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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t the outcome be similar to if France had used a lot of Gas generation instead of having those temporarily-shut down reactors?

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A cheaper alternative could have been solar for example. I don't mind keeping our nuclear capacity (it's certainly better than coal) while we switch to renewable and find good (eco friendly) and cheap storage but I don't really see it as a good target for producing the majority of our energy given the downsides.

On this, another funny story that pro nuclear also don't mention: this summer when it was very hot (and electricity demand for AC was high) they had to shut down several reactors because the cooling river would have been over heated too much. People criticize renewable for not being available all the time (which is indeed a problem without storage) but here thankfully solar saved the day by being available when it was needed.

Last thing that people tend to forget when they criticize ecologists views on nuclear: part of many ecologist program is to make it so that we use less energy. Heating and cooling poorly insulated housing is wasteful and stupid. Having everyone having their own transportation mean rather than having collective and energy efficient transportation system or having housing too far from commodities such that people can't walk or bike to them is also wasteful. And AI... Bref, let's fix that then maybe we won't need that much nuclear power in the end.

If environmentalists had adopted nuclear as one of the renewables we would be burning a tiny fraction of the gas and coal we burn today.

Haha as if anyone cared about what environmentasist think. Gaz or nuclear are choosen for reasons that have nothing to do with environment (like whatever fuel is convenient to get for the given country and is pushed by the local financial interests). If environmentalists were listened a bit, we would be using a fraction of the energy we use, regardless of how it's produced. The only clean energy is the one we don't use / produce.

This is revisionist history.

We invested massively in nuclear power in recent decades? Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto, Flamanville were the west ensuring nuclear investment while at the same time investing in the nascent renewable sector.

In total something like a ~$100-200B investment in nuclear technology. The nuclear investment evidently did not pan out.

How much more should we have spent? Should we just push through no matter the cost even though we have cheaper alternatives?

If we had invested all that public funding into renewables instead of nuclear since the 40s we would have had plentiful renewables decades earlier. Nuclear misadventures had a very high opportunity cost.

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