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Comment by nextw33k | Hacker News Reader

I am very much pro-nuclear.

I argue against wind and wind alone, it is a very unreliable source of energy, I think it is crazy to rely on gusts of wind to power a population. Nuclear is the only technology which offers a base load without burning fossils.

Solar I am happy with, it could be better than nuclear but the storage problem needs solving before it gets onto everyone's roof.

That's another problem with solar, people are putting up fields of the stuff when there is already enough roof space. In my mind large retail shops should be mandated to fill their roofs with solar.

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I live in France, where nuclear energy is dominant, and I can tell there are some serious issues with nuclear power.

First, nuclear can be extremely inefficient since it's heavily centralized : I have friends working for energy distributors telling me they can lose more than half the energy between the power plant and the client's house.

More importantly, nuclear waste disposal and power plant cleaning costs are heavily underestimated. I've worked for the CEA, the French nuclear agency where they invented the first French atomic bomb and reactor in the sixties, and some experiments aren't still cleaned up yet in 2010's (the current objective is to fully clean up the laboratory in 2025-2040). That is a massive cost which is not factored into the kW price.

I think decentralized technologies are the way to go regarding energy (using local loops and "smart grids") even if they aren't viable now (solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example).

"solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example)"

is not correct (maybe your information is from e.g. 20+ years ago). There are many sources, here is one of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystalline_silicon#Energy_pay...

About: ".. they can lose more than half the energy between the power plant and the client's house." - this seems extremely unlikely to be a representative case. Maybe your friends were telling you about some extreme case (they are always the best stories :)

solar panels cost more in energy to produce than they give back during exploitation for example

The EROEI for solar is around twice that of wind and oil, but it is definitely not negative.

I think you'd benefit from looking at some actual data. In practice, wind is predictable enough.

You don't need baseload. It's a concept that makes sense when you have power plants with flat output profiles.

What you actually need is to always match the demand. Nuclear isn't some magical silver bullet here. As it turns out, it's simply far too expensive to use for fulfilling the daily peak demands.

Wind + storage, on the other hand, provides base load just fine. You just need to capture enough wind energy over the course of the storage capacity / baseload to keep it stable. On sufficiently large scale, you can get its probabilities up to the level of nuclear plant uptimes.

We're turning a bandwidth problem into a caching problem. That's the game-changer.

meh once the storage problem is for some value of solved it all becomes a mere optimisation problem.

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