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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Both are the way to go. Let's stop this "either solar or nuclear" mentality.

Nuclear was a great choice in the 1970s, when France started seriously investing in it, but solar & wind have come a long way since then.

Nuclear is still by the far the best in any kind of metric

If one doesn't count the ever-present possibility of freak accidents, the externalities, or the endless heaps of subsidies for nuclear (some covert in the way of colonial arrangements and other ways, others open), yes.

Is it really? The cost per MWh generated seems far higher

Could you name these metrics?

Because, nuclear loses according to all of these metrics, for a start:

1. the cost of energy produced.

2. operational flexibility (ability to follow demand).

3. operational cost (the average nuclear plant in the US employs 750).

4. project risk

Pretty much everything beats nuclear on 1, 3 and 4 while gas turbines, batteries and hydro beat nuclear on 2.

It doesn't even win on the fuel cost metric, given wind turbines and solar PV have zero costs in this regard.

Except cost, construction time, and public acceptance.

They have. So has nuclear.

You mean by becoming more expensive over time[0]?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Bread has become more expensive over time too. I still buy it.

It seems that you haven't checked out the reference, because during the same time renewables became 2x cheaper than Nuclear at it's best, and 4x cheaper than Nuclear is right now.

If you still buy the same brand of 4$ bread made from exotic imported ingredients and a non-bio-degradable packaging that needs to be stored for thousands of years and can only be bought in 2 Ton Loafs from a government-owned centralized bakery that hasn't baked bread in years, and requires a nuclear physics degree to be sliced.

Instead of buying the 1$ Bread that is currently produced in high quantities, can be bought from your lokal bakery, has bio-degradable packaging, mostly local incredients, can be baked by any engineer and bought and cut by private individuals.

Then I think that could be called nostalgic at best. It certainly doesn't speak of economic literacy.

If I can only buy the $1 bread during the day, that's an issue, as I might also be hungry at night.

At night most people sleep so you don't need as much bread, and in case you do get hungry you can just eat the other brand that costs 1$.

The "Dunkelflaute" is extremely rare [0].

0: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

Nuclear power generation has been more or less flat since ~25 years, with overall growth of electricity generation. Solar and wind on the other hand...

Just look at the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

OK, so? Should we keep burning coal for base load?

My top comment was "we need both" and the reply literally two messages down is "no. Nuclear bad." I give up.

In the near future you will have essentially free energy during the day or when it's windy. What do you do with your 90% capex nuclear fleet then? You can throttle them for most of the year, but that just increases cost per kWh until they're not competitive with storage.

Then we'll just use storage at that point. I feel like all of these replies are missing my point.

So we'll have sunk a few hundred billion into nuclear plants that won't be useful instead of just building more renewables and storage? What's the point?

the problem is, every time the sun shines and the wind blows it makes the investment in nuclear a sinking ship.. you cant throttle nuclear power plants like that, so they keep producing energy you cant charge for. They keep producing waste, they keep chewing up fuel and they continue being a saftey issue.

What needs to happen is baseload storage, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen/ammonia.

Nuclear power can be dispatched/throttled. The reason why it's not done in practice is because it's uneconomic - the cost of nuclear power is almost all in building the plant and in the subsequent decommissioning, the power itself is almost free once you account for that. So you're better off producing, even under very unfavorable conditions. (Negative prices for power due to excess production can theoretically happen, but they will be solved if storage can be expanded and demand response can be deployed at scale. And renewables are even less capable of throttling in case of negative prices.)

I'm 100% on the renewable energy arc and have been for decades. However ..

> and they continue being a saftey issue.

this just gets tedious. I'm been in exploration geophysics and resource estimation, modelling, resource processing, etc for decades and batteries, hydrogen | ammonia aren't going to be any safer than existing nuclear reactors.

eg:

South Korea battery maker apologises for deadly fire but says it complied with safety rules

     following a massive factory fire that killed 23 workers

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-begin...

and there's not much of a renewables industry without seperated rare earth products

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynas

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/malaysia-allow-l...

this comes with radioactive waste storage requirements that rival the nuclear inustry.

The issue is that you need both - a stable source of power like nuclear for solar or wind to work

I feel like that's exactly what I said.

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