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Comment by testing22321 | Hacker News Reader

I’d much rather look out across a city and see solar panel islands rather than a coal smoke stack belching smoke, a nuke cooling tower or a massive dam.

Just because old school power generation is often out of sight, it shouldn’t be out of mind

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I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams. They're majestic in the same way ancient pyramids are majestic. On top of being useful infrastructure and not just oversized landscaping pieces.

Trivial national production compared with a single dam.

The problem with dams is that for the most part in the West all the good sites near population centers have been taken. In developing countries you have the issue of new dams potentially making older downstream ones less useful, which is now a real conflict point with Egypt vs Sudan vs Ethiopia, Afghanistan vs Iran, China vs India and SEA, etc.

In addition, because silt will back up in reservoirs there are an increasing amount of old dams where removal makes more sense than spending more money on dredging and maintaining the dam; and with droughts becoming more common hydro is not as reliable for baseload anymore.

I don't mind nuclear. Good for base load.

Base load becomes very expensive under free and fair market conditions. The reason is simple: wind and PV are extremely cheap, and surplus capacity costs little. PV module price in EU is just 0.086 UDS/W fob. Wind turbine price in China ~2200Yuan/kW inclusive tower.

In a free market, this leads to attractive conditions for batteries, and that is where the problem of base load begins: there is a lack of real demand, and base load then remains unused because its OPEX cannot compete with wind and PV.

There's just one problem. There is virtually no free and fair market in the electricity market. Utilities lobby very successfully for highly regulated markets to protect their monopolies. Nuclear power requires massive government protection from competition, which makes it attractive to utilities.

This is a prediction of the future, not an observation about the present / past like it's phrased as.

no, this are real world prices

https://www.infolink-group.com/spot-price/ https://wind.in-en.com/html/wind-2462559.shtml (chinese example)

BESS 5MWh 52 USD/kWh: https://www.metal.com/Battery-Cell-And-Module/202407100001

Yes, electricity is becoming very cheap in China, and it will be difficult for the West to keep up here. Exorbitant US tariffs are also counterproductive, as they only serve to secure monopoly profits for old utilities.

We are already cresting that hill. It’s happening now. It’s not happening everywhere, but it’s already happening.

Nuclear is attractive? Are we living on the same planet? I wish it was attractive but it’s quite obviously the opposite.

If you assume nuclear is only a 3 Mile Island waiting to happen, you're out of date.

You’re preaching to the choir here, I know nuclear is good and safe, but most people really don’t.

Base load is something of the past. Base load does no longer exist as such as during daytimes the solar curve will / should push it to zero as surplus capacity is cheap. Running base load plays at night is then also no longer sensible.

> ”I don't mind nuclear. Good for base load.”

Everyone who has an electricity bill or pays taxes should be against new-build nuclear power because it is pretty much the most expensive way to produce electricity. You should instead lobby for wind, solar, and even closing coal power plants in favour of modern natural gas plants. All of those will cut more emissions, more quickly, per dollar spent.

But, is that what the average ratepayer wants? I personally want cheaper, more reliable power over any feelgood emission metrics.

I install solar on my rooftop because BESCOM is ripping me off, and net metering would occur help me get my bill to zero.

No I'm 100% in factor of lots of new build nuclear. It's only expensive because it's rare. The more we build the cheaper it becomes. And it does not have the issues like wind and solar and even gas.

Given the trend line of the cost of renewables + storage, by the time you’ve built one if you start now we could’ve done it cheaper and easier with renewables in most locations in the world.

Let's also not forget about the haze of photochemical smog everywhere there are combustion vehicles.

Today I walked by someone dropping off people from his diesel VW Passat B6. You could smell that thing from afar and it bothers me that it's still considered roadworthy.

Diesel particles are heavy.

What if we designed nuclear cooling towers to be more aesthetic? Maybe it would become desirable to see.

What’s wrong with a nuke cooling tower?

I admit this is subjective, but they're giant ugly concrete chimney-like structures spewing stuff into the air. Sure, intellectually I know it's just water vapor and they're form is dictated by their function, but they look like they belong in some pollution riddled dystopian hellscape.

I'm actually pro-nuclear power, but the cooling towers are a pretty significant eyesore and a non-trivial downside. But apparently some people hate the way wind turbines look while I think they're sleek and futuristic looking, so taste as ever is subjective.

They’re elegant structures venting water vapor into the atmosphere. It looks like clean power. Way nicer than solar panels, which take up a lot of space.

Do you see any of those things now?

Personally, no. My brother does. My sister does.

Hundreds of millions of people do, and their health would improve if they didn’t.

I understand the complaint against coal power plants, but you're not saying that nuclear power plant or large dams cause health issues, right?

large dams do have pretty big environmental effects

None of them that impact people’s health.

Not even remotely true.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...>

And that's just the direct impacts from failure. Long-term environmental costs are real, if indirect.

I write this somewhat reluctantly as hydro is carbon-neutral,* and affords one of the better energy-storage options, as pumped hydro. Even allowing that dam failures tend to occur under regimes with significant organisational issues (low trust, low public concern, low levels of organisation, conflicted interests), dams have a pretty horrific track record for direct fatalities. Almost all those risks are mitigatable, and the underlying root cause (organisational dysfunction) would likely create similar risk patterns for other energy modalities. But we have a direct history to point to.

I've written on this topic a few times at HN should you or others be interested, I do hope my thoughts come across as nuanced, as they in fact are:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

‘Health’ is generally used to refer to things like pollution, etc. that cause long term chronic impacts.

Not individual sudden events which drown/murder massive numbers of people regardless of their general health status (except perhaps for their ability to run really fast and really far on no notice).

Those are referred to as ‘disasters’.

Public health includes drowning……

Yeah, individually. Like in pools.

Dam failures are an entirely different department. Or just FEMA/military.

Death is a health risk.

So are cholera and other diseases accompanying flooding.

And other factors associated with reservoirs: desertification and lake evaporation can lead to increased dust, common where water is diverted or impounded (Aral Sea, Lake Powell, Lake Mead). Disruption of silt flows has various impacts, more on the general environmental side.

Generally, if your concern is overall mortality risk rather than a specific disease/pollution mechanism, dams do not get a free pass.

The public health department doesn’t concern itself with things like national defense, if skyscrapers are likely to fall over or not, and local gang violence. Those have their own specialities.

Otherwise, literally everything is a ‘health issue’, including agriculture and commercial/residential zoning.

And notably, no one has actually provided any examples of where any of these are actually in major cities. Because it’s absurd, hah.

Nukes don’t often cause health issues, but from time to time…

I’m not aware of any sizable cities with coal smoke stacks, nuke towers, or visible large dams.

Are you?

Indeed. Both my brother and sister live in cities with those, and I’ve driving through literally hundreds on my way around the world

Examples/cite?

I haven’t seen an active smokestack with actual smoke in a city in decades, dams are where mountains are - and usually require the opposite terrain for a city, and no one builds nuke plants in major cities. That would be silly.

I personally don't know but I feel like, we also need to think of the environmental changes of something like solar batteries if we store the energy

There was a michael moore's documentary regarding climate change and I personally think that the best solution climate-wise speaking is probably nuclear but the whole world's sentiment is so regulated by lobby-ists which is why the cost of production of them and regulations shot up to an unreasonable amounts but the world was already transitioning to nuclear energies.

There are some new modular approaches to it which aren't as efficient but feel safer to the general public but nuclear is one of the most safest and compact sources of massive amounts of energy generation compared to solar and wind.

Nuclear Energy is cool.

Now am I right/wrong in saying this, let me know, I think I am right but I maybe wrong too, but its just that every expert I have seen on this topic really prefer's nuclear and my own "research" on this topic makes me feel the same really.

Somebody should write more clearly as to why nuclear is superior to solar and the others as a comment as I feel like I have written similar things atleast once more and maybe if there could be a nice website like why.nuclear or why-nuclear.net etc. which could give points of why nuclear is a superior form, it could be really great and I would love to hear more arguments both good and bad comparison with nuclear (primarily) and maybe comparing it with solar if somebody's an expert on this topic as I would love to hear an expert about it as well.

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