Comment by atomic128 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atomic128 | Hacker News Reader

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Microsoft commits to pay somewhere between $100/MWh and $140/MWh for 20 years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443

Microsoft's commitment allows Constellation Energy to restart the 819 MW nuclear fission reactor at Three Mile Island. This reactor operated without problems for approximately 45 years and was switched off in 2019.

The other reactor at Three Mile Island (880 MW) melted harmlessly in 1979 due to operator error. That reactor will never be restarted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Clean baseload power is extremely valuable.

Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source mature enough to be widely adopted. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. Having used fission reactors for 70 years, we know how to build them and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). For example, Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100% of their capacity.

In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline.

Furthermore, even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar and wind. As a last resort, fossil fuel backup plants can be built, but building them is costly and using them is dirty. See Germany's power grid for an embarrassing real-world example.

Solar + wind + batteries is an intrinsically unreliable, unacceptable solution. Please see Yann LeCun's comments, reflecting Meta's view on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097

>solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.

Being 5x cheaper more than makes up for that though.

None of the viable modes of storage (pumped water, hydrogen, batteries) are expensive enough to make paying 5x per kilowatt hour worthwhile any more.

If you roundtrip solar and wind via hydrogen stored for months and back into electricity again (the most expensive mechanism), it's still cheaper than every single kilowatt hour of nuclear power delivered on the sunniest, windiest days.

It really is difficult to overstate just how mind bogglingly expensive nuclear power is. Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.

Where are you going to build a 1GW solar installation with multiple days of storage capacity in the northeast?

long transmission lines significantly reduce efficiency and add massive costs as well as creating easy targets for terrorism.

Firstly, we should probably not start by building a mathematical renewable energy model that presumes wind energy doesn't exist. Storing solar energy for use while the wind is blowing hard is a bit pointless and vice versa.

You don't store energy from solar on a sunny winter day to use at midnight when the wind is blowing hardest and consumption is lowest. Your store energy to use on those rarer hours when it is neither sunny nor windy and when consumption exceeds the production of both.

This can be done cost effectively and at scale in two ways - 1) by pushing water uphill for short term storage and 2) by manufacturing hydrogen and storing it underground for longer term storage.

So, you combine overproduced solar, wind, pumping water uphill and electrolyzing and storing hydrogen to match demand with supply.

Solar and wind and their transmission are distributed. This makes them poor terrorism targets. A nuclear plant, on the other hand, is a great target for terrorists.

> Unless it's used to cross-subsidize the military nuclear industry it just isnt worth it.

I feel sure Ontario does not have nuclear weapons ambitions.

> If you round trip solar and wind via hydrogen

Do you have any examples of this at commercial scale (hundreds of MW) and their costings?

>I feel sure Ontario does not have nuclear weapons ambitions.

Canada actually used to be a nuclear power until 1984. Since then it has signed up to the NPT and disavowing weapons but maintaining a nuclear industry that would let it spin up a nuclear weapons program in a hurry should it deem it necessary (i.e. if the American nuclear umbrella faltered).

There are several countries around the world that follow a similar policy - Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Iran. There's value to belonging to the NPT but there's also value to being able to get a nuke in months if an existential crisis presented itself (as it has for Iran).

>Do you have any examples of this at commercial scale (hundreds of MW) and their costings?

Google for lazard LCOE.

> Canada actually used to be a nuclear power until 1984.

No, it wasn't, except in the sense that Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey are nuclear powers today. It was a participant in a nuclear sharing agreements (under the auspices of NORAD, rather than NATO like the other countries) where US-owned and controlled weapons were deployed at Canadian bases, under control of the US military, with plans for transferring them for delivery by Canadian forces in the event of war. It never had its own nuclear weapons or, AFAIK, nuclear weapons program

> Google for lazard LCOE.

I guess LCOH is a more relevant search term. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

Page 28 is informative. 220-235 USD/kWh for a 25% blend of unsubsidised PEM hydrogen, or 210-221 USD/kWh a 25% blend for unsubsidised alkaline hydrogen.

>In contrast, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable, fundamentally weather dependent. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, your data center is offline.

ok so weather is predictable and highly accurate for at least 3 days in advance. You are still able to buy energy from markets. You can still load battery storage in case of bad weather forecasts.

I don't know what the problem is here? Why do you paint a scenario where data centers magically are now off the grid and have to be on 100% reliable energy sources?

> After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity).

France would like your phone number.

Knowing how and being politically prevented from doing so are entirely different things.

It’s nuclear or fossil fuels until an order of magnitude change in chemical storage.

No one is going to be building enough gas peaker plants sitting idle 360 days a year to achieve the reliability of the grid most consumers and modern civilization require. So it’s burn more gas or coal on a regular basis or enjoy power outages if you want what we have today.

I love solar. I plan to have a week or so worth of battery at an off grid home someday soon. It’s both entirely financially impractical (yay disposable tech income) and I will still back it with an expensive propane generator since I live over here in reality.

> France would like your phone number

I think there is a small matter of national/international politics (running nuclear as renewables backup), a lack of focus within EDF and perhaps a dash of French industrial action (at least a go slow on the refuelling outages).

Project Hercules was meant to solve the latter https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/ceo-of-edf-defe... but this never happened.

On them positive side their nuclear generation is recovering a bit, albeit from a low base. https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...

Fossil fuel plants already exist for the base load. If they run only 5% of time, it will be lot cleaner than what we have right now.

Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time? That would be a pretty interesting pitch deck.

That’s a pretty damn low utilization rate. The cost per Mwh would make the Texas polar vortex incident look downright cheap. Or you’ll be having the government build and operate idled natural gas (or coal!) plants via taxpayer money since investors are generally not quite that poor at math. An idle plant still needs the same number of staffing and engineering as one operating at 90% capacity factors, before you even begin to look at capex.

Perhaps that will happen. Running your baseload generation balls to the wall at 100% seems to be a far better use of capital to me, and have your cheap intermittent power sources fill in for those peak loads that don’t require reliability.

I can come up with all sorts of great ideas on how to utilize spare solar capacity. None are financially practical in the scale of a human lifetime at a societal level, even with a magic wand to instantly enable the political will to do so.

Humans continue to amaze me with their inability to account for tail risk. The same political magic wand makes nuclear viable within a decade or two, accounting for said tail risk within it.

That said, the current unserious political climate gives me zero hope any solution will be found, so I’m simply preparing for semi regular power outages becoming a thing within my lifetime.

> Who is building and operating a plant (these need to be more or less 1:1 per MW to back your intermittent power sources) that sits idle 95% of the time?

This is what the capacity market is for; ensure the plant needed to operate the grid can pay the bills. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit...

It does feel like an inefficient use of capital. My best explanations for intermittents are 1) they are fuel savers, making natural gas cleaner by having them run less; 2) they siphon money into the generator’s pockets (from taxes via the Inflation Reduction Act and other subsidies, from other electricity generators via renewable energy mandates, from the utilities via rooftop solar which reduces the consumption when energy is easier/less costly to produce).

"Operator error", classic.

You nuke fans always conveniently leave out the costs of cleaning up the mess that the civilian nuclear generation program has already created. Last I heard it was about half a $T.

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