Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

echelon

How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents?

Vs. coal?

Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)

-----

Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here:

> Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.

Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?

Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?

View on HN

Per TWh, nuclear kills fewer people than solar, mostly because roofing is dangerous.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it.

A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.

Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

>A lot more utility solar has been installed since then.

Yes, utility solar is very safe. Unfortunately rooftop solar is much more dangerous and also much, much more costly. So one has to wonder why anyone supports the massive subsidies that are still given to rooftop solar.

Note that it's massively more expensive in the US than other nations due to paperwork and regulations. But even there it costs about the same as the low end of nuclear costs per KWh.

Adding it when building the home in the first place eliminates much of the cost and danger since you don't double up on a lot of things.

Thanks, that's the website I was originally looking for.

I agree it's close, and either way both are orders of magnitudes safer than coal.

yep. On the other hand, interestingly, most nuclear deaths are from Fukushima evacuation which wasnt necessary, due to too small dose

Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter.

Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.

Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.

it depends if you like gas firming or not. France doesnt. Germany loves it

> Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?

Yes.

(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)

If it was viable it would have happened already. We have a massive oversupply of solar and wind, particularly on the west coast. Generation is the easy part.

We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.

> If it was viable it would have happened already.

It is happening, all over the world, with a persistent and rapid growth curve.

> We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.

Better cut those tariffs on cheap Chinese batteries (and aluminium for the transmission).

Not that anyone would build one in the current political reality, but China produces enough aluminium that it would be viable to make a genuinely planet-spanning 1Ω power grid connecting your midwinter nights to someone else's midsummer days.

Viability is not just 'do the physical materials exist'. Building transmission in the US is almost entirely impossible at scale because he have no political will to do so and it's a regulatory nightmare. We can't just bury an entire mountain valley under 300 feet of water or evict a county of people to make room for a project like China can.

Ignoring the hard part and saying the aluminum exists is not even wrong, it's counterproductive. Until you solve the political component the materials might as well all be sitting on pallets in a warehouse, it doesn't help any.

Indeed; my example is intended to illustrate that the expense you experience isn't entirely necessary, but rather it is in a large part simply what America* chose.

* assuming I guessed the correct continent when you wrote "the west coast".

It's impossible for germany to have such a combo in any economical way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com