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Pretty sad that the solar lobby is trying to destroy the credibility of nuclear. I hope we one day see a resurgence of nuclear, the drama and fear around it rea

Pretty sad that the solar lobby is trying to destroy the credibility of nuclear. I hope we one day see a resurgence of nuclear, the drama and fear around it really shouldn't exist in 2022.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Solar is safe, cheap fusion at a distance. Nuclear is expensive, continually mismanaged local fission. Batteries are short duration fusion buffers. Batteries will be needed for EVs as well, so cost will continue to decline as manufacturing learning and capacity scales up. Enough sunlight hits the Earth every 30 minutes to power humanity’s energy needs for a year. Keep existing nuclear plants running for as long as safely possible, for sure, but stop throwing good money after bad with new generators. Build batteries (including pumped hydro where able), renewables, and transmission. Throw in some demand response or load shifting for loads that can tolerate being scheduled around renewables production (Google does this for compute using ElectricityMap.org, and Nest does demand response in aggregate as a revenue source, when utilities send a signal to shed AC load temporarily on peak consumption days versus firing up gas peakers). https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Edit: (HN throttling, can’t reply) @mrits: Telling people what they want doesn’t work. If they want cars (they do), you sell them EVs. You use your margin to build out a global EV charging network and battery factories. I don’t live in traffic, that’s a choice for others to make. The world is full of space batteries can be installed out of the way to meet net zero goals. There is no such thing as an ideal world, just nudges of consumers towards more positive macro outcomes.
- holoduke 5y ago
  Nuclear has the potential to become very cheap. Much cheaper than solar. The only reason why it's currently more expensive is because of technology. But huge advancements are made every year. Give another 10 years and it will be much much cheaper. Currently a lot of country investing a lot in new nuclear plants.
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    Why won't battery backed solar+wind be cheaper then too? It's already cheaper, and massive advancements are being made there too.
  - polski-g 5y ago
    Technology isn't the reason nuclear is expensive. Regulation is.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Nuclear science came into industrial scale in America and there has never been a fucked-up American accident. The accidents there have been have been minuscule and nobody should lose their shit over them. The ought to be understood as valuable part of the learning process of exactly how much safety must be made part of the design. Binary searching how much safety is truly best involves small accidents. Safety is expensive! Safety takes effort every instant! Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all. Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    > there has never been a fucked-up American accident. What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      > and come very damn close to real disaster That's what I'm smoking. For there to be a fucked-up American accident the accident has to actually happen.
  - monetus 5y ago
    Hanford (in Washington) always sticks in my mind as the most fucked up. Oak ridge has had problems, three mile island too of course, but the reactions were commensurately paranoid. Hanford seems to be incapable of not occasionally poisoning people.
    - foobar2021 5y ago
      For context, the Hanford reactor was built during ww2; around the same age as the presidential candidates from the 2020 USA election.
    - 5y ago
- mrits 5y ago
  So your ideal world is filled with batteries and traffic?
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  Hard-core/irrational environmentalists hate pumped hydro and really any large hydro projects. Some of this likely stems from a massive gaffe some years ago when California regulators demanded a certain percentage of state generation come from environmentally-friendly sources. PG&E laughed because it already had the largest hydroelectric portfolio in the US and didn't have to change anything. Democrat leadership, angry because they didn't find a way to punish the largest utility in the state, promptly recategorized large hydro as Very Naughty. Does hydro have an environmental cost? Sure, so does everything. Is it a great way to generate and store electricity? Yes. Does that matter to lawmakers? No.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    California state elected officials have always been massively solicitous toward PGE, undercutting continual efforts to establish Public Utility Districts that could provide reliable, cheap service. A Public Utility District does cover Sacramento, so legislators are relatively insulated from PGE abuses.
    - aerostable_slug 5y ago
      Any reliability coming to those municipal utilities would be due to PG&E's transmission system. No municipals, even the biggest like LA's, tackles anything near the scale of even our smallest IOU. Most critics of the IOUs ignore the sheer scale and geographic challenges of running a service area larger than some states across many different types of terrain. Running retail distribution and metering isn't that hard when other people run the grid for you. PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E have lots of issues to be sure, but to compare them to SMUD or Modesto is far from apples to apples.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Solar however also takes up a lot of land whereas Nuclear does not. Not saying we should go all in on one or the other but that has to be a huge factor.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Cost of land is close to negligible for solar in the US.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Solar and wind on a disused nuclear reservation can produce as much power as the nuke used to, or had been expected to produce if ever completed. The grid tie-ins come in handy.
    - opo 5y ago
      For typical nuclear power plants the land usage isn't anywhere close to what you claim: >...A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space. To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included). https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate%20Fast%20Facts%20Guide-PRINT.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate... Are there countries where the land use for nuclear power is orders of magnitude larger?
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Evidently my information was faulty. Pilots are advised to stay well outside the fenceline when flying below 1500 feet above ground level, but the sites are not so marked on the sectional charts.
godelski 5y ago
It's anti nuclear round two. I hope we don't make the same mistake again. Last time organizations like green peace and sierra Nevada club took money from gas and oil to smear nuclear. The shame is because nuclear provides 50% of the US's zero carbon energy, despite only being 20% of production. So even if you believe we can do it without nuclear you should clearly want to keep these alive until that number is much smaller.
- projektfu 5y ago
  Do you have a reference about Greenpeace taking money from fossil fuels companies? I would be very interested to read it but I could not find anything in my search.
  - godelski 5y ago
    I have one on Sierra Nevada Club https://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/02/25/the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-fracking-industry/ https://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/02/25/the-sierra-club-took... (there's plenty of other search results you'll find this is just a random one)
    - projektfu 5y ago
      So nothing for Greenpeace?
  - aerostable_slug 5y ago
    Greenpeace board members also benefited from PG&E's patronage. TL;DR: they were flown around on a junket on Frank Sinatra's private jet (!), entertainment provided by Danny Kaye, and then voted to support the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant... Good times! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance
    - projektfu 5y ago
      That talks about the Sierra Club.
qqqwerty 5y ago
You are literally making this comment on an article about how the nuclear industry needs a massive taxpayer funded bailout to stay cost competitive. The "evil solar lobby" has been saying for quite some time that solar is much cheaper than nuclear and therefore should play a large role in the post carbon grid. This article seems to reinforce their claims. Do you have a rebuttal, or are you just trying to be contrarian because it makes you feel good?
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  In 2011-2016 period, renewable energy received roughly 30 times the amount of government subsidy that nuclear energy had. https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources/reports-and-briefs/analysis-of-us-energy-incentives-1950-2016.pdf https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources... The “massive taxpayer funded bailout” the nuclear industry wants is order of magnitude below what solar/wind/hydro get all the time. No wonder nuclear finds it hard to compete, when government subsidizes its competitors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
  - qqqwerty 5y ago
    Did you read the report or did you just read the headline? Your source is a report created by the nuclear energy lobby. This is quite literally the most biased source available. And even then, literally from their own data it shows that in 2015, of the total federal incentives dispersed, renewables got 16% vs 8% for nuclear. That hardly feels like "30 times the amount". And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.
    - qqqwerty 5y ago
      And digging even further. The biggest "incentive" that renewables received was in the "Tax Policy" category. This money is likely the tax incentives that are available to newly built projects. This money is not a government transfer, but rather a tax credit that a project developer users AFTER successfully building a project. These types of incentives are available to nuclear developers, but funnily enough, they received 0 in 2015. Considering these incentives are available to developers of both technology types, I think it is unfair to use them when comparing federal subsidies (after all, if the nuclear industry could actually build a power plant, they would also get this incentive). However, when you look at the R&D column, which is a direct transfer of cash from the government to industry. Nuclear received over 2.5 times as much as renewables (85B vs 32B). This is even more of a travesty considering "Renewables" is a bucket of multiple technology types. So oddly enough, if I was to take away one thing from this report, it looks like we are not investing nearly enough in renewables R&D. Also, why is coal getting 43B, that sucks.

Pretty sad that the solar lobby is trying to destroy the credibility of nuclear. I hope we one day see a resurgence of nuclear, the drama and fear around it really shouldn't exist in 2022.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Solar is safe, cheap fusion at a distance. Nuclear is expensive, continually mismanaged local fission. Batteries are short duration fusion buffers. Batteries will be needed for EVs as well, so cost will continue to decline as manufacturing learning and capacity scales up. Enough sunlight hits the Earth every 30 minutes to power humanity’s energy needs for a year. Keep existing nuclear plants running for as long as safely possible, for sure, but stop throwing good money after bad with new generators. Build batteries (including pumped hydro where able), renewables, and transmission. Throw in some demand response or load shifting for loads that can tolerate being scheduled around renewables production (Google does this for compute using ElectricityMap.org, and Nest does demand response in aggregate as a revenue source, when utilities send a signal to shed AC load temporarily on peak consumption days versus firing up gas peakers). https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Edit: (HN throttling, can’t reply) @mrits: Telling people what they want doesn’t work. If they want cars (they do), you sell them EVs. You use your margin to build out a global EV charging network and battery factories. I don’t live in traffic, that’s a choice for others to make. The world is full of space batteries can be installed out of the way to meet net zero goals. There is no such thing as an ideal world, just nudges of consumers towards more positive macro outcomes.

holoduke 5y ago
Nuclear has the potential to become very cheap. Much cheaper than solar. The only reason why it's currently more expensive is because of technology. But huge advancements are made every year. Give another 10 years and it will be much much cheaper. Currently a lot of country investing a lot in new nuclear plants.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Why won't battery backed solar+wind be cheaper then too? It's already cheaper, and massive advancements are being made there too.
- polski-g 5y ago
  Technology isn't the reason nuclear is expensive. Regulation is.
daniel-cussen 5y ago
Nuclear science came into industrial scale in America and there has never been a fucked-up American accident. The accidents there have been have been minuscule and nobody should lose their shit over them. The ought to be understood as valuable part of the learning process of exactly how much safety must be made part of the design. Binary searching how much safety is truly best involves small accidents. Safety is expensive! Safety takes effort every instant! Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all. Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  > there has never been a fucked-up American accident. What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    > and come very damn close to real disaster That's what I'm smoking. For there to be a fucked-up American accident the accident has to actually happen.
- monetus 5y ago
  Hanford (in Washington) always sticks in my mind as the most fucked up. Oak ridge has had problems, three mile island too of course, but the reactions were commensurately paranoid. Hanford seems to be incapable of not occasionally poisoning people.
  - foobar2021 5y ago
    For context, the Hanford reactor was built during ww2; around the same age as the presidential candidates from the 2020 USA election.
  - 5y ago
mrits 5y ago
So your ideal world is filled with batteries and traffic?
aerostable_slug 5y ago
Hard-core/irrational environmentalists hate pumped hydro and really any large hydro projects. Some of this likely stems from a massive gaffe some years ago when California regulators demanded a certain percentage of state generation come from environmentally-friendly sources. PG&E laughed because it already had the largest hydroelectric portfolio in the US and didn't have to change anything. Democrat leadership, angry because they didn't find a way to punish the largest utility in the state, promptly recategorized large hydro as Very Naughty. Does hydro have an environmental cost? Sure, so does everything. Is it a great way to generate and store electricity? Yes. Does that matter to lawmakers? No.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  California state elected officials have always been massively solicitous toward PGE, undercutting continual efforts to establish Public Utility Districts that could provide reliable, cheap service. A Public Utility District does cover Sacramento, so legislators are relatively insulated from PGE abuses.
  - aerostable_slug 5y ago
    Any reliability coming to those municipal utilities would be due to PG&E's transmission system. No municipals, even the biggest like LA's, tackles anything near the scale of even our smallest IOU. Most critics of the IOUs ignore the sheer scale and geographic challenges of running a service area larger than some states across many different types of terrain. Running retail distribution and metering isn't that hard when other people run the grid for you. PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E have lots of issues to be sure, but to compare them to SMUD or Modesto is far from apples to apples.
Melatonic 5y ago
Solar however also takes up a lot of land whereas Nuclear does not. Not saying we should go all in on one or the other but that has to be a huge factor.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Cost of land is close to negligible for solar in the US.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Solar and wind on a disused nuclear reservation can produce as much power as the nuke used to, or had been expected to produce if ever completed. The grid tie-ins come in handy.
  - opo 5y ago
    For typical nuclear power plants the land usage isn't anywhere close to what you claim: >...A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space. To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included). https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate%20Fast%20Facts%20Guide-PRINT.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate... Are there countries where the land use for nuclear power is orders of magnitude larger?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Evidently my information was faulty. Pilots are advised to stay well outside the fenceline when flying below 1500 feet above ground level, but the sites are not so marked on the sectional charts.

godelski 5y ago

It's anti nuclear round two. I hope we don't make the same mistake again. Last time organizations like green peace and sierra Nevada club took money from gas and oil to smear nuclear. The shame is because nuclear provides 50% of the US's zero carbon energy, despite only being 20% of production. So even if you believe we can do it without nuclear you should clearly want to keep these alive until that number is much smaller.

projektfu 5y ago
Do you have a reference about Greenpeace taking money from fossil fuels companies? I would be very interested to read it but I could not find anything in my search.
- godelski 5y ago
  I have one on Sierra Nevada Club https://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/02/25/the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-fracking-industry/ https://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/02/25/the-sierra-club-took... (there's plenty of other search results you'll find this is just a random one)
  - projektfu 5y ago
    So nothing for Greenpeace?
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  Greenpeace board members also benefited from PG&E's patronage. TL;DR: they were flown around on a junket on Frank Sinatra's private jet (!), entertainment provided by Danny Kaye, and then voted to support the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant... Good times! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance
  - projektfu 5y ago
    That talks about the Sierra Club.

qqqwerty 5y ago

You are literally making this comment on an article about how the nuclear industry needs a massive taxpayer funded bailout to stay cost competitive. The "evil solar lobby" has been saying for quite some time that solar is much cheaper than nuclear and therefore should play a large role in the post carbon grid. This article seems to reinforce their claims. Do you have a rebuttal, or are you just trying to be contrarian because it makes you feel good?

xyzzyz 5y ago
In 2011-2016 period, renewable energy received roughly 30 times the amount of government subsidy that nuclear energy had. https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources/reports-and-briefs/analysis-of-us-energy-incentives-1950-2016.pdf https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources... The “massive taxpayer funded bailout” the nuclear industry wants is order of magnitude below what solar/wind/hydro get all the time. No wonder nuclear finds it hard to compete, when government subsidizes its competitors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  Did you read the report or did you just read the headline? Your source is a report created by the nuclear energy lobby. This is quite literally the most biased source available. And even then, literally from their own data it shows that in 2015, of the total federal incentives dispersed, renewables got 16% vs 8% for nuclear. That hardly feels like "30 times the amount". And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.
  - qqqwerty 5y ago
    And digging even further. The biggest "incentive" that renewables received was in the "Tax Policy" category. This money is likely the tax incentives that are available to newly built projects. This money is not a government transfer, but rather a tax credit that a project developer users AFTER successfully building a project. These types of incentives are available to nuclear developers, but funnily enough, they received 0 in 2015. Considering these incentives are available to developers of both technology types, I think it is unfair to use them when comparing federal subsidies (after all, if the nuclear industry could actually build a power plant, they would also get this incentive). However, when you look at the R&D column, which is a direct transfer of cash from the government to industry. Nuclear received over 2.5 times as much as renewables (85B vs 32B). This is even more of a travesty considering "Renewables" is a bucket of multiple technology types. So oddly enough, if I was to take away one thing from this report, it looks like we are not investing nearly enough in renewables R&D. Also, why is coal getting 43B, that sucks.