".

There actually have been many months without more than half of nuclear reactors in France in 2022 - beginning 2023. And in France there are not enough different energy sources to compensate.

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220825-france-prolongs-...

Taking down such reactors is a periodically routine for maintenance. The question is only how fast you can bring them up again (especially in case of serious repair needs).

But that can be easily rectified by building cooling towers, instead of using river for cooling. What are you going to do with wind not blowing?

> easily

That can be easily rectified by building energy conservation facilities for wind (and other renewables) instead of halting wind generators.

But your point about French NPs is technicality which can be rectified. Time of low wind can't be rectified unless we are able to control the weather.

> But your point about French NPs is technicality which can be rectified.

No, you cannot avoid using electricity few months in summer to have electricity for the rest time. And you cannot double the number of extremely costly NPs to have one half online while another half is being maintained/repaired.

Right, this must be the reason why Germany is back to coal these days after decades of heavy investing in renewables.

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