8 ms·

There seem to be a series of pro-nuclear submissions here, driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying. That would be an interesting story to dig o

There seem to be a series of pro-nuclear submissions here, driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying. That would be an interesting story to dig out. The resulting discussion points out that the cost of nuclear power plants is very high, the long term risks high, the time taken to build and cost overruns extraordinarily high and so on and on. Meanwhile renewables are cheaper, even when adding the batteries required to smooth lumps, and they can be stood up very quickly. Sure keep the old plants and improve regulation, but investors are not going to get returns from nuclear plants when the competition is low capex, free sunlight and almost zero maintenance.

melling 6y ago
I don’t think we currently have the battery technology to carry the base load for the United States.
bpodgursky 6y ago
I think there are far more effective venues for lobbying that posting pro-nuclear links to HN. More likely, it's educated users who don't want to see the world melt by 2100.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying Or because people are waking up and realizing that climate change is gonna screw us faster than we can build the tech to prevent that and people are defecting toward nuclear which is relatively shovel ready compared to grid scale solar/wind and the storage they necessitate.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  That doesn't make sense. If you feel pressure by time, nuclear is and never was your solution. It takes too long to construct. By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    That's fantastic but unfortunately there is no viable grid storage close to being capable of actually utilizing renewables for the majority of power all over the world. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-to-get-biglike-enormousfor-solar-power-to-shine https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-t... Are we really going to risk human civilization on the immediate invention and mass fabrication of new storage technologies orders of magnitude more efficient then what we have?
    - addicted 6y ago
      Well, let’s get to 30-40% solar/wind before we start worrrying about grids that cannot accept majority renewable. And guess what, at that point maybe some of the newer, safer, and cheaper nuclear designs would have been proven so the nuclear plays we build then for the next few decades are better than the ones we would build right now.
    - drran 6y ago
      Massive energy storage can^W will be built in fraction of time needed to build and then demolish a nuclear power plant.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    > By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps. We can build more than one nuclear reactor at a time, you know.
    - Krasnol 6y ago
      How does that change something the amount of time it takes to build each of them? If you start now, it'll still take you almost a decade (or maybe it even will be a decade. You never know with NPPs because they always take longer and cost more than projected) and in that decade renewables will jump generations of development. In the end you just wasted money which could have been invested into true clean energy which is still improving fast.
- Octoth0rpe 6y ago
  > faster than we can build the tech You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed? That doesn't seem to be born out in reality. Maybe another X* years when we've got cheap, factory built small modular reactors, but that certainly doesn't describe nuclear today. In which case we're back to waiting for new tech. * X being some number of years that increments by 1 year, every year.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    We can hope that all countries will find the space for all the solar panels, wind turbines, have some convenient height differences for hydro power and pumped energy storage, money for li-ion storage for the night or windless days, grid upgrades to get it from where it's produced to where it's needed... or we could apt remove coal_plant && apt install fission_plant on the same surface area and be certain that we'll be done in the 15 years that this takes to build. I'm very much afraid the former isn't going to cut it. I also know solar is cheaper if you compare kWh produced by panels on roofs to kWh produced by nuclear plants, but we need to increase our energy production nearly tenfold and renewables only won't make it easy to get there. We need to continue on both fronts, we can't rule out nuclear if we want to avoid this disaster. Best case the money is wasted. Currently, the best case is that we'll succeed and the average case a disaster.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Large parts of build speed issue with nuclear is regulation. If we could just get a permit to build done in a reasonable amount of time and then not stop progress again and again it would make a big difference.
    - Octoth0rpe 6y ago
      Given the price tag for Fukushima is at $187 billion and rising, arguing for deregulation _should_ be a hard sell. The axiom 'safe, cheap, fast; choose any 2' doesn't even apply to nuclear. It's more like choose 0. You might be able to argue for some version of 'safe' by talking about actual fatalities from nuclear energy being low, but I think the 5000ish square kilometers of exclusion zones from Chrenobyl/Fukushima should be part of the conversation about 'safety'. Safe for people perhaps, safe for property, apparently not. So maybe choose 0.5?
- jolux 6y ago
  Nuclear, shovel ready? How many economically viable nuclear designs are shovel ready with a reasonable time to generation?
  - Alupis 6y ago
    We regulated the industry so much that we made nuclear plants almost entirely economically unviable. Some of the regulations are good, some are bad - and a lot were born out of irrational fears about an immature industry that we didn't fully understand at the time. There is no reason a nuclear plant cannot be economically viable. They're all over Europe, Japan, Russia, China and I'm sure other countries as well.
  - gitgreen 6y ago
    NuScale/Fluor claim they can bring the UAMPS project in Idaho online by 2027 at an amortized average energy cost of about $55/MWh. https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-nuclear-plant-licensing/ https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-nu... That would make it more expensive than onshore wind($45/MWh) and solar yet($48/MWh) cheaper than all other sources of energy including natural gas($59/MWh). Double the final cost of energy to $110/MWh and it would still be in theory cheaper than the average for coal($115/MWh). Granted I'm pulling these numbers from Wikipedia so it's not that simple but the numbers aren't unrealistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
  - fallingknife 6y ago
    South Korea builds nuclear plants in < 5 years. Japan < 4 years. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2016/10/123_215869.html https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2016/10/123_215869...
- garmaine 6y ago
  You do realize this is a 75 year old industry with dozens of approved reactor designs?
Krasnol 6y ago
The lobby tries everything to paint themselves as a clean energy source and alternative to renewable energy. Striking aggressively left and right. Sometimes even by the same lobbyist: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-lights-michael-shellenberger-and-the-breakthrough-institute/ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-... https://www.facebook.com/shellenbergerMD/videos/my-interview-with-tucker-carlson-on-fox/319827365960758/ https://www.facebook.com/shellenbergerMD/videos/my-interview... I have the feeling that the gained pace now that nuclear is on the retreat in democratic countries. https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.742611.de/dwr-20-11-1.pdf https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
Tarsul 6y ago
that we have so many pro nuclear articles here on HN is remarkable to me, too. However, I come from Germany where the general sentiment is negative. I'd guess in the US (where probably most of HN users come from?!) the sentiment is more positive? I can't explain it any other way (well, lobbyism, astroturfing... okay, but I wouldn't go that far without evidence). What I miss in all these energy discussions is arguments about reducing the load or better managing the load (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd. And those discussions should come before we start even thinking about nuclear. Same argument as with recycling: the best garbage [energy] is the one which never was (reduce > recycle).
- wsc981 6y ago
  I've never had a negative sentiment against nuclear energy, even though most of the people from my country seem to be or at least were so in the past. And I feel many of the measures the Dutch government is taking these days to reduce CO2 seem borderline crazy. For example burning trees for energy (biomass), wood that is imported from the USA and Canada and shipped in huge container ships to The Netherlands [0]. And let's not forget that trees actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Or the fact that the Dutch government wants the whole country cut off from gas for heating, while neighbouring countries (like Germany) are trying to get people to use gas for heating. In The Netherlands every house if connected to the gas network, but soon everybody will need to switch to waterpumps for heating. Or the fact that the whole country will be covered with wind turbines which ruin the view, produce a lot of noise, need a lot of space and kill many birds. --- [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https://www.bnnvara.nl/zembla/artikelen/bos-als-brandstof https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...
- cestith 6y ago
  Light water reactors are not the only option for nuclear power. CANDU reactors have a wonderful safety record. MSRs are on the brink of becoming commercially viable and have been for a long time, but funding is currently insufficient. Funding is insufficient largely because light water and heavy water (like CANDU and derivatives) plants are already researched on the one hand and light water reactors have created negative sentiment for all things nuclear on the other. Would I like nuclear power that fails safe and doesn't produce bomb material? Absolutely. Would I live next door to a molten thorium salt reactor? I'd love to. Do I want to see new light water reactors built anywhere in the world? No.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> free sunlight and almost zero maintenance. Try running a gigawatt's worth of solar panels attached to enough battery capacity to fill a small stadium. There is plenty of maintenance to be done. Nuclear and solar are really apples and oranges. They each have advantages and disadvantages. In a given time/place/need one will always be better than another but neither are superior always.
- mtone 6y ago
  Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where several provinces use hydro as a primary energy source, but why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often? Nearby ecosystem damages, relatively speaking, seem rather low in comparison with nuclear or fuel, and for dealing with future climate change issues in general. While they don't explode, I'm sure they can can cause disasters of their own. But wind/solar require massive storage capacity to become a primary source and require a lot of space/disruption at these scales. I'm not sure how the affected landmass (in the long term) compares with Hydro, or maintenance costs. Hydro has this great combination of zero emission and the water being its own battery. Not relying on rare materials and battery production avoids adding competition and could favor the transition to electric vehicles at a global scale. Like nuclear, initial costs are problematic. Social acceptance is so-so. In some places like the US many "good spots" are taken, but it appears 2/3 of potential in the world is untapped. More numerous but smaller damns seem to be a possibility too.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    First, there isn't that much Hydro around, and a lot of that has been tapped already. Second, it's significantly less safe than nuclear. In fact, IIRC the worst single power-generation disaster was a hydro-dam failure in China. And the environmental impact outside of accidents is also far from trivial.
    - RealityVoid 6y ago
      I find it amazing that people go "Let's use hydro!" When a single event killed more people than all the nuclear accidents combined. Unreal.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
duxup 6y ago
> perhaps, driven by lobbying Is there a reason to think this outside seeing something you disagree with?
m463 6y ago
gah. I nuclear has a place. Nuclear generates energy and lots of it. Take a look at this table and check out uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#List_of_material_energy_densities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#List_of_materia... The thing is, just like we are developing solar, we have to develop nuclear. We should drive the cost down, and safety up. Boiling water reactors are very expensive, in the same way solar power was in the Jimmy Carter era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#/media/File:Price_history_of_silicon_PV_cells_since_1977.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#/media/File:Price_h... We should be working on stable reactors, safe ones that don't need active intervention to shut down, and work to make them available. By all means we should also work on solar and wind, but we should keep nuclear active. We should be working to have MORE CO2 free power, of different kinds, that will work during a variety of conditions.
Hammershaft 6y ago
The cost of nuclear is high in the short term but when debt is paid off it becomes one of the cheapest sources of baseline energy in the long run. I don't think "big nuclear" is behind these posts, its just that more and more people are looking past a period of nuclear panic and recognizing that this is likely to be the only form of baseload power we can transition to in the face of climate change.

melling 6y ago

I don’t think we currently have the battery technology to carry the base load for the United States.

bpodgursky 6y ago

I think there are far more effective venues for lobbying that posting pro-nuclear links to HN. More likely, it's educated users who don't want to see the world melt by 2100.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>driven by articles that are, perhaps, driven by lobbying Or because people are waking up and realizing that climate change is gonna screw us faster than we can build the tech to prevent that and people are defecting toward nuclear which is relatively shovel ready compared to grid scale solar/wind and the storage they necessitate.

Krasnol 6y ago
That doesn't make sense. If you feel pressure by time, nuclear is and never was your solution. It takes too long to construct. By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  That's fantastic but unfortunately there is no viable grid storage close to being capable of actually utilizing renewables for the majority of power all over the world. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-to-get-biglike-enormousfor-solar-power-to-shine https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-need-t... Are we really going to risk human civilization on the immediate invention and mass fabrication of new storage technologies orders of magnitude more efficient then what we have?
  - addicted 6y ago
    Well, let’s get to 30-40% solar/wind before we start worrrying about grids that cannot accept majority renewable. And guess what, at that point maybe some of the newer, safer, and cheaper nuclear designs would have been proven so the nuclear plays we build then for the next few decades are better than the ones we would build right now.
  - drran 6y ago
    Massive energy storage can^W will be built in fraction of time needed to build and then demolish a nuclear power plant.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  > By the time a single reactor is build, renewables will jump several development steps. We can build more than one nuclear reactor at a time, you know.
  - Krasnol 6y ago
    How does that change something the amount of time it takes to build each of them? If you start now, it'll still take you almost a decade (or maybe it even will be a decade. You never know with NPPs because they always take longer and cost more than projected) and in that decade renewables will jump generations of development. In the end you just wasted money which could have been invested into true clean energy which is still improving fast.
Octoth0rpe 6y ago
> faster than we can build the tech You're arguing for nuclear on the basis of its build speed? That doesn't seem to be born out in reality. Maybe another X* years when we've got cheap, factory built small modular reactors, but that certainly doesn't describe nuclear today. In which case we're back to waiting for new tech. * X being some number of years that increments by 1 year, every year.
- Aachen 6y ago
  We can hope that all countries will find the space for all the solar panels, wind turbines, have some convenient height differences for hydro power and pumped energy storage, money for li-ion storage for the night or windless days, grid upgrades to get it from where it's produced to where it's needed... or we could apt remove coal_plant && apt install fission_plant on the same surface area and be certain that we'll be done in the 15 years that this takes to build. I'm very much afraid the former isn't going to cut it. I also know solar is cheaper if you compare kWh produced by panels on roofs to kWh produced by nuclear plants, but we need to increase our energy production nearly tenfold and renewables only won't make it easy to get there. We need to continue on both fronts, we can't rule out nuclear if we want to avoid this disaster. Best case the money is wasted. Currently, the best case is that we'll succeed and the average case a disaster.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Large parts of build speed issue with nuclear is regulation. If we could just get a permit to build done in a reasonable amount of time and then not stop progress again and again it would make a big difference.
  - Octoth0rpe 6y ago
    Given the price tag for Fukushima is at $187 billion and rising, arguing for deregulation _should_ be a hard sell. The axiom 'safe, cheap, fast; choose any 2' doesn't even apply to nuclear. It's more like choose 0. You might be able to argue for some version of 'safe' by talking about actual fatalities from nuclear energy being low, but I think the 5000ish square kilometers of exclusion zones from Chrenobyl/Fukushima should be part of the conversation about 'safety'. Safe for people perhaps, safe for property, apparently not. So maybe choose 0.5?
jolux 6y ago
Nuclear, shovel ready? How many economically viable nuclear designs are shovel ready with a reasonable time to generation?
- Alupis 6y ago
  We regulated the industry so much that we made nuclear plants almost entirely economically unviable. Some of the regulations are good, some are bad - and a lot were born out of irrational fears about an immature industry that we didn't fully understand at the time. There is no reason a nuclear plant cannot be economically viable. They're all over Europe, Japan, Russia, China and I'm sure other countries as well.
- gitgreen 6y ago
  NuScale/Fluor claim they can bring the UAMPS project in Idaho online by 2027 at an amortized average energy cost of about $55/MWh. https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-nuclear-plant-licensing/ https://www.powermag.com/nuscale-uamps-kick-off-idaho-smr-nu... That would make it more expensive than onshore wind($45/MWh) and solar yet($48/MWh) cheaper than all other sources of energy including natural gas($59/MWh). Double the final cost of energy to $110/MWh and it would still be in theory cheaper than the average for coal($115/MWh). Granted I'm pulling these numbers from Wikipedia so it's not that simple but the numbers aren't unrealistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
- fallingknife 6y ago
  South Korea builds nuclear plants in < 5 years. Japan < 4 years. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2016/10/123_215869.html https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2016/10/123_215869...
garmaine 6y ago
You do realize this is a 75 year old industry with dozens of approved reactor designs?

Krasnol 6y ago

The lobby tries everything to paint themselves as a clean energy source and alternative to renewable energy. Striking aggressively left and right. Sometimes even by the same lobbyist: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-lights-michael-shellenberger-and-the-breakthrough-institute/ https://extinctionrebellion.uk/2020/09/16/statement-on-zion-... https://www.facebook.com/shellenbergerMD/videos/my-interview-with-tucker-carlson-on-fox/319827365960758/ https://www.facebook.com/shellenbergerMD/videos/my-interview... I have the feeling that the gained pace now that nuclear is on the retreat in democratic countries. https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.742611.de/dwr-20-11-1.pdf https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...

Tarsul 6y ago

that we have so many pro nuclear articles here on HN is remarkable to me, too. However, I come from Germany where the general sentiment is negative. I'd guess in the US (where probably most of HN users come from?!) the sentiment is more positive? I can't explain it any other way (well, lobbyism, astroturfing... okay, but I wouldn't go that far without evidence). What I miss in all these energy discussions is arguments about reducing the load or better managing the load (with flexible pricing etc.), especially since that could be very data driven which should align well with the HN crowd. And those discussions should come before we start even thinking about nuclear. Same argument as with recycling: the best garbage [energy] is the one which never was (reduce > recycle).

wsc981 6y ago
I've never had a negative sentiment against nuclear energy, even though most of the people from my country seem to be or at least were so in the past. And I feel many of the measures the Dutch government is taking these days to reduce CO2 seem borderline crazy. For example burning trees for energy (biomass), wood that is imported from the USA and Canada and shipped in huge container ships to The Netherlands [0]. And let's not forget that trees actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Or the fact that the Dutch government wants the whole country cut off from gas for heating, while neighbouring countries (like Germany) are trying to get people to use gas for heating. In The Netherlands every house if connected to the gas network, but soon everybody will need to switch to waterpumps for heating. Or the fact that the whole country will be covered with wind turbines which ruin the view, produce a lot of noise, need a lot of space and kill many birds. --- [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https://www.bnnvara.nl/zembla/artikelen/bos-als-brandstof https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https:/...
cestith 6y ago
Light water reactors are not the only option for nuclear power. CANDU reactors have a wonderful safety record. MSRs are on the brink of becoming commercially viable and have been for a long time, but funding is currently insufficient. Funding is insufficient largely because light water and heavy water (like CANDU and derivatives) plants are already researched on the one hand and light water reactors have created negative sentiment for all things nuclear on the other. Would I like nuclear power that fails safe and doesn't produce bomb material? Absolutely. Would I live next door to a molten thorium salt reactor? I'd love to. Do I want to see new light water reactors built anywhere in the world? No.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> free sunlight and almost zero maintenance. Try running a gigawatt's worth of solar panels attached to enough battery capacity to fill a small stadium. There is plenty of maintenance to be done. Nuclear and solar are really apples and oranges. They each have advantages and disadvantages. In a given time/place/need one will always be better than another but neither are superior always.

mtone 6y ago
Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where several provinces use hydro as a primary energy source, but why doesn't make it to the top of the lists more often? Nearby ecosystem damages, relatively speaking, seem rather low in comparison with nuclear or fuel, and for dealing with future climate change issues in general. While they don't explode, I'm sure they can can cause disasters of their own. But wind/solar require massive storage capacity to become a primary source and require a lot of space/disruption at these scales. I'm not sure how the affected landmass (in the long term) compares with Hydro, or maintenance costs. Hydro has this great combination of zero emission and the water being its own battery. Not relying on rare materials and battery production avoids adding competition and could favor the transition to electric vehicles at a global scale. Like nuclear, initial costs are problematic. Social acceptance is so-so. In some places like the US many "good spots" are taken, but it appears 2/3 of potential in the world is untapped. More numerous but smaller damns seem to be a possibility too.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  First, there isn't that much Hydro around, and a lot of that has been tapped already. Second, it's significantly less safe than nuclear. In fact, IIRC the worst single power-generation disaster was a hydro-dam failure in China. And the environmental impact outside of accidents is also far from trivial.
  - RealityVoid 6y ago
    I find it amazing that people go "Let's use hydro!" When a single event killed more people than all the nuclear accidents combined. Unreal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

duxup 6y ago

> perhaps, driven by lobbying Is there a reason to think this outside seeing something you disagree with?

m463 6y ago

gah. I nuclear has a place. Nuclear generates energy and lots of it. Take a look at this table and check out uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#List_of_material_energy_densities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#List_of_materia... The thing is, just like we are developing solar, we have to develop nuclear. We should drive the cost down, and safety up. Boiling water reactors are very expensive, in the same way solar power was in the Jimmy Carter era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#/media/File:Price_history_of_silicon_PV_cells_since_1977.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#/media/File:Price_h... We should be working on stable reactors, safe ones that don't need active intervention to shut down, and work to make them available. By all means we should also work on solar and wind, but we should keep nuclear active. We should be working to have MORE CO2 free power, of different kinds, that will work during a variety of conditions.

Hammershaft 6y ago

The cost of nuclear is high in the short term but when debt is paid off it becomes one of the cheapest sources of baseline energy in the long run. I don't think "big nuclear" is behind these posts, its just that more and more people are looking past a period of nuclear panic and recognizing that this is likely to be the only form of baseload power we can transition to in the face of climate change.