Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

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Those figures seem very optimistic. Uranium miners die early, often of horrific cancers.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232447/

But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.

Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.

IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.

Thanks for the reply! I think you're arguing with the wrong person in the second half, though. I agree that renewables could potentially be more economically viable than nuclear power[1]. My reply was disputing the "people can die from nuclear therefore we should never use nuclear" argument, not arguing about economic viability. Also I think that broadly claiming that your opposition is "completely irrational" is not a very tactical rhetorical move.

[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point

Again I don't know why people do this framing that its either renewables or nuclear. We can and should develop and have both - they provide different energy products to the grid. Solar and storage ARE NOT viable at scale for 99.99% uptime requirements or industrial facilities that are in remote locations.

Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.

Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)

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