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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Excessive enthusiasm with EVs were the spell of death for german auto manufacturers.

Then, the absurdly stupid sanctions on Russian Oil and Gas, coupled with the irrealistic and inconsequential energy transition and other absurdly emotionally charged decisions like phasing out nuclear power.

Germany industrial competitivity depended a lot on cheap Russian energy that could only be realistically replaced with Nuclear Energy.

Blaming volkswagen demise on incidental stuff like their issues with software is something that only someone as ignorant of the real world as a journalist from The Economist could do.

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Why do you think that nuclear energy, requiring Uranium, a resource that again has to be bought from another country (a lot of the supply comes from Autocracies), is the better alternative to renewable energies?

Edit: And moving away from russian energy is the best thing Germany did since the Berlin wall fell.

Until storage is solved (and it might not ever be), then nuclear is excellent for base load. Germany lacks coast line for wind and is in northern europe. Nuclear is ideal for them.

Germany could power their entire grid using only Organic, fair-trade, hand-picked, artisanal Uranium and still be far ahead of relying on fracked gas and petroleum.

Wind and Solar are great, but still require peaker plants to maintain 24x7x365 power. Grid-scale storage is coming along, but is still cost-prohibitive to do something like power the grid overnight from solar.

Because solar and wind renewables are intermitent, and the factual reality of energy prices and grid stability in every fucking place of earth that went all in into renewables trumps the all the wishful thinking of the the rent seeking renewable energy industry.

The reality nowadays is that for every single GW of renewable capacity generation you forcibly have to have another GW of dispatchable generation, usually natural gas, it is also inescapable that renewables, especially solar, displace baseload generation, reducing its ROI while not eliminating its fixed costs, making energy as a whole more expensive.

Most people have no fucking idea of how electric power generation and distribution and are easy to be mistified with bullshit accounting concepts such as LCOE. But what matter is the total SYSTEM-WIDE cost of energy.

And there is not a single place in the world where widespread adoption of intermitent non-dispatchable power sources haven't absurdly increased the final costs of electricity for the customers.

Of course, lots of people are making a lot of money out of that, a lot of talking heads have their careers based on that and they will say otherwise. So, just move to germany, california, UK or south Australia, enjoy your expensive electric bills, and stop worrying and learn to love increasingly frequent blackouts.

It is not that intermitent renewables are useless and can't be a part of the grid under some constraints. Also, if you have enough hydro-power potential, go ahead. But otherwise, unless you come up with a magic storage solution, solar and wind can't replace nuclear and thermal more than for a small percentage. And while we are at that, solar in a northern european country is a particularly dumb idea.

Yes, renewables are intermittent, but the storage needed to deal with this is rapidly becoming cheaper. No natural gas is needed, although the last few percent of storage shouldn't be batteries. Burning hydrogen in turbines would work, and that can be sourced renewably.

Nuclear is so out of the running economically that even with the (rapidly falling) cost of dealing with intermittency, renewables come out ahead.

> Nuclear is so out of the running economically that even with the (rapidly falling) cost of dealing with intermittency, renewables come out ahead.

Only if you do the funny math of LCOE. Because in the real world, in terms of system wide costs, this is laughable opposite to reality. More intermitent renewables -> Higher electricity bills, more grid instability.

And no, storage costs are not even close to be economically viable.

The biggest battery systems are able at most to cover the demand of a metropolitan area for a few hours by themselves. What you do in the winter on moderate to higher latitudes with fewer hours of daylight and the sun down in the horizon with very few wind?

No, the funny math is typically from the nuclear advocates.

A usual bit of dishonesty you see from them is computing the cost of firming intermittent sources by assuming batteries are the only storage used. This massively inflates the cost, since batteries are unsuited for certain storage use cases (rare correlated outages, seasonal storage) for which there are other, cheaper options. They can massively inflate the cost by doing this kind of strawman engineering. Nuclear bros lap up the numbers produced by this sort of fraud and repeat them unquestioned.

Careful analysis using all the options for dealing with intermittency (storage is not even close to #1) reveals that renewables are very affordable.

But anyway: if nuclear really is so much better, it doesn't need subsidy. So let's let them compete head on. I don't think nuclear can survive if that happens though, since no unsubsidized nuclear power plant has ever been built, anywhere, selling into a competitive market.

The whining about nuclear opposition eventually boils down to complaint that nuclear isn't being given the massive public subsidy it would need to get anyone to actually choose to build it.

Again. The real world. Tell me how how much bills have been lowered in California, Germany and the UK.

Tell me about how China installed two orders of magnitude more renewables than nuclear last year.

Uranium is not required for nuclear energy. We have other elements that work, like thorium.

Which is used by... transmuting it into uranium (U-233, to be precise.)

Nope, we can do it direct using alphavoltaics.

Exploiting the alpha decay of thorium? If we fully capture the alpha decay energy from the decay chain of Th-232, we get about 24 milliwatts per ton of Th-232. That doesn't seem practical at all.

> absurdly stupid sanctions on Russian Oil and Gas,

do you want to enable people who wage aggressive wars or what?

Man, that's the kindergaten view of international relations and war. Really, that's not how the real world works and things have a lot more layers than this cheap naivety.

At the bare minimum, if the US can bomb and invade countries thousands of kilometers away from its borders due to their alleged security interests we should take into account the probability that Russia as a nation-state follows a similar logic when dealing with a country that borders them.

It is not like the US is some kind of exceptional entity that have some special rights to act in certain ways that are verboten for other countries.

I speak as a Russian. In the US, you have your own protestors for those issues, which I am not qualified to discuss.

So, you really think there was no reason for alarm with NATO encroachment on Ukraine? You really had no issue with the repression of ethnic russians in regions that historically were Russian before Lenin?

You really had no issue with the repression of ethnic russians ...

Which consisted of what, precisely?

in regions that historically were Russian before Lenin?

Are you suggesting that there's some magical, enduring quality to the Russian Empire's territorial claims? Is every place the Russian Empire managed to sit on for a while ipso facto "historically Russian" -- and we should just accept this description at face value?

And before these regions were supposedly "Russian" -- what were they? What kind of people were living there? What became of them?

Would you refer to Okinawa as "historically Japanese", or Algeria as "historically French"?

Enlighten us, please.

s/b "Enlighten, please"

I'm wondering how you're proposing to power cars with nuclear energy, if not electric cars? Are you proposing synfuels? These are very expensive. Hydrogen cars are notably for how much of a failure they've been, even in places like Japan that have been heavily pushing them.

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