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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

energy development is complex, but it cannot be your idea, which boils down to, "whatever is cheapest," especially for government policy. it would be cheapest to not use energy at all, which is the exact opposite of the mercenary POV you are talking about, without having to use the word environment at all.

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It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.

But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price

Why do you think your particular mercenary point of view does not prevail? Because people are stupid?

I like nuclear. The funny thing about nuclear power and the mercenaries promoting their startups about it is, you will still have to convince democrats about it. Because occasionally they are in power, and nuclear, as is often criticized, takes a long time to build and a short time to turn off haha.

The problem is you build all of these offshore wind turbines and none of them are lowering our bills. As a politician I would try and lower my constituents' bills

> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants.

Close, but one minor correction.

Multiple studies have found that it would be cheapest to DEstruct coal plants.

Literally demolishing them and replacing them with battery + solar is more cost effective than continuing to operate them in 99% of cases.

In New England, where the offshore wind is being shut down, there is very little sun right now. How will solar + battery help in New England?

Germany is mostly north of the 49th parallel and has deployed over 100GW of capacity. New England would do just fine.

> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.

“Cheap” only if you exclude indirect costs due to emissions (both localized effects and less-localized.)

> we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear

nuclear is not renewable (it is low carbon, a feature that is also true of renewables in general, but it is not, itself, a renewable.)

> nuclear is not renewable

It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors. Over 95% of the existing 'waste' could also be consumed by breeders.

> It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors reduce long-term waste issues, but they don't make nuclear renewable.

They push the timeline out so far that it's effectively renewable. The sun will burn out at some point, too, but we don't say solar is non-renewable.

We don't say solar is non-renewable because using every single available bit of solar today has no impact on the solar energy available tomorrow. This is not true of nuclear, even if you increase the total quantity of available fission-derived energy by 50 or 100 or whatever the outer estimate is for breeder reactors compared to non-breeder fission.

Based on the math in this paper[1] there's enough uranium floating around to keep the planet running on the order of hundreds of millions of years at modern energy consumption levels. The price of the material would go up compared to what it costs currently, but the raw material costs are a small fraction of bottom line anyway.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...

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