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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it's stupid not to take the game-changer of solar and wind (and batteries) into account.

Even though I believe that nuclear no longer has a role in energy (fuel sources, disposal, concentration of risk into few small units), the statement is still correct and it has another dimension:

There is a conflict between poverty, climate change, gravity of climate change harms and the speed at which we can reduce climate change impacts.

The problem is that there is a shrinking window to limit harm, and the harms will disproportionally affect poor nations which at the same time lack resources to mitigate. I'd definitely call that a gordian knot.

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Is it really a game changer though ? AFAIK countries that made the shift to solar and wind can't still store they energy and have to rely on fossil still to power they country (e.g. Germany). On top of that, if the whole world made the shift to solar, wind and batteries, I assume the scarcity of some materials will become an issue. According to this [1] Lithium for example is expected to have a shortage by 2025. There are also challenges like usable surface, and making all the intermittent, non-controllable energy work together. I mean, I am open to the idea of solar/wind, but "game changer"... Doesn't seem so easy

[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...

Watching what China does is always instructive. Despite platitudes to the contrary, climate change is a tertiary concern of theirs. What they care most about is (1) energy independence and (2) cost. So 10-15 years ago they started building a lot of nuclear, solar and coal.

As the cost of solar plummeted and nuclear went up they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. For the last 5 years they've built several TW's of solar capacity and a similar amount of coal peaker plants to run when the sun isn't shining.

Now in 2024 they're starting to scale back coal and they're building massive batteries instead. IOW, batteries are now cheaper than coal to offset the intermittency of solar.

Also, the lithium shortage has come and gone already: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

> they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions.

Currently (June 2024) they're all the way down to:

    China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations.

    China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.

    China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs).

    From 2008 to 2023, China’s share of all nuclear patents increased from 1.3 percent to 13.4 percent, and the country leads in the number of nuclear fusion patent applications.

~ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...

Which is quite the wind down from . . . ?

If they want 150 online by 2035, most of them would have been started by now and/or you would expect to see capacity accelerating. Instead, capacity additions appear to be slowing down, in contrast to the massive additions in the 2010's.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

They were aiming for 15% by 2035, 25% in 2050 then ramping up to 45%.

Now they're aiming for 18% by 2060, by which time they will also be net zero carbon.

Article with much more info about China's nuclear pull back: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/22/china-still-hasnt-learn...

What's IOW... ?

in other words

A guardian or a gordian knot [0]?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot

Haha thanks fixed.

The story of the gordian knot wasn't really about the problem. It was about the solution. So alluding to it when you talk about nuclear is apt, but not for the reasons people seem to think.

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