Comment by leonidasrup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leonidasrup | Hacker News Reader

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If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.

Nuclear industry is running with very high quality standards, this requires very good training, good maintenance. In this aspects, nuclear industry is similar to aircraft industry.

Solar panels are cheap to install, wind turbines are not so cheap to install.

Solar panels are cheap to maintain. Maintenance of offshore wind turbines is very expensive, therefor offshore wind turbines are more expensive, build with higher quality, than onshore wind turbines - so they require less frequent maintenance.

I assume you are from US. The big difference between US and Europe energy landscape is the cost of natural gas, Europe pays 4-5x higher prices for natural gas then US. When solar power don't supply electricity (at night or under cloud cover) and wind has slow speeds (can happen for multiple weeks) some countries from Europe can use hydro-power (Norway, Austria, Switzerland), some countries can burn coal (Poland, Germany), but most European countries have to burn very expensive gas.

The biggest source of electricity in Europe in the year 2025 was natural gas.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

>If you think nuclear facilities are complicate I would suggest to look into facilities used to manufacture polycrystalline silicon for solar panels, or facilities for manufacturing gas turbines used in gas power plants.

That's an unfair comparison. We are talking about operational costs, not capital costs. A fair comparison would include nuclear's capital costs, which don't do it any favors - nuclear plants also need fancy turbine blades.

Not that I'm against nuclear, I think we're completely mad to be still burning (burning! so primitive!) ancient plants, coming up on a century after Magic Energy Rocks were discovered. "Cost" is a fickle metric when so many costs are externalized in both space and time - nobody cares if the effects of pollution are felt years down the line, thousands of miles away.

But it's funny that governments throw wildly generous subsidies and special legal treatment at domestic food production, correctly perceiving cheap reliable food as upstream of a functioning society, yet fail to similarly "overinvest" in energy sources for machines as well as humans. I hazard that most of the European countries that depended heavily on Russian gas would not have been so blase if their population had been subsisting off Russian food imports.

We should be building out tremendous energy capacity using every conceivable technology available. Any country that does this is virtually guaranteed wealth, for energy is fungible with almost everything else. The equation is so obvious that failure to do so implies regulatory capture by entrenched energy interests. "Too cheap to meter" belongs in the same rhetorical bucket as "Perfect sound forever" - a promise that was retracted as soon as it became clear that scarcity was more profitable than abundance.

I thought you talked about the impression of solar energy being simple and nuclear energy being, in comparison with solar, complicated.

Solar power, wind power, hydro power, nuclear power are all heavy on capital costs and light on operational costs. The capital costs to build a nuclear power plant are about the same as the total operational costs of the nuclear power plant over it's entire lifetime (60 - 80 year).

The turbine blades for a water cooled nuclear power plant are similar technology to turbine blades in coal power plant. (Newest coal power plant turbines are even more demanding, because the newest coal power plant utilize ultra-supercritical steam cycles, with temperatures and pressures much higher than conventional nuclear power plants). Turbine blades for turbines in gas power plants, operating at even higher temperatures than coal power plants, are examples of the most advanced metallurgy.

https://www.gem.wiki/Coal_power_technologies

We are burning ancient organism, with every year increasing amounts.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Because most of the worlds population lives with lot less energy than developed countries, we can assume that total energy demand will increase a lot in future.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked

"Cost" is only one metric, but many other many externalized costs connected to energy generation are hard to quantify and compare. Like impacts of nickel mining in Indonesia, lithium extraction in Chile, rare earth refining in China.

"In 2024, nickel mining and processing was one of the main causes of deforestation in Indonesia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_mining_in_Indonesia

https://ttfpower.com/chiles-lithium-mine-powering-the-future...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...

Some of the externalized costs are quite political sensitive

https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr...

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-...

>> Solar power, wind power, hydro power, nuclear power are all heavy on capital costs and light on operational costs

I'm not sure I agree. Firstly, I can get solar panels without building a solar panel factory. Hence the capital cost of a solar farm is cheap. I can't buy a nuclear power plant off the shelf.

Equally on the running cost, solar costs pretty much nothing to run. I'd argue that the costs to run a nuclear plant are substantial. Plus I need highly skilled people on-site permanently. With solar I need skilled people to install (skills easily taught) but I don't need permanent engineers on site.

> I can't buy a nuclear power plant off the shelf.

China will build it for you, and has. Not OTS, but still something you write a check and a spec for, and you get it made.

How much of your yearly electricity amount can you get from the installed solar panels?

How much do you need get from electric grid, from non-solar power plants?

Try to scale this to a whole country.

Currently I generate about 66% of my annual power requirements with solar alone. If I had even a small 10kw battery I'd be moving that closer to 80%.

But demand for base load is irrelevant to my thesis. My point is that financially it makes no sense. So private capital aren't interested. [1]

So that leaves govt. They could decide (especially in regulated markets) to ignore Financials and build it anyway. Which is great, except govts are typically really bad at large capital projects that span multiple administrations.

[1] private capital cam get involved if the govt signs guaranteed income contracts. It's a model that puts the bad Financials on the govt (hence the people) while the govt avoids the pain of building. This model typically works as well as you might suspect.

Ultimately what we (the customer) want or need is irrelevant. The real world revolves around the money. And the only way to make the money work is to make the customer pay a lot.

The base-load question is solved with better, cheaper, storage. Not expensive power stations.

You would still need and have to pay for an electric grid for the rest 20% of your electric demand. How much would it cost to go to 100% solar+battery?

Governments can't ignore Financials, because in the end all money is just a payment for human labor and physical materials needed to realize a project. Successful governments do invest in long term infrastructure, like highways, bridges, hydro dams, but they have pay for this project by taxes, or they can borrow money from private investors and pay the investors with future taxes.

See for example the financing of The Hoover Dam:

"Hoover Dam was built for a cost of $49 million (approximately $1 billion adjusted for inflation). The power plant and generators cost an additional $71 million, more than the cost of the dam itself. The sale of electrical power generated by the dam paid back its construction cost, with interest, by 1987."

https://hoover.archives.gov/hoovers/hoover-dam

There are many places (mostly sunny and dry places) in the world where solar+battery can supply large part of electricity demand for 100$/MWh. Is this cheap? Yes, if you compete with European electricity prices, not when you compete with Chinese electricity prices (88$ / MWh).

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-industrial-power-...

Will China invest in large amounts of battery storage, or will it rely on cheap coal power to complement solar power? They do invest a lot in hydro power, which can be seen as energy storage. India and Bangladesh are quite unhappy with this development.

https://www.abc.net.au/asia/china-plans-to-build-world-large...

My hope was that we could get SMRs in play to replace every coal power plant's furnace with a couple SMRs to leverage the existing infra (turbine/generator/grid hookup) and stop burning coal. Now.

I know the numbers aren't the best for SMRs as far as efficiency or LCOE, but it would give us baseline power and an ability to cut away from fossil fuels for the grid much faster than building bespoke plants (which have a horrible record in the US).

> The biggest source of electricity in Europe in the year 2025 was natural gas.

Closely followed by nuclear.

In the first half of 2026, nuclear was the #1 electricity source in Europe, by quite a margin.

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