Comment by kfrzcode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kfrzcode | Hacker News Reader

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Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality.

Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.

It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.

It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.

Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.

I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?

China has been running a side-by-side experiment building both nuclear and solar. Here's one rendering of the result:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1l5h5e2/sola...

Nuclear may be a big part of the future (assuming storage prices don't plummet) but it's not going to be the bulk of the power we ever receive. It'll be the 10% that stabilizes the grid and provides baseload, at most.

[0] A summary on ACX of a debate between nuclear and solar proponents; and

[1] The video of the debate itself.

I thought solar won.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-stu...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbypyd7HFPE

Also relevant given the post is also about fusion.

At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".

> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.

...

> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for ”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.

Uranium shortage, expensive builds, long timelines, unproven technology(no commercial molten salt deployments). Just do solar and batteries. It is way cheaper and proven. Going to get even cheaper when sodium batteries become mainstream, less than half the cost of lithium batteries.

The problem is that I don't trust corporations to run nuclear plants reponsibly; and if they fail to do so and I get hurt, then I don't trust society to take care of me or to hold the corps accountable.

I don't outright buy the claim that a "failure" results in you getting hurt. Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events. You're getting 3x the yearly radiation from one cross-country flight NYC to SF than you would if you lived at the gates of a nuclear power plant for a year.

You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.

Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.

I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.

>Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events.

Not at all.

Fukushima costs 7 billion per year now, after 15 years, with no end in sight. Boar with meat measuring over 30 000 bq/kg was shot 30 years after Chernobyl in areas over 1000 miles away.

The things that have already happened were not acute, immediate or local, they were wide-spread and long-lasting.

And they were far from the worst that could have happened. Imagine if the fire at Chernobyl was not put out, for example.

Financially and technically nuclear makes little sense since solar and batteries are faster to deploy and much cheaper.

Nuclear power is very interesting for nations and companies that want to extract money from the taxpaying population. Microsoft gets cheap electricity now, and when the US discovers that its promise to handle the waste and liability is crazy expensive, taxpayers will have to pay for it. Not Microsoft.

Politicians and corps generally want to start multi-billion dollar projects to deliver comparatively tiny amounts of electricity 10 years from now, because it's about the money today, not about the electricity tomorrow.

Don't fall for it. We want to build cheap, distributed, uncomplicated electricity ourselves, controlled by the people who consume it.

Even if nobody gets rich from selling electricity in that scenario, there's plenty of money to be made from consuming almost free electricity.

I'm just not sure we can trust the numbers in today's America. I'm sure it's safe if they are run responsibly, but we've already got stuff like Cancer Alley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley). I'm less worried about a disaster than I am about long term radiation exposure due to cut corners.

It's too expensive compared to solar with storage.

The numbers from published analyses are clear. The revealed preferences from local market participants and foreign geopolitical rivals strongly aligns with these analyses.

If Bill Gates wants to put his money into making it cheaper per Wh, then that's great, and I support him doing this.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Acres of battery parks on fire, near the Tianjin Gate.

What's with this narrative? There isn't some popular resistance holding nuclear back. The only thing holding them back is their own ineptitude.

> It's all proven technology

Literally none of the things you mentioned exist at commercial scale. It is the opposite of "proven". This technology is purely hypothetical.

There's a history of protests against nuclear power, so I don't think it's right to there isn't a popular resistance holding nuclear back.

Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.

There was popular resistance to nuclear, and nuclear was held back, but that doesn't mean nuclear was held back by popular resistance. It certainly doesn't explain why nuclear is struggling to compete with renewables globally, even in countries without popular resistance (like China).

McMurdo was powered by a modular reactor in the 60s. It's not "hypothetical" - though I do agree it's not economically scalable, but neither is training an LLM and before OpenAI did it DARPA did it, and you'd better believe the DOD did it too. I'm saying that the technology exists, it's been proven, and it can work - the hangup is political and cultural, and it burdens me with sadness to see conversation focus on things like "omg what if microsoft put clippy on an ICBM" it's appealing to ridicule and we've enough of that tendency these days. Instead we should celebrate this! Explore and discuss it from merit and principle.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...

I want to like nuclear, but it's clear that many of it's proponents are red-eyed bitcoin-maxis with that strange fanatical juvenile vibe going, and it all just turns me off because it's obvious they are spouting BS. It's all just an act to pump a penny stock or because they are an angsty teen.

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