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Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

It just seems so obvious that the government should work towards making energy practically free. It would lower the cost of everything.

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I always wondered how do we get to 'free' energy with our current status quo. As soon as energy prices drop, investment dries off and suddenly future supply disappears (see oil and how many new oil rigs are coming online in the US, see uranium and the current yellow cake shortages)

Take that, Jane Fonda!

She and the movement she was a face for set back Nuke power 40 years. Forty Years!

We can only imagine where the world would be today in terms of energy independence and state of Carbon exhaust of we had progressed the tech for the past 40 years.

"On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous."

I think you are confusing production costs with selling price.

How much is Insulin in the US?

So far nuclear hasn't been a path to practically free nergy.

Isn't that largely because of the regulatory burden?

Yes. And the fact we don’t build nuclear at scale. All projects have been essentially one-offs, built and managed by inexperienced teams working on custom designs. If we build the same type of plant hundreds of times by experienced teams, the cost per unit will plummet.

For something where Chernobyl or Fukushima is far from a worst case scenario I do appreciate there’s regulator burden involved in new deployments.

You mean necessary burden.

Especially since times got morr tense between the west and Russia and China.

It's a cost, but far from the only cost. Construction is truly expensive.

no, it's largely because thermal power plants are expensive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724305

Because we don’t have enough

Exactly, I think we should promote both solar and nuclear, and when energy is so cheap, everyone will naturally switch to using electricity for everything from heating to driving.

Should still maintain infrastructure for gas for the foreseeable future just in case of EMP. Coal too. That valuable knowledge should not be lost in case we ever need to go back to simpler ways as well.

Alternatively they'll just collect higher margin.

Then it should fund fusion

It does.

With way more money. ITER's budget is so far 22 billion. I would think development could be accelerated if they put more money into it. And I would argue that 22 billion for fusion research has the potential of doing way more for world peace than spending the same amount on defense.

I agree, but it doesn't seem any more obvious than the same being true for transport, healthcare, decent education etc and government funding for those is immensely unpopular with a large portion of the population.

Edit: sure, I'll narrow this to just housing and transport.

It's much more obvious than education. For education, what they are educated in matters.

For healthcare, it's much harder to fundamentally lower the cost. Ie for energy, we know if we build a ton of nuclear reactors, wind turbines, and solar we could have practically free energy. It's just about increasing supply. Health care does not have that easy lever.

For transport and housing, I agree it's analogous. If we lower the cost of housing and transportation dramatically then everything will also get cheaper.

Education also has the problem that, to all evidence, we don't know what to use more money for. There does not seem to be any correlation across US school districts with dollars per student and educational outcomes. No one disagrees that "better" education would be great. We, as a society, just don't seem to know how to get better education, but just throwing more money at the problem doesn't appear to be working.

You can argue about how "cost effective" nuclear is, but at the end of the day, if you spend money, you know, for a fact, that you will have more energy than you did before. Maybe you could have gotten more MW/$ with a different technology, but you will still be ahead of where you were before you spent the money.

> For healthcare, it's much harder to fundamentally lower the cost.

I strongly disagree. Compared to the rest of the OECD we have much higher costs (3x OECD average!) and worse health outcomes (life expectancy 4 yrs < OECD average).

https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/health-at-a-glance-United-...

If they can do it, obviously we could do. There's just no political or social will. Everyone complains but no one is willing to make the radical changes (i.e., Medicare for all), or lifestyle and environmental* changes (i.e., to combat obesity, which costs us $150-200 billion/year in health care costs).

https://stop.publichealth.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs4356/f...

* (availability/affordability of healthy food)

Strong disagree. Energy use irrevocably underpins absolutely every human activity. The other items mentioned do not.

Don't take this as a disagreement that education, healthcare, etc aren't crucial. They certainly are, but not to the same degree.

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