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Comment by teractiveodular | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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.

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

Except cost, construction time, and public acceptance.

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