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They take time to build, solar is intermittent, and just like with nuclear there are NIMBY issues. Installed solar capacity is rapidly going up. Solar in parti

They take time to build, solar is intermittent, and just like with nuclear there are NIMBY issues. Installed solar capacity is rapidly going up. Solar in particular is a big potential issue for nuclear, because so long the sun is shining, why would you buy any nuclear power? Solar is far cheaper to provide, so any rational person would buy solar first. And the more solar the less nuclear has to do during the day, which means that all those billions take longer and longer to pay off. And you better hope storage doesn't kick off before that.

fewavewavewa 4y ago
So renewables are not cheap, easy, and quick?
- dale_glass 4y ago
  They're very cheap compared to building nuclear, very easy to build compared to nuclear, and go up in weeks or months rather than years, so also quick. Capacity is being rapidly added, but there's not enough of them yet.
  - fewavewavewa 4y ago
    So it's easy to throw up some wind turbines and solar panels, but difficult, expensive, and requires cutting-edge technology to make them useful as power sources to the national grid?
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      No, we just need to build more of them. Renewables started being competitive fairly recently and you can't just magic solar panels and turbines out of thin air, they need to be built. And we're rapidly building them. Which by the way, the very reason why we're having this conversation. If nuclear was such a great proposition, people would go and build it. We wouldn't be having silly arguments about its worth on websites that affect nothing. People with billions of money to spend and who expect juicy profits don't need Hacker News' validation.
      - fewavewavewa 4y ago
        We (well, at least in the UK) have plenty of them. It's all that tricky, expensive, and financially unrewarding infrastructure that's holding things back. We pay Scottish windfarms about £200million per year to curtail their output, just because we can't get the power from source to sink.

fewavewavewa 4y ago

So renewables are not cheap, easy, and quick?

dale_glass 4y ago
They're very cheap compared to building nuclear, very easy to build compared to nuclear, and go up in weeks or months rather than years, so also quick. Capacity is being rapidly added, but there's not enough of them yet.
- fewavewavewa 4y ago
  So it's easy to throw up some wind turbines and solar panels, but difficult, expensive, and requires cutting-edge technology to make them useful as power sources to the national grid?
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    No, we just need to build more of them. Renewables started being competitive fairly recently and you can't just magic solar panels and turbines out of thin air, they need to be built. And we're rapidly building them. Which by the way, the very reason why we're having this conversation. If nuclear was such a great proposition, people would go and build it. We wouldn't be having silly arguments about its worth on websites that affect nothing. People with billions of money to spend and who expect juicy profits don't need Hacker News' validation.
    - fewavewavewa 4y ago
      We (well, at least in the UK) have plenty of them. It's all that tricky, expensive, and financially unrewarding infrastructure that's holding things back. We pay Scottish windfarms about £200million per year to curtail their output, just because we can't get the power from source to sink.