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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t. To settle this, you basically need to look at what China is doing —- which is to build a lot of nuclear and then exponentially more solar and wind. We’re a huge percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges.

But it isn’t a competition. I’d be just as happy if things were going the other way. Having a clear mental model of the world is just useful. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...

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>look at what China is doing

China needs everything it can build and more. It's not much the what but rather where, when and how much that is crucial.

I don't get all that either, though I don't mind if nuclear is the future we'd just need to let go of the brakes on it. The other thing to look at is overall growth of each type - China is going ham on wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear yet they've still had to increase the total amount of power generated by coal, oil, and gas anyways. Graphs always predict something like https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.09.27/main.png but we really always end up with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ch...

Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.

About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.

I'm not sure what you're arguing that's different than what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that renewables are being deployed on an exponential (S-)curve and nuclear is not. Given the relatively short time frame we have to solve this issue, any viable solution must exhibit this exponential deployment increase.

(This does not mean we'll succeed. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. But any approach that doesn't have this shape is a disaster.)

If you actually care about this problem, the actual question is: how do we get nuclear onto that same exponential pathway that renewables are on? Fiddling around with our existing legacy nuclear plants is so inadequate to our emissions pathways right now that it's equivalent to surrender.

> There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t.

"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.

China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.

Have a Look at the statistics, before nitpicking. Solar and wind dwarfs nuclear in China and increasingly so.

"Once again, China's nuclear program barely added any capacity, only 1.2 GW, while wind and solar between them added about 278 GW."

Dwarfs is the most apt description. (~250x)

Nope. The devil is in the details.

You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.

And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.

Even considering the capacity factor solar and wind still grows by 60x compared to nuclear. And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“. You could manage the current grid with current chemical battery technology, levelized cost of electricity of that solution is cheaper than nuclear. And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.

The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.

Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.

> And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“.

Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).

And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.

> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.

Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.

It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.

BESS and solar are not on par with nuclear for several reasons: (1) there is a much faster construction pathway for solar+BESS than nuclear, (2) costs of both PV solar and BESS continue to go down every year, while nuclear doesn't have the same cost curve, (3) manufacturing capacity for solar and BESS continue to rise on the exponential piece of an S-curve (meaning, a consistent multiplicative increase every year) while nuclear construction rates don't look anything like that.

There is a root cause for this: both solar PV and battery storage can be mass-produced in factories, and current nuclear tech can't. If nuclear can get onto a similar growth trajectory, we'll be cooking.

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