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An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

92 points by stadia42 6y ago

stadia42 6y ago
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.
- scythe 6y ago
  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!
  - mchusma 6y ago
    Agree that his premise is entirely an economic one. From first principles, nuclear energys's marginal cost is very inexpensive (similar to renewables). What's basically needed to bring the cost of nuclear down is scale, investing more in production. This is why new approaches to mass producing small scale reactors is so interesting. It should allow nuclear to get competitive with renewables, and having a diverse energy base is definitely a good thing. Also, fusion holds the most hope for massively decreasing the cost of energy. It's a game changer, and it's close. It's possible that fusion allows things like mass carbon capture, powering reforestation efforts, and more.
  - pydry 6y ago
    >However, it's extremely difficult to determine how much of this expense is necessary vs. due to over-regulation or lack of innovation. The sheer capital intensity of nuclear is what hampers innovation, not safety regulations.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear. Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change But that's not what happened. Given the current state of the industry we can't afford to spend decades trying to right the technical and regulatory wrongs of the past now that renewables are becoming truly viable.
  - wernercd 6y ago
    > Truly viable When you ignore the glaring problems with renewables? Sure... but why pay attention to rare earth minerals needed, massive problems creating massive amounts of PV panels, recycling issues, etc We can't afford to let the burgeoning "savior" of our world continue on it's destructive path because the Religion of Renewables won't admit to the fact that it's Priests are doing bad things with children... To many aspects and conversations turn into religious debates. PC? SJWs? Climate Change? Anti-Nuclear/Pro-Renewable? (or vice versa on all of them) all turn into religious debates with people who refuse to look at both sides of very complex issues.
    - CarelessExpert 6y ago
      You know, you have some valid points. Unfortunately, due to your demeaning and dismissive tone, I don't feel there's any point in engaging with you further.
      - mionhe 6y ago
        You know, you have a point. Unfortunately, due to your demeaning and dismissive tone, I don't feel there's any point in engaging with you further.
    - ruph123 6y ago
      > recycling issues You gotta love the whataboutism of the nuclear folks ranting about recycling issues of current renewable energy tech when nuclear leaves behind toxic material that has to be kept in a safe place for a long time surviving changes in government, potential revolutions, terrorist attacks, incompetence, greed, etc.
nabla9 6y ago
It's infatuating that all arguments pro- and against nuclear energy are so selective. It's very hard to get unbiased view. The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh. Nuclear energy is 24/7 from the start. Currently Nuclear/coal/gas provides base load that enables cheap renewables (base load is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. Day, week, months) Supplying same base load with renewables means energy production + large scale energy storage + grid investments. You need overcapacity in production and the grid to even out time and geographical variability of renewables. I have not seen any honest cost comparison that counts in everything.
- aksss 6y ago
  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, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive. Advocacy for non-hydro renewables requires heaping doses of “hope” that new technologies will be developed one day to deprecate the side-by-side ff power-generation. That hope and risk has to be priced in to the comparisons with nuclear for supplying electric grids, or the debate isn’t “nuclear vs renewables” it’s “nuclear vs. (renewables + fossil fuel generation)”. At that point it even makes sense to think of “nuclear vs. (renewables + nuclear)”. If you want the cost of CO2 and its global impact priced into using fossil fuels, perhaps that’s what the cost of nuclear should be compared to.
  - mattashii 6y ago
    > Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now. There are quite some solar-thermal installations of >100MW, which store solar energy in a thermal buffer to later convert this to electrical power, creating an effective 24/7 stable supply of power, weather permitting.
rtx 6y ago
We will end up with nuclear, we can take as many different path as we wish. Any nation which goes full nuclear first will reap the benefits.
- jokoon 6y ago
  I will not bother reading that article, sorry.
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
>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 catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones. And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!
- robocat 6y ago
  Nuclear friendly countries are struggling with the costs. Multiple examples of problems were given for France, yet the French government likes nuclear power.
  - namdnay 6y ago
    Electricity in France is so cheap that EDF has had to raise domestic electricity prices in order to make it possible for other providers to compete
    - Hammershaft 6y ago
      In the short term nuclear is undoubtedly expensive, but when the debt from construction is payed off, it becomes an incredibly cheap and reliable source of energy. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
      - throw0101a 6y ago
        Not disputing, but in the interests of full disclosure, the presenter is (per YT About): * Professor David Ruzic * Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering * Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering * University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
        6y ago
Sudophysics 6y ago
Solar and off loading batteries from like Ambri is probably a good idea. Nuclear is great, but is simply annoying in every right despite being an existing "throw megawatts at it" solution that's also not spewing gas.
wernercd 6y ago
I'm going to hesitate to say this article is very short sighted... it talks about "nuclear is expensive, renewables are cheap and we don't know how to store nuclear waste". Nabla's comment is a good start on the conversation (good frame but no real apples to apples comparisons). Personally, with the talk about "what about all that nuclear waste"... where's the talk about the recyclable waste? Batteries, solar panels, wind mills are all very hard to recycle and add "after the fact" costs like nuclear does that's being unaccounted for - and is happening at a MUCH larger scale currently. Where's the talk about all the "rare earth minerals" that's going to have to be strip mined around the world to keep up with "clean energy"? I think this article has some valid points wrapped up in talking points to strengthen its argument while ignoring massive talking points that go unmentioned (True comparisons of costs, storage/recycling of materials and the massive increase in "plundering" Earth goes unmentioned... to name a few). Edit: Not saying I'm "pro nuclear" or "anti renewable"... I'm more of a balanced approach person - I think the future will include Coal, Gas, Nuclear, Solar, hydro and various mixes there-of and we need to work on making all of them better because none of them are going anywhere any time soon - and they ALL have strengths and weaknesses. https://fee.org/articles/the-environmental-costs-of-renewable-energy-are-staggering/ https://fee.org/articles/the-environmental-costs-of-renewabl... > Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs. https://www.futurity.org/nuclear-waste-recycling-2355402-2/ https://www.futurity.org/nuclear-waste-recycling-2355402-2/ New, better ways of recycling Nuclear "waste" is being researched constantly > A new simple, proliferation-resistant approach offers a way to reduce nuclear waste, researchers say. https://fortune.com/2020/02/05/wind-turbine-fiberglass-landfill-disposal-renewable-energy/ https://fortune.com/2020/02/05/wind-turbine-fiberglass-landf... > Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23... > The problem of solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”
Shadonototro 6y ago
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
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  He says renewables. Fusion isn't mentioned. America isn't mentioned. What are you talking about?
  - Shadonototro 6y ago
    i know what i'm talking about, you'll see in 10 years, and you'll say "yep that random guy was right" renewables, sure
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rich_sasha 6y ago
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”.
- worik 6y ago
  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
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    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.
    - dang 6y ago
      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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - jillesvangurp 6y ago
      It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer. Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly. You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to deal with peaks in demand. That's because they are only needed for that long and because you can turn them on and off pretty much instantly. You don't have that choice with traditional solutions like gas plants. Which is why despite battery cost, this type of battery is very successful at largely removing the need for having peaker plants. It also seems to be very successful at getting rid of blackouts because there were never enough of those peaker plants to begin with in Australia. Another advantage is that you can put these batteries all over the place. Many small installations make up for a lot of aggregate capacity. You can put them in buildings even; and people do. Musk is also building factories that are producing batteries by the GWH per year per factory and soon TWH per year. He's not alone of course and basically there are quite many other companies now planning their own little GWH production facilities. There are tens of billions being invested in that stuff in the next few years. There will be hundreds or thousands of these factories in a few decades churning out many TWH of storage annually. That battery capacity is of course mostly intended for the transport sector and not for grid storage. But if you are worried about having enough storage capacity on the grid, there will be multiple TWH of batteries driving around on roads in most countries by the end of the decade. Basically 2M cars with 50KWH batteries == 1TWH. That's a lot of distributed and mobile storage. All we need to do is plug it in. Of course there will be more optimal solutions as well. But it's capacity we'll have none the less.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Why do all the anti-nuclear people just through out the marginal cost and then move on...
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > Why do all the anti-nuclear people just through out the marginal cost and then move on... In the article, the interviewee didn't — he specifically talked about decommissioning costs.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
The solution is smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Run them for 30 years, and then just leave them in place- waste included - forever. Eventually we can probably figure out how to operate them for 50, then 100 years. The downsides of this are much less than the potential downsides of excess CO2 in the atmosphere, which are civilization-ending.
mimixco 6y ago
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 by now. The report does a great job of linking to original sources and it would be hard to find fault with the facts in it. TLDR, nuclear is in decline worldwide and maybe completely over in the US as far as new construction. The proposed new modular reactor designs have safety issues that keep them from being a quick fix.
- c1ccccc1 6y ago
  > The proposed new modular reactor designs have safety issues that keep them from being a quick fix. That's interesting, I didn't know that. Where can I read more about this?
  - mimixco 6y ago
    Here's the report PDF link: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2020-.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-S...
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  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.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
lousken 6y ago
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
- armada651 6y ago
  Ironically many countries are considering underground storage of CO2 to combat climate change.
  - aksss 6y ago
    Is carbon sequestration even remotely realistic though (beyond PoC, and at scale)?
    - gameswithgo 6y ago
      Hard to say, its a big mega project, but then so is what we do today to keep getting more oil and gas. Same story goes for energy storage to make solar/wind workable at large scales. Very hard problem! So is sucking the last dregs of oil out of the ocean, or creating earthquakes to suck it out of the ground.
    - Hammershaft 6y ago
      I reccomend Vaclav Smil's interviews on this subject. The short answer is no.
    - Trombone12 6y ago
      I mean, it's pretty realistic at incinerator plants, the concentrations and temperatures are such that you use up some reasonably small percentage of the total plant effect on capture and you can capture 90 % of the generated CO2. The trick will be to make sure economic incentives don't lead to people simply building so many incinerators that you end up emitting more than before anyway...
grawprog 6y ago
One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/ >Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal and leaching of contaminants including heavy metals and arsenic into the water. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining-and-milling https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/ Nuclear energy still requires fuel. The impacts and costs from mining operations and refining should be taken into account when comparing to other energy sources. They are part of it. Nuclear energy can't exist without it.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  Is there an argument to be made about volumes? Eg let’s say it is 5x worse than mining coal, but you need 100x less of it, is it net less bad? I clearly made up the numbers, just curious.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    I'm not sure how directly comparable they are. How do you compare radioactive and chemical contamination to the kind of contamination from coal mines? Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about. I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly, increasingly ecological models require easy to work with numbers that can be compared and contrasted to analyse cost vs benefit, but the real world does not work that way.
    - Swenrekcah 6y ago
      Using this comment to remind people that coal plants do produce radioactive exhaust: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
cipher_system 6y ago
Everyone always says nuclear is expensive but what if the world (or significant portion of it) decided to go all in and build enough nuclear to replace fossil fuels in the next 2 decades. What would the price be then?
- stkdump 6y ago
  France tried to do exactly that, with the results mentioned in the article: massive subsidies, but future costs not covered by far.
2trill2spill 6y ago
Wow, what a simplistic look at nuclear vs renewables. They don't even begin to look into the "hidden" costs of renewable energy. They fail to mention or include the costs of new transmissions lines, bringing new mines onboard, building grid storage, etc. If we forgo nuclear power the only other currently viable carbon free, stable, energy source is hydro power, which has huge environmental costs and immense public resentment/push back. For example look at the James bay hydro project[1]. 11,500 km2 of land flooded, intense protest from the Cree and other first nations as well as conservation groups, increases in mercury levels in fish populations, etc. Expanding hydro power enough to handle base load energy use is unlikely, due to the above costs and push back. So if we can't expand hydro or nuclear then we have to go all in on wind and solar plus grid storage. We could use pumped hydro but that brings about many of the same costs/problems as hydro power. That leaves us with over building wind and solar, and adding huge amounts of transmission lines and batteries to account for the variability. Add in the switch from ICE cars to electric and the amount of new metals needed is going to be immense. I've also noticed that every time a new transmission line or mine is purposed in the United States their is immense push back from environmental and conservation groups, and from the public as a whole. For examples of this look at the fight over adding new transmissions lines in southern Wisconsin[2] or the intense opposition to mining the Duluth complex[3] in northern Minnesota[4]. The Duluth complex is the largest untapped copper and nickel resource in the world and Polymet has been trying to get permits for well over a decade to mine. Copper and nickel are greatly needed for renewable energy and batteries, and it could still be another 4 or 5 years if it ever happens. Not using nuclear energy is just going to massively exacerbate the transmission line and mining problems as well as increase the prices of renewable energy. Wind and solar is "cheap" because we don't factor in the added transmission lines, and natural gas peaker planets needed to currently make it happen. Also many of the groups pushing for wind and solar + batteries also happen to be against adding additional mines and transmission lines required to make it happen, and honestly you cant really blame them, mines can pollute local water supplies and transmission lines are ugly. All and all a balanced approach is probably the cheapest and most viable path forward, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, grid storage all working together on the grid. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project [2]: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/cardinal-hickory-creek-wisconsin-residents-speak-out-against-proposed-power-line/article_6ceb0747-9bdc-5c12-b7d0-18e8d2d3209c.html https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/cardina... [3]: http://www.miningminnesota.com/duluth-complex/ http://www.miningminnesota.com/duluth-complex/ [4]: https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/06/polymet-copper-nickel-mine-litigation-indigenous-environmental-groups/ https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/06/polymet-copper-nickel-...
agarttha 6y ago
Looks like Mycle Schneider, the lead author, is a founding member of WISE-Paris, which is the French branch of the anti-nuclear group WISE, which he directed from 1983 to 2003. [wikipedia]
- pydry 6y ago
  Is it particularly noteworthy that an anti nuclear article was written by an anti nuclear author or am I missing something?
  - sneak 6y ago
    I believe that GP intended to imply ideological bias.
    - fuzzfactor 6y ago
      Could be true. but from an above comment: >Not disputing, but in the interests of full disclosure, the presenter is (per YT About): >* Professor David Ruzic >* Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering >* Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering >* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professors usually don't gain these qualifications because they started out anti-nuclear. Something must have reversed his opinion somewhere along the line, no doubt he has greater domain expertise than all but a few others sharing similar deep knowledge.
  - ingsoc79 6y ago
    Yes, as it establishes the potential bias of the article author. If this article was written by typically a pro-nuclear author it would be much more noteworthy.
    - pydry 6y ago
      That was the idea behind this nuclear industry PR piece from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213984 Predictably, it didn't bring up the costs (though of course the first comment on HN did) but it tried to play the "environmentalist who has seen the light" angle pretty hard. It's actually kind of weird how many articles like this do get submitted to hacker news. Link says "it's safe & making a comeback", comments say "it's just not economic and no" <- this has happened quite a few times.
imtringued 6y ago
Renewables fail at heating in the winter because they generate electricity directly. SMR nuclear district heating might be the only way to cover the shortfall. Thermal power plants have an inherent advantage when it comes to producing heat.
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jswizzy 6y ago
Good look getting to Mars or exploring space without nuclear power of some sort. It's the safest and cleanest energy source we have have.
huffmsa 6y ago
> 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. Because nukes have stagnated for close to half a century. Bit of a head slapper.
Nasrudith 6y ago
The premise is fallacious on several levels. Nuclear power and renewables are a dichotomy even if one is better for stable baseload power and the other lower in kWhr cost. France isn't going to give up MAD just because renewables are cheaper - it is still a budget synergy since they will have reactors anyway. No country has or will go 100% CO2 reduction focus. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.
fuzzfactor 6y ago
>nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse Could be if it delays or prevents addressing the real roots of the problem such as overpopulation and extreme lack of energy conservation. Fukushima is nature's way of reminding us to conserve or live to regret it eventually. No one has yet been able to even locate the still-molten fuel, I know its only been 10 short years and it's not supposed to be easy or even possible with today's limited nuclear technology. Good thing it has such a long half-life so there's plenty of time remaining to figure this out over the next 24,000 years. As all engineers know, when deadlines are too short it can lead to unaddressed consequences. Regardless since the nuclear option exists there will always be a significant faction of enthusiasts who will die eventually without regretting it at all. Most regrets will occur in a future these enthusiasts (or anybody else) can not accurately visualize, but it doesn't matter to them anyway.
ajarmst 6y ago
Mycle Schneider isn’t a trustworthy source. He’s an anti-nuclear activist with a clear agenda and a history of misrepresenting or obfuscating facts about the industry and its inherent danger.
- bigfudge 6y ago
  Without any evidence, this is just an adhominem. Please cite an example of obfuscation or misrepresentation.
  - ajarmst 6y ago
    Here's the World Nuclear Association on some of Schneider's most recent FUD: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/combatting-climate-change-faster-with-new-nuclear.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/combatt....
ambyra 6y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05/if-saving-the-climate-requires-making-energy-so-expensive-why-is-french-electricity-so-cheap/?sh=55f4df11bd98 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
- ambyra 6y ago
  I think real world examples are always good. Germany went all solar, France all nuclear. Seems like France is winning (cheap clean energy).
  - kristofferR 6y ago
    Germany didn't go "all solar", they went "all coal and methane". https://grist.org/energy/the-cost-of-germany-going-off-nuclear-power-thousands-of-lives/ https://grist.org/energy/the-cost-of-germany-going-off-nucle...
    - stkdump 6y ago
      Same old lie. Check the actual numbers of electricity production.
betwixthewires 6y ago
Sensational title. > every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options. This is a weak argument. The article makes a good point, which is that renewable costs in some countries are lower than nuclear operating costs. But this alone does not justify the claim that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse. Then the article delves into politicking. I get the feeling that that was the original intended goal of the piece.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  The arguments do not compete. Each adds to the case, and the strength of the argument is the sum of all, less any valid counters. It is very clear that the sum is strongly positive, even with increasing uncertainty in the later points. The case is solid even if one or two sub-arguments turned out to have holes. Huge decommissioning costs are always neglected in any argument promoting nukes. As thoroughly bad as the argument is for building nukes, and even for continuing to operate existing nukes, the value proposition for Tokamak fusion is thousands of times worse. The only plausible explanation for continued work on them is as a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population available to draw upon for weapons projects. Nothing else could make a lick of sense. Spending on Tokamak is thus deeply irresponsible.
  - jpgvm 6y ago
    You could have made the same argument for investing in solar a few decades ago. Spending money on fusion research will unlock humanities next energy supply for when/where solar isn't viable. Fusion power has been hampered by the way it's been approached )massive slow moving projects) but is inevitably going to come to fruition given enough time and money and when it does it will likely displace most other energy sources.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      I will go on record here: There will never be so much as one single, solitary erg of competitive commercial energy production from any Tokamak plant, ever. Every cent spent on Tokamak is stolen from more viable energy research--which might reasonably even include some non-Tokamak, aneutronic fusion, after solar, wind, and geo capacity are fully built out. Thus, each person-day of work on Tokamak takes our species a day farther away from any desirable goal.
grassmudhorse 6y ago
Complete crap. Anyone who makes statements about solar energy costing 2c a kwhr is either a fool or a liar. I'd suggest the latter in this case. There's nothing independent about this clown

92 points by stadia42 6y ago

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.

scythe 6y ago
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!
- mchusma 6y ago
  Agree that his premise is entirely an economic one. From first principles, nuclear energys's marginal cost is very inexpensive (similar to renewables). What's basically needed to bring the cost of nuclear down is scale, investing more in production. This is why new approaches to mass producing small scale reactors is so interesting. It should allow nuclear to get competitive with renewables, and having a diverse energy base is definitely a good thing. Also, fusion holds the most hope for massively decreasing the cost of energy. It's a game changer, and it's close. It's possible that fusion allows things like mass carbon capture, powering reforestation efforts, and more.
- pydry 6y ago
  >However, it's extremely difficult to determine how much of this expense is necessary vs. due to over-regulation or lack of innovation. The sheer capital intensity of nuclear is what hampers innovation, not safety regulations.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear. Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change But that's not what happened. Given the current state of the industry we can't afford to spend decades trying to right the technical and regulatory wrongs of the past now that renewables are becoming truly viable.
- wernercd 6y ago
  > Truly viable When you ignore the glaring problems with renewables? Sure... but why pay attention to rare earth minerals needed, massive problems creating massive amounts of PV panels, recycling issues, etc We can't afford to let the burgeoning "savior" of our world continue on it's destructive path because the Religion of Renewables won't admit to the fact that it's Priests are doing bad things with children... To many aspects and conversations turn into religious debates. PC? SJWs? Climate Change? Anti-Nuclear/Pro-Renewable? (or vice versa on all of them) all turn into religious debates with people who refuse to look at both sides of very complex issues.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    You know, you have some valid points. Unfortunately, due to your demeaning and dismissive tone, I don't feel there's any point in engaging with you further.
    - mionhe 6y ago
      You know, you have a point. Unfortunately, due to your demeaning and dismissive tone, I don't feel there's any point in engaging with you further.
  - ruph123 6y ago
    > recycling issues You gotta love the whataboutism of the nuclear folks ranting about recycling issues of current renewable energy tech when nuclear leaves behind toxic material that has to be kept in a safe place for a long time surviving changes in government, potential revolutions, terrorist attacks, incompetence, greed, etc.

nabla9 6y ago

It's infatuating that all arguments pro- and against nuclear energy are so selective. It's very hard to get unbiased view. The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh. Nuclear energy is 24/7 from the start. Currently Nuclear/coal/gas provides base load that enables cheap renewables (base load is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. Day, week, months) Supplying same base load with renewables means energy production + large scale energy storage + grid investments. You need overcapacity in production and the grid to even out time and geographical variability of renewables. I have not seen any honest cost comparison that counts in everything.

aksss 6y ago
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, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive. Advocacy for non-hydro renewables requires heaping doses of “hope” that new technologies will be developed one day to deprecate the side-by-side ff power-generation. That hope and risk has to be priced in to the comparisons with nuclear for supplying electric grids, or the debate isn’t “nuclear vs renewables” it’s “nuclear vs. (renewables + fossil fuel generation)”. At that point it even makes sense to think of “nuclear vs. (renewables + nuclear)”. If you want the cost of CO2 and its global impact priced into using fossil fuels, perhaps that’s what the cost of nuclear should be compared to.
- mattashii 6y ago
  > Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now. There are quite some solar-thermal installations of >100MW, which store solar energy in a thermal buffer to later convert this to electrical power, creating an effective 24/7 stable supply of power, weather permitting.

rtx 6y ago

We will end up with nuclear, we can take as many different path as we wish. Any nation which goes full nuclear first will reap the benefits.

jokoon 6y ago
I will not bother reading that article, sorry.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago

>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 catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones. And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!

robocat 6y ago
Nuclear friendly countries are struggling with the costs. Multiple examples of problems were given for France, yet the French government likes nuclear power.
- namdnay 6y ago
  Electricity in France is so cheap that EDF has had to raise domestic electricity prices in order to make it possible for other providers to compete
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    In the short term nuclear is undoubtedly expensive, but when the debt from construction is payed off, it becomes an incredibly cheap and reliable source of energy. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      Not disputing, but in the interests of full disclosure, the presenter is (per YT About): * Professor David Ruzic * Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering * Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering * University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
      - 6y ago

Sudophysics 6y ago

Solar and off loading batteries from like Ambri is probably a good idea. Nuclear is great, but is simply annoying in every right despite being an existing "throw megawatts at it" solution that's also not spewing gas.

wernercd 6y ago

I'm going to hesitate to say this article is very short sighted... it talks about "nuclear is expensive, renewables are cheap and we don't know how to store nuclear waste". Nabla's comment is a good start on the conversation (good frame but no real apples to apples comparisons). Personally, with the talk about "what about all that nuclear waste"... where's the talk about the recyclable waste? Batteries, solar panels, wind mills are all very hard to recycle and add "after the fact" costs like nuclear does that's being unaccounted for - and is happening at a MUCH larger scale currently. Where's the talk about all the "rare earth minerals" that's going to have to be strip mined around the world to keep up with "clean energy"? I think this article has some valid points wrapped up in talking points to strengthen its argument while ignoring massive talking points that go unmentioned (True comparisons of costs, storage/recycling of materials and the massive increase in "plundering" Earth goes unmentioned... to name a few). Edit: Not saying I'm "pro nuclear" or "anti renewable"... I'm more of a balanced approach person - I think the future will include Coal, Gas, Nuclear, Solar, hydro and various mixes there-of and we need to work on making all of them better because none of them are going anywhere any time soon - and they ALL have strengths and weaknesses. https://fee.org/articles/the-environmental-costs-of-renewable-energy-are-staggering/ https://fee.org/articles/the-environmental-costs-of-renewabl... > Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs. https://www.futurity.org/nuclear-waste-recycling-2355402-2/ https://www.futurity.org/nuclear-waste-recycling-2355402-2/ New, better ways of recycling Nuclear "waste" is being researched constantly > A new simple, proliferation-resistant approach offers a way to reduce nuclear waste, researchers say. https://fortune.com/2020/02/05/wind-turbine-fiberglass-landfill-disposal-renewable-energy/ https://fortune.com/2020/02/05/wind-turbine-fiberglass-landf... > Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23... > The problem of solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”

Shadonototro 6y ago

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

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
He says renewables. Fusion isn't mentioned. America isn't mentioned. What are you talking about?
- Shadonototro 6y ago
  i know what i'm talking about, you'll see in 10 years, and you'll say "yep that random guy was right" renewables, sure
dang 6y ago
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rich_sasha 6y ago

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”.

worik 6y ago
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
- akvadrako 6y ago
  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.
  - dang 6y ago
    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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer. Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly. You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to deal with peaks in demand. That's because they are only needed for that long and because you can turn them on and off pretty much instantly. You don't have that choice with traditional solutions like gas plants. Which is why despite battery cost, this type of battery is very successful at largely removing the need for having peaker plants. It also seems to be very successful at getting rid of blackouts because there were never enough of those peaker plants to begin with in Australia. Another advantage is that you can put these batteries all over the place. Many small installations make up for a lot of aggregate capacity. You can put them in buildings even; and people do. Musk is also building factories that are producing batteries by the GWH per year per factory and soon TWH per year. He's not alone of course and basically there are quite many other companies now planning their own little GWH production facilities. There are tens of billions being invested in that stuff in the next few years. There will be hundreds or thousands of these factories in a few decades churning out many TWH of storage annually. That battery capacity is of course mostly intended for the transport sector and not for grid storage. But if you are worried about having enough storage capacity on the grid, there will be multiple TWH of batteries driving around on roads in most countries by the end of the decade. Basically 2M cars with 50KWH batteries == 1TWH. That's a lot of distributed and mobile storage. All we need to do is plug it in. Of course there will be more optimal solutions as well. But it's capacity we'll have none the less.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Why do all the anti-nuclear people just through out the marginal cost and then move on...

dctoedt 6y ago
> Why do all the anti-nuclear people just through out the marginal cost and then move on... In the article, the interviewee didn't — he specifically talked about decommissioning costs.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

The solution is smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Run them for 30 years, and then just leave them in place- waste included - forever. Eventually we can probably figure out how to operate them for 50, then 100 years. The downsides of this are much less than the potential downsides of excess CO2 in the atmosphere, which are civilization-ending.

mimixco 6y ago

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 by now. The report does a great job of linking to original sources and it would be hard to find fault with the facts in it. TLDR, nuclear is in decline worldwide and maybe completely over in the US as far as new construction. The proposed new modular reactor designs have safety issues that keep them from being a quick fix.

c1ccccc1 6y ago
> The proposed new modular reactor designs have safety issues that keep them from being a quick fix. That's interesting, I didn't know that. Where can I read more about this?
- mimixco 6y ago
  Here's the report PDF link: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2020-.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-S...
hodgesrm 6y ago
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.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

lousken 6y ago

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

armada651 6y ago
Ironically many countries are considering underground storage of CO2 to combat climate change.
- aksss 6y ago
  Is carbon sequestration even remotely realistic though (beyond PoC, and at scale)?
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    Hard to say, its a big mega project, but then so is what we do today to keep getting more oil and gas. Same story goes for energy storage to make solar/wind workable at large scales. Very hard problem! So is sucking the last dregs of oil out of the ocean, or creating earthquakes to suck it out of the ground.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    I reccomend Vaclav Smil's interviews on this subject. The short answer is no.
  - Trombone12 6y ago
    I mean, it's pretty realistic at incinerator plants, the concentrations and temperatures are such that you use up some reasonably small percentage of the total plant effect on capture and you can capture 90 % of the generated CO2. The trick will be to make sure economic incentives don't lead to people simply building so many incinerators that you end up emitting more than before anyway...

grawprog 6y ago

One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/ >Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal and leaching of contaminants including heavy metals and arsenic into the water. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining-and-milling https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/ Nuclear energy still requires fuel. The impacts and costs from mining operations and refining should be taken into account when comparing to other energy sources. They are part of it. Nuclear energy can't exist without it.

rich_sasha 6y ago
Is there an argument to be made about volumes? Eg let’s say it is 5x worse than mining coal, but you need 100x less of it, is it net less bad? I clearly made up the numbers, just curious.
- grawprog 6y ago
  I'm not sure how directly comparable they are. How do you compare radioactive and chemical contamination to the kind of contamination from coal mines? Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about. I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly, increasingly ecological models require easy to work with numbers that can be compared and contrasted to analyse cost vs benefit, but the real world does not work that way.
  - Swenrekcah 6y ago
    Using this comment to remind people that coal plants do produce radioactive exhaust: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

cipher_system 6y ago

Everyone always says nuclear is expensive but what if the world (or significant portion of it) decided to go all in and build enough nuclear to replace fossil fuels in the next 2 decades. What would the price be then?

stkdump 6y ago
France tried to do exactly that, with the results mentioned in the article: massive subsidies, but future costs not covered by far.

2trill2spill 6y ago

Wow, what a simplistic look at nuclear vs renewables. They don't even begin to look into the "hidden" costs of renewable energy. They fail to mention or include the costs of new transmissions lines, bringing new mines onboard, building grid storage, etc. If we forgo nuclear power the only other currently viable carbon free, stable, energy source is hydro power, which has huge environmental costs and immense public resentment/push back. For example look at the James bay hydro project[1]. 11,500 km2 of land flooded, intense protest from the Cree and other first nations as well as conservation groups, increases in mercury levels in fish populations, etc. Expanding hydro power enough to handle base load energy use is unlikely, due to the above costs and push back. So if we can't expand hydro or nuclear then we have to go all in on wind and solar plus grid storage. We could use pumped hydro but that brings about many of the same costs/problems as hydro power. That leaves us with over building wind and solar, and adding huge amounts of transmission lines and batteries to account for the variability. Add in the switch from ICE cars to electric and the amount of new metals needed is going to be immense. I've also noticed that every time a new transmission line or mine is purposed in the United States their is immense push back from environmental and conservation groups, and from the public as a whole. For examples of this look at the fight over adding new transmissions lines in southern Wisconsin[2] or the intense opposition to mining the Duluth complex[3] in northern Minnesota[4]. The Duluth complex is the largest untapped copper and nickel resource in the world and Polymet has been trying to get permits for well over a decade to mine. Copper and nickel are greatly needed for renewable energy and batteries, and it could still be another 4 or 5 years if it ever happens. Not using nuclear energy is just going to massively exacerbate the transmission line and mining problems as well as increase the prices of renewable energy. Wind and solar is "cheap" because we don't factor in the added transmission lines, and natural gas peaker planets needed to currently make it happen. Also many of the groups pushing for wind and solar + batteries also happen to be against adding additional mines and transmission lines required to make it happen, and honestly you cant really blame them, mines can pollute local water supplies and transmission lines are ugly. All and all a balanced approach is probably the cheapest and most viable path forward, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, grid storage all working together on the grid. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project [2]: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/cardinal-hickory-creek-wisconsin-residents-speak-out-against-proposed-power-line/article_6ceb0747-9bdc-5c12-b7d0-18e8d2d3209c.html https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/cardina... [3]: http://www.miningminnesota.com/duluth-complex/ http://www.miningminnesota.com/duluth-complex/ [4]: https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/06/polymet-copper-nickel-mine-litigation-indigenous-environmental-groups/ https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/06/polymet-copper-nickel-...

agarttha 6y ago

Looks like Mycle Schneider, the lead author, is a founding member of WISE-Paris, which is the French branch of the anti-nuclear group WISE, which he directed from 1983 to 2003. [wikipedia]

pydry 6y ago
Is it particularly noteworthy that an anti nuclear article was written by an anti nuclear author or am I missing something?
- sneak 6y ago
  I believe that GP intended to imply ideological bias.
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
    Could be true. but from an above comment: >Not disputing, but in the interests of full disclosure, the presenter is (per YT About): >* Professor David Ruzic >* Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering >* Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering >* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professors usually don't gain these qualifications because they started out anti-nuclear. Something must have reversed his opinion somewhere along the line, no doubt he has greater domain expertise than all but a few others sharing similar deep knowledge.
- ingsoc79 6y ago
  Yes, as it establishes the potential bias of the article author. If this article was written by typically a pro-nuclear author it would be much more noteworthy.
  - pydry 6y ago
    That was the idea behind this nuclear industry PR piece from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213984 Predictably, it didn't bring up the costs (though of course the first comment on HN did) but it tried to play the "environmentalist who has seen the light" angle pretty hard. It's actually kind of weird how many articles like this do get submitted to hacker news. Link says "it's safe & making a comeback", comments say "it's just not economic and no" <- this has happened quite a few times.

imtringued 6y ago

Renewables fail at heating in the winter because they generate electricity directly. SMR nuclear district heating might be the only way to cover the shortfall. Thermal power plants have an inherent advantage when it comes to producing heat.

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jswizzy 6y ago

Good look getting to Mars or exploring space without nuclear power of some sort. It's the safest and cleanest energy source we have have.

huffmsa 6y ago

> 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. Because nukes have stagnated for close to half a century. Bit of a head slapper.

Nasrudith 6y ago

The premise is fallacious on several levels. Nuclear power and renewables are a dichotomy even if one is better for stable baseload power and the other lower in kWhr cost. France isn't going to give up MAD just because renewables are cheaper - it is still a budget synergy since they will have reactors anyway. No country has or will go 100% CO2 reduction focus. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.

fuzzfactor 6y ago

>nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse Could be if it delays or prevents addressing the real roots of the problem such as overpopulation and extreme lack of energy conservation. Fukushima is nature's way of reminding us to conserve or live to regret it eventually. No one has yet been able to even locate the still-molten fuel, I know its only been 10 short years and it's not supposed to be easy or even possible with today's limited nuclear technology. Good thing it has such a long half-life so there's plenty of time remaining to figure this out over the next 24,000 years. As all engineers know, when deadlines are too short it can lead to unaddressed consequences. Regardless since the nuclear option exists there will always be a significant faction of enthusiasts who will die eventually without regretting it at all. Most regrets will occur in a future these enthusiasts (or anybody else) can not accurately visualize, but it doesn't matter to them anyway.

ajarmst 6y ago

Mycle Schneider isn’t a trustworthy source. He’s an anti-nuclear activist with a clear agenda and a history of misrepresenting or obfuscating facts about the industry and its inherent danger.

bigfudge 6y ago
Without any evidence, this is just an adhominem. Please cite an example of obfuscation or misrepresentation.
- ajarmst 6y ago
  Here's the World Nuclear Association on some of Schneider's most recent FUD: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/combatting-climate-change-faster-with-new-nuclear.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/combatt....

ambyra 6y ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05/if-saving-the-climate-requires-making-energy-so-expensive-why-is-french-electricity-so-cheap/?sh=55f4df11bd98 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

ambyra 6y ago
I think real world examples are always good. Germany went all solar, France all nuclear. Seems like France is winning (cheap clean energy).
- kristofferR 6y ago
  Germany didn't go "all solar", they went "all coal and methane". https://grist.org/energy/the-cost-of-germany-going-off-nuclear-power-thousands-of-lives/ https://grist.org/energy/the-cost-of-germany-going-off-nucle...
  - stkdump 6y ago
    Same old lie. Check the actual numbers of electricity production.

betwixthewires 6y ago

Sensational title. > every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options. This is a weak argument. The article makes a good point, which is that renewable costs in some countries are lower than nuclear operating costs. But this alone does not justify the claim that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse. Then the article delves into politicking. I get the feeling that that was the original intended goal of the piece.

ncmncm 6y ago
The arguments do not compete. Each adds to the case, and the strength of the argument is the sum of all, less any valid counters. It is very clear that the sum is strongly positive, even with increasing uncertainty in the later points. The case is solid even if one or two sub-arguments turned out to have holes. Huge decommissioning costs are always neglected in any argument promoting nukes. As thoroughly bad as the argument is for building nukes, and even for continuing to operate existing nukes, the value proposition for Tokamak fusion is thousands of times worse. The only plausible explanation for continued work on them is as a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population available to draw upon for weapons projects. Nothing else could make a lick of sense. Spending on Tokamak is thus deeply irresponsible.
- jpgvm 6y ago
  You could have made the same argument for investing in solar a few decades ago. Spending money on fusion research will unlock humanities next energy supply for when/where solar isn't viable. Fusion power has been hampered by the way it's been approached )massive slow moving projects) but is inevitably going to come to fruition given enough time and money and when it does it will likely displace most other energy sources.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    I will go on record here: There will never be so much as one single, solitary erg of competitive commercial energy production from any Tokamak plant, ever. Every cent spent on Tokamak is stolen from more viable energy research--which might reasonably even include some non-Tokamak, aneutronic fusion, after solar, wind, and geo capacity are fully built out. Thus, each person-day of work on Tokamak takes our species a day farther away from any desirable goal.

grassmudhorse 6y ago

Complete crap. Anyone who makes statements about solar energy costing 2c a kwhr is either a fool or a liar. I'd suggest the latter in this case. There's nothing independent about this clown