Hacker News Reader

Comment by vablings | Hacker News Reader

A nuclear power plant is a coal power plant except.

It has incredibly strict requirements for safety, we are talking SOP & Risk assesment for climbing up a 3ft ladder

There is a requirement for literally thousands of pounds of concrete to shield the reactor

The employees have to be highly qualified and trained.

The construction materials have to be validated, tested certified and then tested again during install to ensure conformance.

You must deal with spent fuel

They are not the same and cannot be retrofitted eitherways

View on HN

That's my point I'm trying to find a good argument for why modular nuclear is a good idea.

Can modular coal (which doesn't need all of that) beat solar? If not, then I don't know why modular nuclear would be able to.

It can provide power when solar and wind are not generating, and while doing so also provide base generation that allows the grid to be robust against fluctuations in solar and wind.

except it cant do that without going bankrupt. Nuke power costs too much, you have to be selling it at 100% 24x7 to have any chance of paying back the capex.

Modular nuclear is a great idea, sadly right now and in the foreseeable future solar is absolutely king in terms of cost/kWH, we should build what makes sense for our needs with regards to power in the USA then worry about other tech later considering the state of our grid.

But why is it a great idea if solar provides more power, more cheaply without any danger whatsoever?

Solar gives power in the wrong time, making the duck curve a thing, and requiring conflict prone minerals storing dangerous amount of powers to smooth out. On net, this is probably worth it, but solar isn't free as you claim.

> and requiring conflict prone minerals storing dangerous amount of powers to smooth out

Sodium batteries are available these days. No rare minerals, non-flammable, almost fully recyclable.

There are so many other methods aside from lithium batteries for grid scale energy storage.

One of my favorites is pumped storage hydro.

https://www.energy.gov/cmei/water/pumped-storage-hydropower

Pumped hydro is fantastically expensive, not all that efficient, and only works with extremely specific (and rare, aiui) geography. It also comes with the same ecological disasters as dams, displacing entire ecosystems or towns and producing a ton of methane emissions from the now-submerged and decaying plant life.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

A lot of the duck curve can be solved by tiny changes on the demand side. Uranium isn't exactly conflict-free either. Grid storage can also be done with sodium ion batteries or iron redox batteries - even better than the current EV-spinoff lithium ones.

Sure, solar isn't free, but most of the problems it faces aren't exactly insurmountable. In fact, we are already seeing those solutions being deployed in the world - mostly for economic reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com