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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

> abundant renewable energy

We have enough uranium and thorium for millions of years with breeder cycle. Even if not renewable, who cares? And it's quite ecological, compared to burning oil products.

The rest is quite close.

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It's the cost of building new plants that dominates the cost of nuclear energy, though. Cheap fuel is honestly a red herring.

Molten Salt Reactors are cheaper. They do not need a pressure vessel or a huge containment structure. They can fit in a shipping container. BTW red herring is delicious!

Renewables are basically already viable, despite what its opponents have been trying to say. It's already more competitive than natural gas in some places, and the next 5 years will be crossing many other such thresholds.

Is that true even if you normalize subsidies between the different forms of production/transportation/use?

Renewables are not already viable, they are never going to be viable but for a small portion of our energy needs. Because Physics. They just don't have enough concentrated energy. Take solar for example, take a look at http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml, In the UK solar basically works out to 100 watts per square meter on average. Somewhere really nice in the American Sotuhwest is maybe like 400 watts per square meter. At 25% efficiency, to equal the baseline load of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, you need something like 7.7 square miles of panel area when you factor in the need to capture enough sun during the day and store it for the night. You need to also have a high voltage DC grid to ship the electricity from the Desert to where we need it, and much better storage systems to hold the load for the night. Basically Solar is never going to work for baseline load, and to top it all off photovoltaics are dirty as hell to make. Wind is even more bad (There was a study that said you needed 270 square miles of land to generate 1 GW reliably), and hydroelectric is limited in where we can deploy it. Nuclear is exactly what we need, renewables just can't be anything but a small part of the solution considering our power usage is increasing not decreasing.

Ah. That's why Germany manages to generate >30% of their energy via renewables. They are this immensely huge country with wide open spaces, flooded with sunlight.

Wait. They're not.

Turns out that you don't need a high-voltage DC grid, you need decentralized power. And you don't need huge contiguous chunks of land, either - you need everybody to be involved.

That doesn't rule out that we might need other energy sources, too - there are the issues of base load, and industrial consumption - but claiming that renewables are "not viable" is a tiny bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?

There's no doubt that the US can learn from the shear audacity and willingness to invest in our country's long term energy plan like Germany has done with the Energiewende. However, we can't pretend that Germany, in terms of its size, existing infrastructure, and structure of the electricity industry, is at all comparable to the US.

While I agree with you that decentralized power will be the way of the future, there's no way the US, where California alone is larger than Germany, can make such a drastic and impressive transition in even a tenth of the time it takes Germany. The power grid in the US is one of the (if not the) most complex networks/systems the world has ever seen. Heck, it's not even a "singular" entity, with three interconnects spanning parts of Mexico and Canada comprising it. We're not going to easily transition away from this--not that I'm saying we shouldn't try. Our current infrastructure is not capable of handling mass amounts of renewable (read intermittent) sources of energy--the energy storage technology, bi-directional communication, and security measures among other necessities just don't exist yet. And while at a certain point our country needs to make the leap and take the risk, we should also be cautious about trying to brute force a solution--look how Spain's renewable energy investments are paying off.

Edit: It may also be too early to call Germany's energy plan a success. They still face many substantial challenges moving forward (http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21594336-germanys-new-s...)

California is perfectly positioned for going into renewables if it actually tried. I live near Los Angeles and there are only a few days during the year when we don't have sun. There huge open desert areas tat could be covered with solar collectors. If any area in the world can make the transition it's California.

Absolutely, there are issues. I was mostly commenting on the GPs "they are never going to be viable but for a small portion of our energy needs". They are viable already, for substantial parts of our load.

And you put your finger straight on one of the largest sources of trouble for the US - the existing grid. That's why I believe the way forward is decentralized power. Cut out the grid. Generate and consume very locally.

There are still many issues that need to be solved there, storage being probably the large one. But I'm more hopeful about that than reforming the US grid with its entrenched players.

What you have heard from supposedly impartial and expert sources may in fact be wrong.

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/08/12/experts-misleading-peopl...

It doesn't matter, I don't have to convince you. Renewable prices are already dropping so much such that they are coming regardless (can't say that about nuclear can you? unless you lie about the budget of course); only Koch-like attempts to oppose it like punitive fees for solar panels can do any damage.

It is renewable. Every time there is a supernova a whole solar system loaded with Thorium is recreated!

I have seen credible estimates that there may only be about 80 years of uranium supply left for current usage, let alone massively expanded generation. Breeder reactors are a red herring. France is shutting theirs down because they are uneconomical.

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