US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified • Hacker News Board

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#401

Post by wahnfrieden » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:45 AM UTC

vablings wrote: post #121

gardncl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors). Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapes…

Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation. It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia. A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar - Gas plants for surge pow…

nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#402

Post by hammock » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #258

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines. Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?

Are they shutting down offshore oil drilling too?

Order of magnitude increase in difficulty to defend a wind farm vs an oil rig. Wind farms are dispersed, not continuously manned, harder to monitor/enforce a 500m maritime safety zone of exclusion, have a greater attack surface (subsea cables, substations), and are easier to sabotage with plausible deniability

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#403

Post by hunterpayne » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:47 AM UTC

salynchnew wrote: post #237

gardncl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors). Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapes…

> Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly. People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.

There is sort of some truth to that but its still pretty disingenuous to phase it that way. The more honest way to say it is that the NIMBYists are (probably somewhat unintentionally) keeping FFs in use by opposing nuclear.

Also, you (and everyone else in the thread) are listing capacity costs. Nobody cares about capacity costs except the CFO of a utility. Utilization costs are what matters. And by that (honest) metric, nuclear is quite cheap if you exclude the extra costs due to scientifically illiterate eco-activists and regulators.

People like to say that "A diamond is forever" is the best marketing effort of all time. I disagree, the ability of FF extractors to get ecos to do their dirty work for them is far more "impressive" (from a POV lacking in ethics).

PS The number of outright falsehoods in just this thread about nuclear should prove my point. Just research about how nuclear pays for cleanup and compare that to some comments in this thread for an example.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#404

Post by hunterpayne » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:50 AM UTC

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #260

gardncl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors). Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapes…

South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed... The proposed costs for the Westinghouse reactors in Poland and EPR2s in France are pretty much in line with the unthinkably expensive Vogtle costs. They haven’t even started building.

"They haven’t even started building."

Both Vogtle units (3 & 4) have been online for over a year.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#405

Post by Scoundreller » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:54 AM UTC

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #272

stefanfisk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence. Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any i…

The best part is that Danish, German and Polish parks are planned mere kilometers away from the denied Swedish ones. The military will need to figure out how deal with off-shore wind no matter what.

I did the same thing in Sim City: put my coal plants in the corner of town

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#406

Post by hunterpayne » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:56 AM UTC

opello wrote: post #203

stefanfisk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence. Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any i…

I'm surprised residential PV even interacts with radar -- or is that the other signal intelligence part?

It probably has more to do with the fact that solar that far north is a non-starter. Any PV installed there will actually make AGW and carbon emissions worse, not better. Basically, the amount of carbon emitted due to manufacturing is greater than the carbon savings over the lifetime of the panel in those locations.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#407

Post by stevage » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #375

stevage wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they're just false hits it's easy to filter them out, right?

It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples. Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. I…

That's a great explanation, thanks.

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#408

Post by janc_ » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #363

Msurrow wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it does. First of all: occam's razor. Political theatrics seems simpler than the US defence/intelligence forces sudenly realizing that drones can be launched from ships. Esp. with the timing involved. Second: Established/traditional radar systems cannot spot drones. Take it from someone living in a country that recently had its airspace violated by (assumingly) Russian drones, affecting national infrastructure.…

Before Ukrain everyone though drones were easy to counter. Now that has proven false. granted Trump probably isn't thinking that, but the concern should be real. We need better drone defense before someone (Russia, Iran...) starts anonymously shooting down airplanes.

That's nonsense. Many countries have been using drones before. (Starting with Nazi Germany during WW 2.)

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#409

Post by MengerSponge » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

throw0101d wrote: post #109

linuxhansl wrote: post #29

What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage. I'm reminded of threatening tariffs to successfully derail global carbon levy on ship emissions. Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.

> Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs. If you're talking about coal miners, David Frum joked / observed that there are more yoga instructors in the US than coal miners: * https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...

And that was in 2017! The population of working coal miners shrank by 20% in the last decade, from 50k to 40k

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CEU1021210001#0

Re: US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

#410

Post by epistasis » Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #361

epistasis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those reactors were also very expensive, though, weren't they? I've heard lots of people look to them as a reason that SMRs might work, but not because the naval reactors were cheap. Plus they use uranium enriched to levels that we typically don't allow in civilian reactors...

Even at military contracting prices, estimates put them at $100-200M each IIRC. That's not terrible. The highly enriched fuel is used because it simplifies the design and maintenance. It eliminates all the machinery you'd need to support things like operational refueling of the reactor. Old designs still needed to be rebuilt every 25 years but the new ones are sealed systems that are never supposed to be cracked open…

I'm not finding much support costs being that low... best collection of info I have seen is here:

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

At 1.5-1.7x the cost of diesel ship, and the "well-managed" Virginia class costing $3.6B, we are at over $1B for 60MW of power, 200MW thermal, which is far worse than larger civilian reactors per watt.

The reason we use nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are their far superior operational characteristics when compared to hydrocarbon fuels. That benefit is massive and well worth it. For terrestrial grid electricity those benefits don't really exist.