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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane.

I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.

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Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.

I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.

But the wind &solar is highly dependant on rare earth minerals that China can limit at any time.

And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt.

It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.

China's happily selling panels so cheaply that you can use them for fencing material and still save money long-term. Batteries too. These things last decades. If they decide to cut you off you have at least 20 years to find alternatives.

Not once it's installed! And no such conditionality exists.

Batteries are more or less consumables, need occasional replacement. OTOH, fresh nuclear fuel can be stockpiled for decades.

Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core).

Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.

> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.

The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.

Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.

Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.

I can see why they'd hedge their bets.

The UK has massive wind resources up north. Absolutely no need for summer-to-winter storage, that would be madness!

This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour.

Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.

Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?

Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions.

[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.

To quote from the article I linked to:

> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.

Another quote from the article is

> If wild game or wild growing mushrooms are consumed in usual amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low.

> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 1,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.0025 millisievert.

The numbers and actual risks don't matter to change regular people's feelings about a technology. All they know is that there was actual nuclear fallout and now the mushrooms in their forests are radioactive.

I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.

If by "the coal industry" you mean people in charge of Chernobyl and Fukushima...

And Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island

Oh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D

See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown.

https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...

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