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Comment by cup | Hacker News Reader

Why bother with Nuclear power when renewable energy is already capable of providing many of our energy needs (and efficiency will only improve in the future).

I know tech heads love Nuclear and love to go on about how safe it is in this day and age but it still leaves us with significant and dangerous waste which our great great great grand children will inherit.

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No non-CO2 emitting energy system is currently a credible source for base load electrical power except for nuclear. Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed everywhere and everytime it's needed. Solar and wind could be, but it would require building new power storage facilities, and so many of them that it would match or exceed the cost of building out the solar/wind capacity to start with.

That's the reality. If it were different it wouldn't require subsidies to encourage people to build solar or wind power, they would do so spontaneously.

> Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed at the time it's needed.

Not in every case. BC Hydro powers BC and sells excess to US Markets.

I updated my post to make it even more clear.

Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net benefit for the world if every country developed a crash program to become as dependent on hydropower as possible.

What "renewable energy" is that? Solar and wind are barely scratching single-digit percentages of energy needs, and this is only because of massive government push to do it, otherwise on pure economic efficiency they'd be below even single digits (so basically now they're just burning money). Hydro can provide tons of energy, but at huge ecological cost which dwarfs nuclear. What else is there?

And many of them are quite expensive and need expensive resources like rare earths which also require significant energy to extract and produce.

Counter argument: South Australia, my state, is well into the double digits for wind. The was also a government push for solar, wind, but right now private generators ate scaling back on dirty fuel options (coal, gas). This has caused disruption: jobs lost, but arguably towards automation, clean energy and lower carbon emissions

South Australia also has third highest electricity costs in developed world and on the way to become the first. [1] As I mentioned, burning money. Serving economy's energy needs assumes serving them at a price that doesn't cause economy to seize up. SA also has some geographical advantages to wind power, which aren't present elsewhere, and still their wind farms operate at around 1/3 full capacity.

And as far as I can see, it is driven by massive government investment and regulation. Which again makes one doubt the viability of the idea - if it were that good, why would it be impossible to find someone willing to invest in it without forcibly taking money from people and prohibiting them from making choices according to their preference?

[1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/power-pri...

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