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Comment by hollowturtle | Hacker News Reader

All I see is missed opportunities to build a bunch less nuclear power plants and call it a day, without messing up with the landscape. Am I the only one? I believe if we Europeans and Americans start building nuclear power plants again we could finally compete. Renewable energy is not constant and has a storage problem

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I also lament the landscapes covered by solar panels. Even deserts are not dead barren ecosystems. Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.

But I get it, and tradeoffs are necessary.

Another reason China may prefer this to more concentrated nuclear power is that is is much more distributed and resilient to targeted attacks.

>Some of these installs are only slightly better than paving the whole area.

Utter horseshit.

Putting up what amounts to a bunch of shade on steel pillars just doesn't harm the environment. There are more than a few contexts where it improves the environment.

There's no identified or predicted harm from large scale photovoltaic installations.

If nuclear plants were as inexpensive as renewables, that would make a ton of sense.

France decarbonized way before the rest of Europe with nuclear and it wasn't expensive. 50 reactors for $200 billion. Gernamy has spent twice that on intermittents and still relies on coal

Such a tired point. It’s not the 1970s anymore, and the west can build any large projects cheap. Go look at the projected costs for France’s new fleet, and that’s before the inevitable cost overruns

Could you post a link to those projected costs?

"EDF estimates EPR2 programme cost at EUR72.8 billion"

France's EDF has said its preliminary cost estimate for the project to build six EPR2 reactors at Penly, Gravelines and Bugey totals EUR72.8 billion (USD85.3 billion).

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-estimates-ep...

Each reactor outputs 1650 megawatts of electricity running at full power. Assuming they run at 92% capacity factor, that's $9.38 per real annualized watt.

Great. So 538TWh per year is 61 GW so roughly 61 GW * $9.38 = $576 billion staggered over the 80 year life of nuclear plants is $7.2 billion per year of capital expenditure.

For comparison, wind is about $5/W. Assuming a 35% capacity factor and a 30 year expected lifetime for the latest turbines that comes to $10.0 billion per year of capital expenditure with no storage or fossil backup systems or extra capacity given weather variability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France

PV solar is between $.97 and $1.16 per watt, so that's going to be the front line. With storage you can get from $1.60 to $2. This is already the bulk of the power generation in Europe and is only going to increase. The idea that you're going to run nuclear plants at 95% capacity factor economically is also very suspect in a continent saturated with cheap PV solar.

US NREL Puts it at $2/W with no storage and ~20% capacity factor. Lifetime of latest panels is unknown but optimistically is 25 years. Assuming perfect and free storage that comes to $24.4 billion per year of capital expenditure for a country the size of France to be 100% solar. So no, it would not be more economical to use solar over nuclear. Wind would be better but when you add the full system costs of storage and backup intermittent heavy systems are vastly more expensive and emit more carbon than nuclear ones. https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...

Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.

See “Market matching costs” here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

At least half of people I talk to are strongly opposed to nuclear energy. How many are opposed to the current sources of energy as well? I wonder.

Agree they oppose nuclear, perhaps because of the fear of the unknown radiation or whatever. Reality is all nuclear incidents combined are nothing compared to the health problems oil and gas created(not to mention political implications). To me filling a giant space with solar panels or installing giant bird killing turbines is such a moronic move when you can have unnoticeable small nuclear power plants

> bird killing turbines

If you think wind turbines are a significant cause of bird deaths it shows that you have no clue what you're talking about. Please don't bother commenting on this topic again.

Not as many as cats I certainly know that, it obiovusly was an hyperbole used to underline that all we need is just a nuclear power plant to replace all that wind turbines

Our study, covering 45 species across 91 countries, reveals that human-induced factors—predominantly electrocution, illegal killing, and poisoning—constitute the major threats to bird mortality, highlighting a critical issue in global biodiversity conservation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...

and from last year, US specific, endangered species:

A comparative assessment with data from the 2010 Red List reveals an increase in the proportion of threatened species recorded as being impacted by certain threats. Notably, the incidence of hunting and trapping as a documented threat has increased from 34% to 41% of threatened species. Similarly, the proportion of species assessments with fire/fire suppression, climate change, pollution, invasive alien species and energy production have each increased by 3-5 percentage points.

https://datazone.birdlife.org/articles/state-of-the-worlds-b...

Wind turbines are a significantly lower threat than windows, look it up!

Compete with what? Is this more American shadowboxing?

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