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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear waste storage is a problem to be solved. But that potentially contaminates, at worst, a discrete area of the planet which can be managed around. Climate change contaminates the entire freaking planet.

If you aren't serious about nuclear power, you aren't serious about climate change. We should have nuclearized our grid decades ago. The US Navy has run reactors for over 50 years without incident. It can be done.

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Nuclear waste is already an effectively solved problem. Breeder reactors can recycle waste, since roughly 98% of the energy remains in the depleted fuel from light water reactors. This also reduces the volume of waste by a factor of 20X. Long term storage sites already exist for the remainder, e.g. Yucca Mountain.

Decades ago it certainly made sense. Even now if it can be done reasonably cheaply it should be done.

If it can be done cheaper with renewables and batteries, we should do that instead .

Over dependence on renewables and battery storage can be a strategic vulnerability, for example an extended stretch of cloudy and windless days. Freak weather events like hail can wipe out entire solar installations, cold snaps can disable wind turbines, batteries underperform significantly in extreme cold. And if we electrify everything, such as mandating electric stoves and heat pumps, then such an event would be a double whammy, since electricity demand spikes even more and most people won't have natural gas as a separate energy source. The Texas winter storm in 2021 is a cautionary example of what could happen.

Moreover, there's a distinct possibility of future weaponized weather modification, such as an enemy power releasing aerosols to reduce solar production, or saboteurs starting forest fires.

We should be able to model freak weather events and design around them. Having a geographically connected grid helps with this.

Smart grid. Right now there are multiple construction equipment rental facilities in my city. They all seem to have a row of quarter megawatt class towable generators ready for rental. They sit on a gravel parking lot and do absolutely nothing during an outage. Theoretically, if you fired up every unrented construction gen plus every stand by power generator at every large building, I think you could, in a distributed sense, temporarily generate several megawatts, maybe more than ten MW, in my home town. Yes it would be very expensive per KWH and eventually you'd run out of diesel, but for a couple days it would work. No wiring currently exists and no control systems exist although in theory this isn't any "worse", and probably a lot better, than having a couple MW of intermittent solar capacity. We will probably never get away from needing heavy construction equipment and needing backup generators so those will "probably" always be available in perpetuity. Maybe they'll switch from diesel to biodiesel, but it'll be the same idea. FWIW a quarter megawatt towable generator is smaller than you'd think, like 12 foot long trailer, MUCH smaller than a RV, if they were not all painted up as rental generators you'd think they're "landscaper trailers". They are HEAVY and take a dualie truck to tow, like "ten thousand pounds" with full tanks and very long and very large electrical cables, etc. A row of ten of them in a parking lot is not overly impressive looking until you realize that's 2.5 megawatts on tap, and these are industrial rated so they are designed to run full power 24x7 in the worst weather conditions. A year around long term average estimate is maybe 1.5 KW continuous per house so perhaps they could only run maybe ten thousand homes if they shut down every non-essential business and fired up every generator. However my city only has 30K homes so dropping demand by 1/3 would be "pretty helpful" for renewables if they can't quite keep up. If I owned an EV I would be happy to charge it down the road at 15 cents/KWh (towards the high end for my state) and discharge it into a failing grid for maybe $1.50 KWh, if I could get the cycle time down to an hour (very optimistic...) and I moved 100 KWh each time, I could make nearly $150/hr as an "electricity tank driver". Realistically I think a failing grid would bid up prices well over $1.50 so I think this quite reasonable... if every charger could be upgraded to backfeed into the grid then a fleet of EVs would be a huge source of mobile power.

The US Navy runs 50 MWe reactors inside billion dollar submarines. The requirements are almost entirely orthogonal to economically viable power reactors.

Dealing with the comparatively tiny amount of nuclear waste vs. continuing to pump billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere seems like an easy tradeoff.

Immobilize it in glass, stick it underground in a remote area.

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