Note: I do not know if this argument against nuclear energy is valid. I'm submitting it in the hope that HN comments will help evaluate it.
His argument is highly contingent on a single premise: nuclear power is very expensive to build, making it uneconomical.
However, it's extremely difficult to determine how much of this expense is necessary vs. due to over-regulation or lack of innovation. It's easy to say that some regulations on nuclear power are probably unnecessary (cf. widespread nuclear paranoia); it's much harder to say which. It's easy to say that new kinds of reactors might be cheaper; it's harder to say what kind or how much cheaper.
ReBCO-stabilized fusion on the horizon throws another wrench in the prediction machine, as well. Who knows what that's worth? It was invented yesterday!
why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small, and I feel like we're not discussing what's gonna happen with old solar panels. Is there a way to recycle them / how good is it? The article doesn't mention it. As for the nuclear storage problem, from my point of view it seems more like the biggest problem is that people don't want it near them even though it's stored hundreds of meters below surface, and they rather accept a factory and directly breathe the stuff from it
So... it’s a massive problem that there is no storage for nuclear waste (mostly agree) but not even worth mentioning there is no energy storage for renewables? Coming from a cold, dark country with long and cloudy winters and no oceanic coast, it drives me mad when people point at the Med or California and say “look how cheap solar and wind is”.
Lack of storage in the US is a purely political issue, not a technical one. Other countries are either successfully building such storage (Finland) or invest into fuel recycling and breeder technologies (France and Russia), which significantly reduce amount of waste which has to be stored and its long-term danger.
Haha sure.. What's your alternative? American Nuclear Fusion? This kind of people aren't european, they worship america, and want us to depend more and more on their companies I'm tired of hearing the same people saying we should exit nuclear energy, this is beyond crazy
He says renewables. Fusion isn't mentioned. America isn't mentioned. What are you talking about?
i know what i'm talking about, you'll see in 10 years, and you'll say "yep that random guy was right"
Yes there is. Two sorts of grid storage batteries: Elon Must has made Lithium batteries work on grid scale. Flow batteries or fuel cells, are probably more economic. And then there is pumped hydro
Elon didn't make any grid-scale energy storage . The largest grid battery installation in the world can only supply power for a couple minutes – that's a buffer at most. Edit: removed first sentence.
If you can't resist swipes like the first sentence (it happens), please edit them out later. They only evoke worse from others.
Your comment would be fine without the first sentence.
For anyone interested in more depth, the full report linked in the article is worth looking at. In general, it's not been a good year for the industry. Uneconomical plants in operation, stalled and cancelled projects, criminal fraud and theft of public money, and the unsolved problem of how to decommission anything plague the business. If the real costs were addressed, it seems many more plants would have shut down b…
I guess I don't understand how nuclear power can run a submarine but can't be harnessed to provide power on land. Nuclear power seems to work pretty well in ships. It seems as if we're not framing the problem correctly.
Submarine, aircraft, and icebreaker reactors usually operate on military-grade fission materials. You don't want those to be exported all over the world. And a bigger reason is that they simply can not compete with bigger plants. 1 GW class nuclear reactors generate much cheaper electricity even after factoring in their huge CAPEX. There is one example of using a small nuclear ship-scale reactor for civilian power generation in Russia [0], but I would say it's a very edge scenario, not applicable to the most of the world.
Haha sure.. What's your alternative? American Nuclear Fusion? This kind of people aren't european, they worship america, and want us to depend more and more on their companies I'm tired of hearing the same people saying we should exit nuclear energy, this is beyond crazy
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something different here.
>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…
Nuclear friendly countries are struggling with the costs. Multiple examples of problems were given for France, yet the French government likes nuclear power.
It does not look to me like Russia is struggling with exporting its reactors and building them domestically. Areva's issues look to me as purely organizational and political, not technical.
why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small, and I feel like we're not discussing what's gonna happen with old solar panels. Is there a way to recycle them / how good is it? The article doesn't mention it. As for the nuclear storage problem, from my point of view it seems more like the biggest problem is that people don't want it near them even though it's stored hundreds of me…
Ironically many countries are considering underground storage of CO2 to combat climate change.
Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now. Even with that, everywhere I’ve lived with hydro power had backup fossil fuel generation, which was periodically used, though rarely. Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably,…
> Even with that, everywhere I’ve lived with hydro power had backup fossil fuel generation, which was periodically used, though rarely. > Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively doub…
If the issue is cutting CO2 with a power generating solution that’s highly, highly reliable, renewables like solar+wind have an uphill battle to fight. Their load factor is abysmally low, and storage tech at scale just isn’t here to sustain daily demand for 72 hrs. Supplementing with hydro instead of gas/coal to pick up the slack probably implies some massive “three-gorges” style damming projects. How feasible that is varies by region. What do you think about the feasibility of building that much hydro capacity in a way that can sustain Europe’s daily need for three days running? If you had that, why even bother with solar+wind except maybe as localized off-grid solutions? Somewhere out there is also a question of hardening generating capacity against kinetic attack, but that’s a whole separate thing. I only think of it because dams seem pretty vulnerable, especially massive ones.