Hacker News Reader

Comment by TelmoMenezes | Hacker News Reader

Even if the article is right about the cost of nuclear energy (for which it provides zero evidence), it is ignoring some major points:

- peak oil: eventually (probably not in a distant future) oil is going to become too expensive. What then?

- coal causes horrible pollution

- natural gas is non-renewable, just like oil

- nuclear power technology hasn't stagnated in the 70's

On a more empirical note, I live in France and energy here is much cheaper than anywhere else I lived (and this includes public transportation, which runs mostly on nuclear power in Paris). My home country, Portugal, has destroyed its industry with a government-subsidized windmill scheme. 70% of your energy bill there is tax.

View on HN

Yeah, this article reads like a propaganda piece. Littering in little bits such as "Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants." It's like the author WANTS you to think that nuke plants are worthless.

Also, yes nuclear does have its associated costs and risks, but they are capable of making shit tons of power, on the order of magnitude that solar and wind and hydro combined are not yet capable of doing.

Also, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and nobody thought any the worse of it that there is a nuclear power plant at three mile island.

And this is just my guess, but I would be a big big cost of nuke plants is the regulation and permit process. Not that this isn't necessary, but I would wager it's a reason the costs are so high still.

> Also, yes nuclear does have its associated costs and risks, but they are capable of making shit tons of power, on the order of magnitude that solar and wind and hydro combined are not yet capable of doing.

Wind and solar yes, hydro no. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Quebe...

Hydro is capable and proven in GW-scale generation.

Hydro is great and proven technology where you have the geography for it. The Three Gorges Dam, for instance, provides up to a staggering 22.5 GW. The limitation is geography.

Unfortunately most of the good large-scale hydro sites were exploited long ago.

"Yeah, this article reads like a propaganda piece."

Reason is largely funded by oil interests like the Koch brothers (one of them is on their board). They've been running pro-oil for at least 6 years or so (when I saw the first of the articles). Reason is a non-profit so you can see their contributors, and it's not hard to find other publications calling them out for conflict-of-interest issues.

Also, no mention of thorium (or other liquid-salt) reactors, other novel reactors such as WAMSR, or the fact that a coal plant dumps much more radiation into surrounding environment than a nuclear plant ever does.

> coal causes horrible pollution

Source? There is a lot of FUD about coal, but modern generation facilities ("clean coal") produce little more than water vapor. We have enough coal to power the country for centuries, and modern technology to have clean power generation. The only problem spot is in mining it, and that's a much more trivial problem to solve than issues like fracking, nuclear safety, peak oil, etc.

I seem to be missing some terms in the "clean coal" equation:

C + O2 --> H2O

maybe it's more like:

C + O2 --> 2(H2O) + 6n + 4p (but I think this would be endothermic, to the tune of a few million EV here and there)

If somebody can supply the missing terms in this "equation", then I learn something. Otherwise, take it as simple sarcasm.

Oops. Should have been ... + 6n + 2p (barring some heavy water creation)

Coal is not pure carbon.

Begging your pardon, but what are you smoking?

SO2 and NOX filtration are great, and significantly reduce emissions (~80% seems to be a common figure cited by FGD and SCR manufacturers), but mercury and radionuclide emissions, especially in fly ash, are still a real thing. It also doesn't address the lifecycle problem: we don't really know whether sequestration will work, and you still have to extract and transport the coal itself.

As far as I know the investments in coal-process carbon capture have yet to be seriously implemented, which is probably why coal-fired power plants are still responsible for 20% of US CO2 emissions. :-/

It also misses that fossil fuels enjoy massive government subsidies, some explicit (tax credits, etc.), and many implicit (not having to pay the massive costs of the pollution they generate). Yes, coal is really cheap, but one reason it's really cheap is because we allow people who burn it to pass on a huge proportion of the cost to the public at large.

Any article discussing the cheapness of coal without mentioning the high hidden costs we pay in the form of pollution is really misleading.

There's also the mountain-top removal and other forms of destructive mining for coal, that will be a loss to future generations for thousands of years.

It's cheaper for the consumer directly, but it costs a similar amount to produce (according to this article, which is again not cited anywhere). The difference comes in the government subsidies, which the consumer pays for only indirectly.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that small semantic difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com