Google to back three new nuclear projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#361

Post by preisschild » Sun, May 11, 2025, 6:12 PM UTC

ivan_gammel wrote: post #21

preisschild wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.

This reminded me of how France had to limit nuclear outputs because of the heatwave. New designs can probably mitigate the risk but it will inevitably add to the operational and construction costs. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...

Its not about "new" vs "old" designs. Cooling towers have been a feature for decades, which those french nuclear power plants just didn't have before, because it wasn't necessary yet. Thanks to climate change it now is.

Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#362

Post by rockemsockem » Wed, May 14, 2025, 12:04 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #339

rockemsockem wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you probably just disagree with OP about the levels of our energy needs in the future. If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.

We can pursue high energy intensive activities with renewables, higher than if we use fusion. On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy. In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar…

I think there are a lot of in-depth trades that can be done to show specifically when nuclear is appropriate vs solar, and I'm sure solar will win a lot of those, but I'm just going to reach for the easy ones here.

Radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, using solar would require long transmission lines. Autonomous vehicles on Mars (already use nuclear energy via RTGs). Any deep space mission where building a nuclear reactor and launching it is lower effort than complex energy beaming.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#363

Post by throwaway2037 » Wed, May 14, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #295

christina97 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that 1 GW solar does not equate to 1 GW firm production.

In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage. Though it's not fully equivalent because solar + storage is far more flexible and would make a lot more money on the grid, since it can shift power to when it's needed rather than being a constant base of power. At old NREL prices that would be $4.3B for the solar, and $7.4B for the storage, but the lifetimes don't match up wi…

    > In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage.

Are you speaking about the precision location of this planned project, or generally about the United States? Really, the US is way too big to generalise about solar efficiency. Compare New England to Southwest US will have massively different solar coefficients. The same is true in Europe: Compare Scotland to Central Spain. Wildly different solar coefficients.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#364

Post by pfdietz » Wed, May 14, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #362

pfdietz wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can pursue high energy intensive activities with renewables, higher than if we use fusion. On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy. In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar…

I think there are a lot of in-depth trades that can be done to show specifically when nuclear is appropriate vs solar, and I'm sure solar will win a lot of those, but I'm just going to reach for the easy ones here. Radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, using solar would require long transmission lines. Autonomous vehicles on Mars (already use nuclear energy via RTGs). Any deep space mission where building a n…

I don't think a radio telescope uses much power at all. And beamed power should work fine on the night side of the moon, beaming power via laser from collectors in space. The apertures on either end would just be a few meters.

I have to question the moon as a location for such telescopes vs. positioning them in space. We've built (small) space radio telescopes already, but none have been placed on the moon.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#365

Post by pfdietz » Wed, May 14, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

7e wrote: post #237

pfdietz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of). This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.

Solar and wind aren’t reliable energy sources. They’re not dispatchable 24x7 and fluctuate along various timescales. Storing renewable energy for 24 hours doubles the cost. Storing it seasonally increases the cost 150x. Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7. At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying…

I do know it. And I know that the intermittency can be dealt with at finite and tolerable cost, and the resulting solutions are likely to be cheaper than those using nuclear power.

Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.