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Comment by bigthymer | Hacker News Reader

> But largely, opinion polls are against the kind of action that would be useful. Nuclear, for example, is the only baseload tech we currently have at scale that doesn't burn carbon. It is widely opposed and public pressure has led to regulations blocking it or even expanding it.

The only country that seems to be having an honest conversation about how to adapt to climate change is France. They've been having society-wide conversations about it over the last few years and support for nuclear has gone up substantially.

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It's the Germans who are showing leadership in Europe. The French and Swedish have most nuclear, but not because of green policies. Just historical. Germany have had the "Energiewende", which everybody in the world should marvel at - but not enough know about. It's shat on, and public opinion even in Europe has been shaped against it. But it really is an 'energy turnaround'. It is leadership by taking unilateral action in the face of our common enemy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende

Don't know much about that policy but I frequently monitor electricity usage via https://app.electricitymaps.com and Germany has usually the highest carbon intensity electricity in western Europe. Getting rid of nuclear seems to have made things worse.

That's why it's called an 'energy turnaround' not an energy 180.

That's awesome thanks. Would be great if it also show'd what the average residential customer was paying as well as the average industrial users cost per kWh so we could get an idea of the cost of manufacturing as far as electricity input goes.

From that page:

> Germany phased out nuclear power in 2023 as part of the Energiewende,[4] and plans to retire existing coal power plants possibly by 2030

Why the fuck, when our biggest problem is co² emissions, would you close down nuclear first , increase coal and gas consumption and hand-wave to some future time when you hope to close coal plants.

I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based.

>I marvel at it alright! But obviously not for the same reasons you do. I think it's incredibly stupid, and likely driven by nutters in the Green party who are ideological (and fucking wrong) instead of pragmatic and science based.

Anti-nuclear sentiment has always been transversal in Germany. At the time of the shutdowns, the conservatives didn't specially love the plants, but with Fukushima, it was electoral death to support them. Someone farting inside a nuclear plant would have been a political scandal, so they weren't going to wait. The future (correctly) was green energy, and Russian gas didn't seem like a bad bridge; after all, foresight is 20/20. You would have been seen as a cold war holdout nutter for raising fears of Russian dependence.

HN always finds public distrust of nuclear to be solely ignorance and oil propaganda, but that's reductive. My (pregnant!) mother woke up one day in the Soviet bloc and suddenly everything fresh in the stores was gone. No explanation, just hushed rumors and "don't eat anything not out of a can." The explanation came a day later. I imagine it wasn't very nice being on the other side and having minimal info during the first days. That's something traumatic that stays with people, not merely a Koch brothers psyop.

Sure, the Soviets were reckless, but the worst was avoided. A couple of decades later, the people who lived during Chernobyl are older, time has passed, and public opinion relaxes. Then Fukushima happens, minimal info again, and every bad memory comes back. We get the info? Just fuckup after fuckup: they knew the sea wall was too low, diesel backups were badly designed, staff wasn't trained correctly, HQ wanted to stop seawater cooling during a meltdown to save equipment.

This was not a technical failure but gross human error in famously detail-oriented Japan. Every reassurance since 1986 about nuclear energy rang hollow. The time for the fail-safe wunder-reactors was the 2000s with a wide rollout.

There are many technical arguments showing that further development and rollout of nuclear energy was the correct choice after Chernobyl, but the public's worries were never "nutty."

Generally, it's popular for people who want to dunk on green energy to choose people who dunk on nuclear as an easy target.

I think we need more nuclear, but it's not realistic given the pricetag and these cogent arguments as why voters are not enamoured either.

Whatever about "more nuclear energy", yeah it has long timelines and sky high price tags.. but decommissioning working nuclear plants decades early and leaning hard on the coal? Sorry, that's fucking asinine populist bullshit. The Russians didn't cause this.

There's been a lot of talk about more nuclear in France. But talk is cheap, and financial commitment to new nuclear starts has been notably lacking. The problem, as always, is very high cost and low dependability of the nuclear construction process. The EPR was a disaster, so France would have to go with a redesign. This adds to the risk and reduces confidence in yet another set of assurances that this time it will be cheaper.

I predict France will inevitably slide over toward a renewable dominated grid, just like everyone else.

Nuclear isn't "baseload" because it's not load, it's supply.

Baseload demand does not need consistent supply. Google in the late 90's proved that reliable results may be created from unreliable components.

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