Hacker News Reader

Comment by mavhc | Hacker News Reader

Mostly replaced with gas, which is probably just as bad for climate change https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

View on HN

The graph in the article makes clear that isn't really true. Around half of coal use was replaced by natural gas in the 1990s, as you say. That's still a win - same energy, but half the CO2 emmisions. But since 2010 or so, the remainder of coal use was largely replaced by renewables.

Now we just need to get rid of the remaining natural gas use. For electricity production, the trend here is pretty good. Natural gas won't disappear anytime soon, but there will be longer and longer periods where none is burned. But for home heating, I don't think gas will be phased out as fast as really needs to be done.

> In 2010, renewables generated just 7% of the UK’s power. By the first half of 2024, this had grown to more than 50%

Electricity not power just to be pedantic. Most power is still from directly burning gas and oil.

At least it’s still lower on average than renewables at the moment [1]. I’m not sure what the current state of Nuclear Reactor construction is like, but hopefully we get some come online soon.

[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/

If no one has started any (other than mainly China? theres one in France) https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu..., why would they suddenly come online.

I feel like the internet hype machine for nuclear is like some dead hand machine gone wrong that doesn’t know nuclear is already dead.

It’s stories like these that tell us the United States wants to triple nuclear energy:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/americas-coal-communities-co...

And restarting closed plants is becoming a thing

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/30/michigan-nuclear-plant-final...

I have read these same stories about "doubling" or "trippling" nuclear for more than 20 years.

In that 20 years there has been ~0 increase in US nuclear power generation, and in the UK it has halved.

Yeah, people wanted to greatly reduce CO2 emissions. The renewable crowd said we didn’t need it.

Now we’re way behind in reducing emissions. All these stories about AI needing electricity. Where’s the renewable solution?

Having worked in the industry, "the renewable crowd" were heavily pro nuclear.

Clean coal, clean gas, carbon capture, and the "nothing bad happens when you burn coal I would happily live next to a coal power plant" crowd are the real issue. That's the grift that keeps on grifting.

Actually nuclear has negative growth at this point. There are a lot of aging plants coming up for either closure or expensive investments needed to keep them going a bit longer.

>No new U.S. nuclear plants are currently being built.

If it was a good idea, plants would be being built. People with much more expertise than us have crunched the numbers and they can’t make it work. It’s too expensive and that’s why there are no new plants being built. No amount of internet proselytizing will change this.

Completely missing our emissions goals will change this attitude.

Both politicians and investors are too short-term in their motivations to use their actions to teach us anything.

It's clear the future is unreliable renewable (solar+wind) and batteries, with some pumped/hydro where it is geologically feasible. Because the renewables are so cheap to build, and the cheap renewables cause over-supply and the batteries are a cheap-steadily-getting-cheaper solution to that.

The tipping point comes when we need to start phasing out the base power for overnight and long bouts of bad weather.

So the pricing game to be made is, can nuclear be built cheap enough to compete with batteries for long-term base power?

Most likely to me is that nuclear will survive in places with worse weather (Nordic countries where the sun goes down for 3 weeks in winter) or poor geography (Japan), and sunnier places (like Texas, or most of the US even) will go full renewable+battery.

Culture war. The left is against nuclear so the right wants it.

Of course it never actually goes anywhere because money has no ideology only reality. Just years of studies and bureaucracy.

Hinckley point C is under construction in the uk and on track for 2026 opening

Edit: potentially delayed by some years

Definitely delayed to at least 2031 and probably beyond. It was never really on any track other than for the inevitable delays and budget overruns.

'Mostly' isn't true over the last decade which is the period of the most recent big shift from Coal.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix-uk

That graph shows gas is the most used fuel in the UK for all years since coal was the most

Mostly replaced implies >50% which is not the case. Gas is the most used fuel but has not 'mostly replaced' coal.

It's approx 50%, and it's more than any other.

1991 Coal 62% Gas 1.72% 2023 Coal 1.28% Gas 31.71%

So Coal dropped 60.72, Gas rose 30, oh no, it's slightly less than 50%, my point is invalid

Probably not.

https://group.met.com/en/mind-the-fyouture/mindthefyouture/n...

That one looks only at carbon emissions, which is not the main issue with Natural gas. The problem is that since it's a gas it leaks and natural gas in the atmosphere is a very very potent greenhouse gas.Though ofcourse over time in will break down to simple co2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com