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Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

Usable energy (work) is the lifeblood of any country. Do the sane thing and start building nuclear again.

They mentioned a utility in Utah keeping coal plants open longer.

They kind of imply it's because AI is increasing demand but the article they link to states it is because they cancelled plans for two of Bill Gates Natrium nuclear plants.

And also that a federal court allowed them to pollute more by halting an EPA regulation.

Maybe they'd still be building the nuclear plants if the coal pollution wasn't allowed.

Direct link to the referenced article:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2024/04/01/climate-s...

> In their general session earlier this year, Utah legislators went the opposite way from their West Coast counterparts, passing a bill this year that makes Rocky Mountain’s coal plants the state’s preferred power source.

> SB224 essentially upended the paradigm that made the utility prove to the PSC it was choosing the least cost/least risk options for providing power. Instead, the PSC must now assume the coal plants are the best option, and it’s up to others to prove they aren’t.

> Advocates for both residential and business customers say it likely will raise rates for Utah customers because it transfers the risk of continuing to operate the plants from PacifiCorp’s stockholders to Utah’s ratepayers.

We're building 120 nuclear fusion power plants in 2024 alone, or something like that.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/21/world-getting-120-new-1...

Wouldn't it be great if all you had to do to power your 1GW data center would be to build PV solar farms with 5GW peak capacity on the other side of the globe.

BTW, the land for those solar farms would occupy a square 9 miles on a side and cost $16 billion to buy the land in the Northeastern US (if you could find the land to acquire.) Doesn't include the cost of panels or storage.

I know people who own 9 square miles of land. They are very far from being billionaires. 9 square miles is fairly large for a farm, but fairly small for a ranch.

1. A square 9 miles one a side is not 9 square miles, it is 81 square miles.

2. I was talking about land values in the Northeast US. Not many large ranches there.

Or start using power to gas and go nuts with solar? Yes, there is a lot of loss in the process but the space available for solar is still untapped. Turn it to gas and fuck it, store it under the ocean if need.

Because investing in an overly expensive, harmful and slow building solution makes so much sense when you need a timely scalable solution. Use whatever renewable solution matches your geography. It will be cheaper, significant faster usable, and usable scales up much better, especially as you can build some renewables even in dense regions, where nuclear plants are no real option.

Here we are on a technology startup site; you'd think that if anyone had the vision for new nuclear power, it would be here, but it always seems like the comments are calling for someone else to do it.

It's actually pretty simple: Nuclear is very expensive, takes ages to build, and is very inflexible. That's why the share of nuclear energy is declining globally. It has nothing to do with safety concerns or "treehuggers". It's simply economics.

The claim is that a significant portion of the expense is due to poorly crafted and outdated regulations.

With regulatory reform, nuke power would be more economically reasonable.

One of the biggest issues with nuclear that doesn't go away with less regulation is that running it at 100% load costs you essentially the same as running it at 10% load (since fuel cost is negligible but labor and other costs stay the same). At the same time the price of electricity on the wholesale market changes every 5, 15 or 30 minutes (depending on where you're trading) though. So you're forced to produce and sell for any price. This is extremely problematic in a time where you're competing with more and more energy sources that have a cost of production that is literally 0 and which can be turned on and off at will.

Many issues surrounding nuclear power are tied to regulatory hurdles and insufficient construction, resulting in numerous inefficiencies. Streamlining regulatory processes and encouraging investment is crucial for establishing a competitive, clean energy source. Complaining about these aspects without taking action only hinders decarbonization efforts. Research, development, and investment should be directed toward any technology, including experimental ones, that facilitates decarbonization. Inaction leads nowhere.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

Regarding the staffing needs for operating a nuclear power plant, it requires a minimum of 0.7 people per MW for large-scale, multi-reactor facilities. While this is indeed more than solar, it is not a significant issue. For instance, France boasts some of the lowest electricity bills in Europe, and nuclear technology remains competitive today (no storage, more reliable, and competitive LCOE prices).

Moreover, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are being developed to significantly reduce staffing requirements, needing minimal to no maintenance.

https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1193_prn.p...

What could possibly go wrong…

Apparently not much.

You can start a software business from your bedroom with no external funding, no qualifications, and build things that people want enough to pay for.

But if you try that with radioactive power sources, the Department of Energy will shut you down.

The biggest problem is that a new power plant takes 10 years to build. So even if everyone agreed on the need, we’d have to wait a long time before it solves the problems we have today.

Yeah ok but at least in 10 years we’ll still need more energy. It’s not like our energy use is going down anytime soon.

Energy consumption has been surprisingly stable in "the west" over the past decades. See the US for example:

2002: 2,256 MTOE

2012: 2,152 MTOE

2022: 2,182 MTOE

(MTOE = Tonne of oil equivalent)

Source: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption...

Energy use is predicted to go down, while electricity usage is predicted to double or triple in western nations.

The dramatic comparative inefficiency of non-electric transport and heating makes this apparent paradox possible.

But, there are multiple nuclear energy startups from YC. There's both fission and fusion startups, and several have been working for over a decade already without giving up. What precisely are you criticizing this site for?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=oklo (YC S14)

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=helion (YC S14)

Interesting - I'm not aware of every YC startup, so cool to hear that that's in the mix (though I feel like fusion is still little more than fantasy, sadly).

I will say that one of the more interesting energy startups that I'm aware of (don't think it's YC though) is Terraform Industries which plans to make hydrocarbon fuels out of captured carbon powered via massive solar installations. I hope that that works out because they really do have a good mission and a plausible economic model to achieve it.

The Helion ideas for fusion are pretty interesting. They put a bunch of energy in using electromagnetics to fuse deuterium, and then (if they can do the next bit) harvest the extra energy out of the magnetic fields on the way out using the same equipment.

It's a different approach than most fusion reactors at least.

Both of those are highly experimental and neither seems to have a working/energy producing reactor yet though. So more of a long term solution if anything.

It's old and hard. Which is the exact opposite of tech innovation.

We build chips the same way for ages. Just smaller. Is that not innovation?

That's probably the most naive take there is. Most of nuclear is not innovation but security, logistics and safety.

Something tech startups are fucking terrible at.

I feel like you get in trouble if you just bootstrap a nuclear plant.

I was thinking more back to the era of ZIRP/VC money - one wonders if it could have been put to a bit better use than "Uber for dog massages".

Let me just spin up a nuclear powerplant on my laptop here

I suggest using kind or minikube to simplify the setup but make sure you supply --nuclear option to create Nukernetes cluster. Also setup scheduled batch of jobs to dump nuclear waste, we wouldn't want to have that overflowing in our laptops, do we?

Yeah. The power grid is on the verge of falling over on an overly warm summer day, that’s not a useful metric. Our infrastructure is trash and utilities have systematically underinvested despite constant increases for delivery fees and capacity charges etc etc, and utilities have systematically lobbied against net-metering and other measures to generate power at the last-mile to mitigate this.

An average summer heatwave here sees 1-3 substations blowing up around here.

And let the oceans boil, literally

>literally

The oceans will not reach 100C°

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/12/economic...

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439

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