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Comment by thomasmg | Hacker News Reader

Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.

Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.

I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.

You can only spend a dollar once, so any money going into nuclear won't go into solar, wind, or hydro - which have far better payoff when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.

And in terms of sovereignty? Most solar panels come from China, don't they?

Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.

There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.

What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.

That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.

Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.

You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.

> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days

Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.

That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built.

> That overcapacity can come online a lot faster than new nuclear can be built

No, it can’t. We’re already building solar as fast as we can, the economics drive that. The marginal supply will come from something else. That margin is what we’re talking about, not the bulk. Most of the new energy will come from solar. But we can’t manufacture and install PVs quickly enough, particularly over the next 20 years, to close the gap.

So how do you propose the energy is supplied in the 20 years it would take for the first nuclear reactors to become offline? Let me guess: gas turbines?

So we either fully rely on gas turbines for the base load for the next 20 years, orrrr we rely on gas turbines during the few days it is both dark and wind-less for the next 20 years.

We have statistics on solar performance at the huge countries levels. And it shows that, in reality, we're talking about 20x overbuild. Not 3x and not even 10x. And there is no way around it.

Wind and solar anti-correlation does not lowering this number. Number is still 20x, just it's more rare now, but it is still there.

it'll still not work if you bothered to look at energy charts data for Europe. Plenty of 3+days of low capacity factor for solar+wind. No amount of realistic oversupply will save you there. "Wind and solar are anti-correlated." - just weakly, if you zoom in at hourly/minute production situation is different. New nuclear makes sense if you hate gas.

Those are all less safe than nuclear. It's a simple fact, look it up.

All the places that can use hydro already do. Oh, and it's pretty damaging to the environment, it turns out.

Wind and solar are pretty cool, but also unreliable, so it's not so clear that they're really cheaper after you account for overprovisioning and storage costs.

If only there was a safe and reliable source of energy we could use to complement them...

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

Lol-ed hard... If we look only at modern generation of tech, Gen3 nuclear plants are the safest source of power

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