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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.

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And that is very much a good thing.

No it's not. Our nuclear standards are so high that they have caused more radiation to be released because of demand shifting to coal.

That was then. Now we have other options, and they are good.

We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).

Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel. Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.

According to what?

We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.

> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.

I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.

Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?

Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.

> Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?

They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.

Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.

> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.

We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.

And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.

chernobyl affected a lot more then the exclusion zone, most of eastern europe... cancer rates spiked because of it... and it could have been a lot worse.

Effects are long term, hence question if you would live there now?, what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?, would you still live there?, would you live in Chernobyl city now?

When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.

In spite of this, there are reactors built with plans to extend (Romania with Cernavoda for example), but they cost a lot and take a long time to build, plus areas where they can be built are likely limited.

So it's not the standards that are the problem.

> cancer rates spiked

Still preferable to the amount of people killed by coal.

> what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?

You can avoid building adjacent to cities.

> would you live in Chernobyl city now?

Really? I go ahead and say I'll live next to it, so you move the goalpost to living in it?

Screw it. Fine. If it will get a lot of large nuclear plants built outside Asia, I'll trade a promise to live inside any disaster zone caused by not only them but any other plant built in the West this century. Is that good enough for you? Chernobyl itself was not an example of modern nuclear power and I'm not going there.

> When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.

Even setting aside the issue of being so cautious you cause harm in other ways, a lot of the precautions don't affect the odds of a big disaster!

> So it's not the standards that are the problem.

There's so much nitpicking on an individual plant basis, so I think they are a big problem.

I didn't see how "there are reactors built with plans to expand" is supposed to show that standards aren't driving the cost?

Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent. Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.

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