Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

“There’s a very decent chance you can do that with wind and solar,”

It is so pathetic that Standford professor spreads this kind of crap. No, wind and solar will not save us, as on majority of our planet we have long period of time without wind and solar.

Unpredictability of solar/wind energy forces to use something to balance the grid. Which, typically, has to be gas, as only gas power station has sufficiently fast start/stop cycle (about 1h in case of modern installation, lignite power plant has several hours cold start, coal power plant even more).

And gas means CO2 emission, even though in some countries, which were buying gas from Russia through Nord Stream, it was considered to be "ecological", similarly like "biomass", that is burning wood and corn (and as we all know burning wood does not emit CO2, right?).

In addition, this is economical idiocy. When there is too much wind/sun, you need to pay producers to stop producing, not to overload the grid. When there is no wind/sun you need to buy energy paying overpriced spot prices. That's why "renewable energy champion" - United Kingdom has the most expensive energy on the planet.

We have one ecological, 100% CO2 emission free, source of energy - nuclear energy (check France if you don't believe it works).

But how Standford professor might promote nuclear power plants when for long, long years all major universities and organizations, with Greenpeace on the head, were fighting nuclear energy, leading to the shitty situation we have now.

10 years ago anyone who wanted to work on nuclear energy research were treated like Holocaust denier, so there was almost no development of new tech in that area.

And now exactly the same people, who were telling us how bad is nuclear energy, are telling us to use wind/solar. What can go wrong...

> "nuclear energy (check France if you don't believe it works)"

France's latest nuclear reactor, Flamanville 3, was finally connected to the grid in December 2024 after 17 years (!!) of construction beset by problems, delays, and massive cost overruns.

Nuclear can be part of the solution, but renewables are much cheaper and faster to build. So for every $/€ spent, you are achieving more CO2 reduction, much more quickly, by building renewables compared to building new nuclear.

US Navy has been building, commissioning, operating nuclear submarines successfully, literally every years for at least past two decades. The sub reactors are PWRs, only built with unadulterated high purity Uranium.

The "problems, delays, overruns" is basically euphemism for political sabotaging. I can't feel so sympathetic to those in denial of that.

It's just hot rocks boiling in a pressure cooker. 1940s technology. Not 1940s as in Portal timeline. Making assumptions that there must be complicated technical challenges that cannot be overcome or could delay construction as long as 17 years to mitigate is just stupid.

When you can spend $2 billion to provide electricity for 150 people then it works fine. I'm not sure many cities would be happy with that though!

Maybe, but it's definitely not delayed 9 or 17 or how many years. I don't know where your $2b number comes from but it's also not trillions. Nukes just work, for USN, which is about the most secure, rational, effectively bureaucratic organization in the history of humanity.

The US has long sabotaged, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, nuclear development efforts of everyone but itself. Especially fuel recycling which scalably yield nuclear warhead materials. One could say call it a noble act, but the resultant "problems, delays, overruns" aren't indicative of true potential of the technology.

See where kragen had to find negative examples from, those are "enemy" states of the US. How convenient is that.

> I don't know where your $2b number comes from

Just an estimate of the reactor cost based on the overall boat cost. If you have a better estimate feel free to share.

You'll note that the US Navy, despite this extensive experience and relative immunity to political sabotage, has not replaced its diesel fleet [correction: fossil-fuel-powered turbine fleet] with a nuclear fleet. Neither have the French, British, Chinese, Indian, Russian, or PRC navies, all of which have nuclear submarines. The Russian navy, which has built more nuclear submarines than any other, is actually transitioning to fewer kinds of nuclear-powered ships. That's because nuclear power is more expensive than diesel power, which in turn is more expensive than solar and wind power.

Moreover, it turns out that years-long construction is also the norm for naval nuclear power; for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borei-class_submarine says:

> The launch of the first submarine of the class, Yury Dolgorukiy (Юрий Долгорукий), was scheduled for 2002 but was delayed because of budget constraints. The vessel was eventually rolled out of its construction hall on 15 April 2007 in a ceremony attended by many senior military and industrial personnel.[11] Yuriy Dolgorukiy was the first Russian strategic missile submarine to be launched in seventeen years since the end of the Cold War. The planned contingent of eight strategic submarines was expected to be commissioned within the next decade, with five Project 955 planned for purchase through 2015.[12]

> Yuriy Dolgorukiy was not put into the water until February 2008. On 21 November 2008 the reactor on Yuriy Dolgorukiy was activated[13] and on 19 June 2009, the submarine began its sea trials in the White Sea.[14] By July 2009, it had yet to be armed with Bulava missiles and was therefore not fully operational, although it had been ready for sea trials on 24 October 2008.[15]

> On 28 September 2010 Yuriy Dolgorukiy completed company sea trials.

And on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_094_submarine:

> A Type 094 was photographed by commercial satellites in late 2006 at the Xiaopingdao Submarine Base.[9] The first commissioned in 2007[1] and six were in commission in 2020.[5] They began nuclear deterrence patrols in December 2015.[10]

Admittedly, that's only 9 years rather than 17 years.

So, in fact, there are complicated technical challenges that create many-year-long delays. And they are not due to "political sabotaging". In cases like nuclear warfare where there is no alternative to nuclear power, it can clearly be made to work, but so far nobody has figured out how to make it economically competitive with other energy sources in situations where they are viable. That's a technical challenge nobody has been able to overcome yet.

When you talk about US "diesel fleet" are you talking about the surface fleet or submarines? Cause surface ships use gas turbines and jet fuel, not diesel. The Navy got rid of nuclear surface ships, except for aircraft carriers, in late 90s cause they were expensive.

If you are talking about submarines, the US Navy hasn't had diesel submarines since 1990.

I'm sorry, I assumed the US Navy ship engines burned bunker fuel like container ships, in diesel engines like those Wärtsilä makes, rather than using turbines. Thank you for the correction. I was talking about primarily the surface fleet, but also didn't know the US had eliminated their non-nuclear submarines, which I have to admit undermines my point somewhat!

The last US Navy diesel submarine, USS Dolphin (AGSS-555), was decommissioned in 2007.

And not all Navy surface ships are nuclear or turbine powered. Many classes of US Navy surface ships are diesel-powered, including some of the newest ones. Ships with gas turbine engines typically feature diesel powerplants also.

You miss listing so many alternatives:

1. Building better/more transmission lines interconnecting carbon-intense grids with low-carbon ones. This is cheaper than ramping up nuclear, and will needed regardless of the technology.

2. Batteries are becoming more and more efficient. One can even mine with electric excavators.

3. Wind and solar not necessarily need to be connected to the grid initially. Look at ERCOT. This incentivizes demanding moving where electricity is generated, specially in small countries. Look at the UK.

You still do not solve the issues with nuclear waste (10k year problem) and its high prices (LCOE). Also, you cannot build nuclear everywhere, specially in the emerging world. We need a mix of solutions, there is no silver bullet in this situation.

> (check France if you don't believe it works)

France's nuclear provider has incredibly high debts, which is only possibly because they are state backed. So no, nuclear energy does not work economically.

Respectfully, who cares? Humanity needs electricity, and "cost" is an entirely made-up thing. "Sorry, it was too expensive to save civilization" is going to be the most obnoxious epitaph for Homo sapiens...

Solar and wind energy has a problem, which is storage. We have not yet developed a competitive solution to store energy on commercial scale that works everywhere.

Nuclear energy is stable but generally quite costly per kWh compared to renewable energy.

Nuclear energy and renewables in combination balances out disadvantages. Nuclear energy reduces the need for energy storage solutions in renewables by providing a base load, while renewables would enable cost-efficiency in even quite energy demanding uses (e.g. carbon capture, generating methane etc.).

Is it 2015?

You can buy 10x as much solar+battery as nuclear these days. Nuclear is simply too complex and dangerous to compete.

Yeah when it comes to these discussions, I think most people are unaware just how much the cost of solar & BESS (at the large scale) has fallen in the past couple years.

The battery installed along solar farms is usually on the order of hours of energy delivery though. Like 5 hours. It’s fine, but not everyone will be able to ornaffors to buy electricity on when it is cloudy and still for a few days.

Battery capacity for how long?

You are talking about a statistical value not a deterministic one.

So it is solar+battery which is sufficient for n% of typical years.

I love how your response conveniently ignores any mention of energy storage technologies, several types of which are having rapid technological advancement.

You’re right that there has been huge advancements but there’s still a pretty brutal economic cost with it. I generally use the Tesla Megapacks as an easy example because prices and specs are easy to find on Wikipedia (and my local utility is testing them, so it’s relevant to me).

A Megapack 2XL can output ~2MW and has a capacity of ~4MWh for $1.39M.

A GE BWRX-300 is rated for 300MW and an 18-24 month refueling cycle and allegedly costs ~$1B.

You can build 150x Megapacks for $208M to match that 300MW output, but there is only enough energy stored to provide that output for two hours. If you want to provide 12 hours capacity (to run through the night), you need 900 units at a cost of $1.25B. That’s just for the storage though, you still need the source of electricity to charge the packs, overprovisioned to deal with the capacity factor issues that solar and wind have.

Will the nuclear plant go over budget? Almost certainly. Will it then provide a long-term baseline source of power? Also yes.

I’m pro-renewables and pro-storage, but there’s a mix needed here. Even with storage tech, there needs to be something else that can just sit there and run and produce reliable and controllable power output long-term.

Some Solar and wind farms I’ve seen have capacity factors about 30%, and run of river hydro commonly 30-40%

Right, so that means that to produce 300MW reliably from the solar or wind farms you'd need about 900MW nameplate capacity. I'd be really curious about the solar side of it too and whether that 30% is overall or just during daylight. Either way, you end up having to overprovision the unreliable sources such that you have enough capacity to both charge your battery pack and provide power to the grid.

30% overall, including night time. Honestly seems high to me and makes me wonder if they have overprovisioned panels vs the maximum allowable injected power to get a better capacity factor.

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