12 ms·

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nature of the tech means each individual unit isn't very important, and failure means no power and maybe an eyesore, no catastrophic pollution. One further consideration is the decentralized nature of renewables. As the war in Ukraine is showing us, for any country dependent on a small number of central power plants, those become extremely vulnerable weak points if your country is invaded, whereas a decentralized network of renewables is hardier and can degrade rather than hard fail. I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run. 1: Perhaps the small modular nuclear reactors idea can eventually be proven out.

coldpie 4y ago
You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer that works everywhere. All options, including nuclear, need to be on the table and considered as part of the whole-system energy solution.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
  - sesuximo 4y ago
    I’d like to read about this - can you point me towards some reputable articles
    - ackfoobar 4y ago
      Not an article, but I find the summary from Sabine Hossenfelder neutral and trustworthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        That's a great video, and I think it's important to point out to the other jackass in this thread that the issue is relevant to Germany because most of that country is north of fucking Saskatoon while this article is about Georgia which is at the same latitude as Iraq.
      - Gwypaas 4y ago
        That video is missing demand response enabling sector coupling. Take green steel using hydrogen as a chemical feedstock. Oversize the electrolyzers and add some storage and the plant is now able to utilize low prices and leave the firm 10% to more important consumers, while enabling more producers to exist. This without paying the round-trip cost. Almost all studies looking into 100% renewable systems finds them easily possible globally but a holistic approach is required. Simply shifting the current electricity sector to renewables won't cut it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
  - slenk 4y ago
    Batteries in their current form are incredibly harmful to the environment, and I think would need to be replaced more than nuclear fuel sources.
    - Elyra 4y ago
      Exactly, and the reason why they're cheaper now is because it's easier to dump their externalities on developing countries with lax environmental policy, whereas nuclear has unreasonably strict safety requirements which drive up costs substantially, along with the lost expertise in the work force by pausing it for so long.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs. We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions. At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas plants already exist; no exotic solutions are required to give 100% continuous power supply.
  - belorn 4y ago
    Europe can not continue to rely on natural gas and fossil fuels for the next 20-30 years, nor will the climate goals be reached if power consumption and thus gas consumption are increased. Gas peaker plants are also not cheap. People think they are cheap when looking at the theoretical cost, but having energy plants in stand-by mode costs a lot of money. Generally those are paid by either taxes or as part of the grid connection cost because governments will pay a lot of money to have grid stability. In theory we could remove those subsidizes and let the market pay to have grid stability, but no governments in Europe do this. Europe also do not have any easy access to natural gas. The only country would be Norway. Being energy self-sufficient is important from a geopolitical perspective and I doubt anyone is unaware about the strong connection between current wars and fossil fuels. Nuclear fuel can be both mined and constructed in EU, the fuel is much less sensitive to geopolitical events, and the diversity in the nuclear fuel production chain is fairly good. Countries can much easier store up decades worth of fuel.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      So you propose having nuclear plants in standby? Then I have a bridge to sell you.
      - belorn 4y ago
        Of course not, but is that question even asked in good faith? Are you not aware that the European grid is made out of multiple different technologies each with a different benefits and drawbacks? Right now the most important aspect of the grid is not price, it is the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. It is not sustainable to use fossil fuels in the short run and it is definitively not sustainable in the long run. Countries need to invest and start building replacement for existing fossil fuel power plants, and they also need at the same time increase capacity. On top of that we also need to start replace and remove part of the hydro energy production in order to prevent several extinctions. It is also not morally or economically sensible to continue spend subsidizes on fossil fuel plants. A minimum requirement for government subsidizes should be zero green house emissions and geopolitical self-sufficient within the borders of EU.
- scythe 4y ago
  I've been pleasantly surprised by the impressive recent results that multiple groups have gotten with potassium-based dual-ion batteries. The dual-ion battery stores both positive (in the anode) and negative (in the cathode) ions, which means that both electrodes can be made of carbon rather than metals. Storing negative ions in the cathode also eliminates the major hurdle with sodium-ion: the large Na+ ion doesn't like to be yanked out of the metal-oxide cathode's crystal lattice. I'm not sure why the best stability results I've seen have been with potassium, but anyway: 1500 cycles, 95% capacity retention: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee01535f/unauth https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee0... 2000 cycles, "100%" capacity retention (degradation below measurement limits): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001440 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001... It's rare that I see a battery that meets the triple criterion of high stability (>>1000 cycles), cheap materials and high current efficiency (which in a large installation is also related to heat dissipation), but these seem to do it. The density is too low for vehicles, but fine for grids.
credit_guy 4y ago
> fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity Do you have some links? All I could find was [1], where it says the rates will be raised by 2.6% in 2023 and 4.5% in the next two years, which is not unreasonable given the current inflation rate. The justification for the increase does not mention Vogtle at all, instead it mentions strengthening the grid, investments in renewables, improving costumer experience, enhancing operations. [1] https://www.georgiapower.com/company/news-center/2022-articles/georgia-power-service-commission-approves-georgia-powers-amended-2022-rate-request.html https://www.georgiapower.com/company/news-center/2022-articl...
- magicalist 4y ago
  The article mentions > Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Three dollars and seventy eight cents?!?!?!
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  It’s in the originally posted article. “Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.”
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns.
- jlarocco 4y ago
  > The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns. The American way.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Capitalizing rewards, socializing the risks. But socialism is bad folks, m'kay.
    - groot2581 4y ago
      Worse things have happened than a $4 rate increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
      - flangola7 4y ago
        Hmmmmm I don't see what famine has to do with nuclear power.
        slackfan 4y ago
        The famine killed more people than nuclear power ever did, yet green activists are all for killing off nuclear power and not socialism.
        flangola7 4y ago
SequoiaHope 4y ago
One further point to add on decentralization: a nuclear power plant necessarily requires a powerful state to protect the plant and supply chain and avoid proliferation risks. This powerful state has other side effects. From a libertarian perspective you cannot have a weak state and safe nuclear power (or rather, this is uncertain), while wind and solar present no such risk. I looked at the numbers for this Georgia plant extension. It cost something like $22B and took over 15 years to build. If such a new plant was started today it would not go online until 2037. Meanwhile you can generate as much total power (accounting for only daytime exposure) with $11B in solar panels, and if you spend the other $11B on battery and grid tied EV storage, you can both make the public happy by giving them discounted stuff while also meeting all of your overnight and weather related storage needs. And best of all that decision can be made tomorrow and you can see customers starting to feed energy back to the grid next month, not in 15 years when climate change is significantly worse. I’m not inherently opposed to nuclear, but it’s hard to see the benefits of a single centralized plant versus a distributed system that can begin build out and operation immediately.
- causi 4y ago
  avoid proliferation risks Proliferation risks seem like something we pretend to care about much more than we actually do. India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea all developed nuclear weapons with little more than complaining from the US.
  - canadianfella 4y ago
    [dead]
giantg2 4y ago
'By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better."' If we look at a long enough timeline, there really shouldn't be much change. The replacement of coal and gas plants would be with much cheaper renewable but also with higher cost nuclear. The average should land near the old price. What we observe is that the renewables have a head start compared to nuclear adoption so it seems like prices are higher because our minds are only remembering the recent price drops compared to the true legacy prices.
- audunw 4y ago
  Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all. Seems to me that, now that both transportation and grid management is pouring bucketloads of money into energy storage technology, they'll just continue to improve and come down. I mean, just as some countries are hitting 50%+ of renewables, and the variability is becoming a significant challenge, we're also starting to see a lot of EVs entering the market. I've got a car charging in my garage right now that my electricity provider can start and stop charging based on electricity prices. I can easily delay charging for 2-3 days if need be. Seems to me that everything is coming together for a fully renewable solution. And this is probably what smaller island nations and such will want to standardize on anyway. It'll be the default for most areas. Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe?
  - giantg2 4y ago
    "Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all." May even in a generation or two. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime though.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    > Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe? Nuclear submarines, and that is about it.
    - 4y ago
kansface 4y ago
> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. If the US were serious about climate change, I have no doubt we would move mountains tomorrow, but we absolutely are not serious. Sacrifice/compromise/responsibility aren't even part of the conversation.
- nwiswell 4y ago
  > Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.
  - xattt 4y ago
    My melange of big projects: Space shuttle, reusable rockets, cell phone networks, Fibre deployment They’re incremental (and out of order of importance), but these radically changed our lives in some way.
  - burnerburnito 4y ago
    I feel like pointing out that stadiums and airports are single buildings that in the grand scheme of things aren't nearly as common or large as a country's (or even a single state's) worth of power plants, highways/rail networks, or housing for the masses. Airports can be complex, and of course chip fabs are an overwhelming case of quality over quantity, so in conclusion you're definitely right on the "hard" count still being accomplished, but I notice a particular gap missing here on "big".
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
misterprime 4y ago
A sub-$4 monthly fee seems like a decent choice to significantly increase the energy supply in your region. I'd like to see the numbers on the average monthly cost of electricity usage for homes in Georgia (separate from the various fees), along with an analysis of how many years will be necessary to recover the additional fees associated with these new reactors. Perhaps this was already done and posted online, but I don't have the confidence to go looking for it. Here in California we seem to be shutting down nuclear plants while energy demand grows.
pleistocene 4y ago
The unique advantage of nuclear is not its price, it’s that it produces a lot of energy in any environment without polluting the air or contributing to climate change
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
There is nothing cheap or simple about wind and solar. This is especially true if you attempt to do an apples to apples output comparison.
ttfkam 4y ago
Georgia is subject to hurricanes, which nuclear plants can weather much better than solar panels or wind turbines. And aside from aforementioned hurricanes, wind is simply not plentiful or reliable across the southeastern United States. Just by virtue of geography, the options are more limited. Nuclear makes a lot more geographic sense in places where there are no reliable wind corridors to harvest. https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325 https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325 Also, unlike many "Red Dawn" fantasies, the US isn't getting successfully invaded anytime in the near (or distant) future. Mexico, Canada, and the islands of the Caribbean are neither inclined nor capable of such an action, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans make one hell of a moat.
infamia 4y ago
> By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." > I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run. Trying to get solar and wind to reliably provide baseload will likely be a big engineering project too (assuming it can be done). I also like the idea of smaller power generation sites. I think it would be really healthy if we had a mix of small nuclear, gas, and renewables, so we're not reliant on one thing. We need a bit more overlapping capacity in our grids.

coldpie 4y ago

You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer that works everywhere. All options, including nuclear, need to be on the table and considered as part of the whole-system energy solution.

jeffbee 4y ago
Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
- sesuximo 4y ago
  I’d like to read about this - can you point me towards some reputable articles
  - ackfoobar 4y ago
    Not an article, but I find the summary from Sabine Hossenfelder neutral and trustworthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      That's a great video, and I think it's important to point out to the other jackass in this thread that the issue is relevant to Germany because most of that country is north of fucking Saskatoon while this article is about Georgia which is at the same latitude as Iraq.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      That video is missing demand response enabling sector coupling. Take green steel using hydrogen as a chemical feedstock. Oversize the electrolyzers and add some storage and the plant is now able to utilize low prices and leave the firm 10% to more important consumers, while enabling more producers to exist. This without paying the round-trip cost. Almost all studies looking into 100% renewable systems finds them easily possible globally but a holistic approach is required. Simply shifting the current electricity sector to renewables won't cut it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
- slenk 4y ago
  Batteries in their current form are incredibly harmful to the environment, and I think would need to be replaced more than nuclear fuel sources.
  - Elyra 4y ago
    Exactly, and the reason why they're cheaper now is because it's easier to dump their externalities on developing countries with lax environmental policy, whereas nuclear has unreasonably strict safety requirements which drive up costs substantially, along with the lost expertise in the work force by pausing it for so long.
jfengel 4y ago
Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs. We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions. At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas plants already exist; no exotic solutions are required to give 100% continuous power supply.
- belorn 4y ago
  Europe can not continue to rely on natural gas and fossil fuels for the next 20-30 years, nor will the climate goals be reached if power consumption and thus gas consumption are increased. Gas peaker plants are also not cheap. People think they are cheap when looking at the theoretical cost, but having energy plants in stand-by mode costs a lot of money. Generally those are paid by either taxes or as part of the grid connection cost because governments will pay a lot of money to have grid stability. In theory we could remove those subsidizes and let the market pay to have grid stability, but no governments in Europe do this. Europe also do not have any easy access to natural gas. The only country would be Norway. Being energy self-sufficient is important from a geopolitical perspective and I doubt anyone is unaware about the strong connection between current wars and fossil fuels. Nuclear fuel can be both mined and constructed in EU, the fuel is much less sensitive to geopolitical events, and the diversity in the nuclear fuel production chain is fairly good. Countries can much easier store up decades worth of fuel.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    So you propose having nuclear plants in standby? Then I have a bridge to sell you.
    - belorn 4y ago
      Of course not, but is that question even asked in good faith? Are you not aware that the European grid is made out of multiple different technologies each with a different benefits and drawbacks? Right now the most important aspect of the grid is not price, it is the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. It is not sustainable to use fossil fuels in the short run and it is definitively not sustainable in the long run. Countries need to invest and start building replacement for existing fossil fuel power plants, and they also need at the same time increase capacity. On top of that we also need to start replace and remove part of the hydro energy production in order to prevent several extinctions. It is also not morally or economically sensible to continue spend subsidizes on fossil fuel plants. A minimum requirement for government subsidizes should be zero green house emissions and geopolitical self-sufficient within the borders of EU.
scythe 4y ago
I've been pleasantly surprised by the impressive recent results that multiple groups have gotten with potassium-based dual-ion batteries. The dual-ion battery stores both positive (in the anode) and negative (in the cathode) ions, which means that both electrodes can be made of carbon rather than metals. Storing negative ions in the cathode also eliminates the major hurdle with sodium-ion: the large Na+ ion doesn't like to be yanked out of the metal-oxide cathode's crystal lattice. I'm not sure why the best stability results I've seen have been with potassium, but anyway: 1500 cycles, 95% capacity retention: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee01535f/unauth https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee0... 2000 cycles, "100%" capacity retention (degradation below measurement limits): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001440 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001... It's rare that I see a battery that meets the triple criterion of high stability (>>1000 cycles), cheap materials and high current efficiency (which in a large installation is also related to heat dissipation), but these seem to do it. The density is too low for vehicles, but fine for grids.

credit_guy 4y ago

> fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity Do you have some links? All I could find was [1], where it says the rates will be raised by 2.6% in 2023 and 4.5% in the next two years, which is not unreasonable given the current inflation rate. The justification for the increase does not mention Vogtle at all, instead it mentions strengthening the grid, investments in renewables, improving costumer experience, enhancing operations. [1] https://www.georgiapower.com/company/news-center/2022-articles/georgia-power-service-commission-approves-georgia-powers-amended-2022-rate-request.html https://www.georgiapower.com/company/news-center/2022-articl...

magicalist 4y ago
The article mentions > Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Three dollars and seventy eight cents?!?!?!
fnordpiglet 4y ago
It’s in the originally posted article. “Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.”

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns.

jlarocco 4y ago
> The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns. The American way.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Capitalizing rewards, socializing the risks. But socialism is bad folks, m'kay.
  - groot2581 4y ago
    Worse things have happened than a $4 rate increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
    - flangola7 4y ago
      Hmmmmm I don't see what famine has to do with nuclear power.
      - slackfan 4y ago
        The famine killed more people than nuclear power ever did, yet green activists are all for killing off nuclear power and not socialism.
        flangola7 4y ago

SequoiaHope 4y ago

One further point to add on decentralization: a nuclear power plant necessarily requires a powerful state to protect the plant and supply chain and avoid proliferation risks. This powerful state has other side effects. From a libertarian perspective you cannot have a weak state and safe nuclear power (or rather, this is uncertain), while wind and solar present no such risk. I looked at the numbers for this Georgia plant extension. It cost something like $22B and took over 15 years to build. If such a new plant was started today it would not go online until 2037. Meanwhile you can generate as much total power (accounting for only daytime exposure) with $11B in solar panels, and if you spend the other $11B on battery and grid tied EV storage, you can both make the public happy by giving them discounted stuff while also meeting all of your overnight and weather related storage needs. And best of all that decision can be made tomorrow and you can see customers starting to feed energy back to the grid next month, not in 15 years when climate change is significantly worse. I’m not inherently opposed to nuclear, but it’s hard to see the benefits of a single centralized plant versus a distributed system that can begin build out and operation immediately.

causi 4y ago
avoid proliferation risks Proliferation risks seem like something we pretend to care about much more than we actually do. India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea all developed nuclear weapons with little more than complaining from the US.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]

giantg2 4y ago

'By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better."' If we look at a long enough timeline, there really shouldn't be much change. The replacement of coal and gas plants would be with much cheaper renewable but also with higher cost nuclear. The average should land near the old price. What we observe is that the renewables have a head start compared to nuclear adoption so it seems like prices are higher because our minds are only remembering the recent price drops compared to the true legacy prices.

audunw 4y ago
Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all. Seems to me that, now that both transportation and grid management is pouring bucketloads of money into energy storage technology, they'll just continue to improve and come down. I mean, just as some countries are hitting 50%+ of renewables, and the variability is becoming a significant challenge, we're also starting to see a lot of EVs entering the market. I've got a car charging in my garage right now that my electricity provider can start and stop charging based on electricity prices. I can easily delay charging for 2-3 days if need be. Seems to me that everything is coming together for a fully renewable solution. And this is probably what smaller island nations and such will want to standardize on anyway. It'll be the default for most areas. Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe?
- giantg2 4y ago
  "Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all." May even in a generation or two. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime though.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  > Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe? Nuclear submarines, and that is about it.
  - 4y ago

kansface 4y ago

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. If the US were serious about climate change, I have no doubt we would move mountains tomorrow, but we absolutely are not serious. Sacrifice/compromise/responsibility aren't even part of the conversation.

nwiswell 4y ago
> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.
- xattt 4y ago
  My melange of big projects: Space shuttle, reusable rockets, cell phone networks, Fibre deployment They’re incremental (and out of order of importance), but these radically changed our lives in some way.
- burnerburnito 4y ago
  I feel like pointing out that stadiums and airports are single buildings that in the grand scheme of things aren't nearly as common or large as a country's (or even a single state's) worth of power plants, highways/rail networks, or housing for the masses. Airports can be complex, and of course chip fabs are an overwhelming case of quality over quantity, so in conclusion you're definitely right on the "hard" count still being accomplished, but I notice a particular gap missing here on "big".
sokoloff 4y ago
> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

misterprime 4y ago

A sub-$4 monthly fee seems like a decent choice to significantly increase the energy supply in your region. I'd like to see the numbers on the average monthly cost of electricity usage for homes in Georgia (separate from the various fees), along with an analysis of how many years will be necessary to recover the additional fees associated with these new reactors. Perhaps this was already done and posted online, but I don't have the confidence to go looking for it. Here in California we seem to be shutting down nuclear plants while energy demand grows.

pleistocene 4y ago

The unique advantage of nuclear is not its price, it’s that it produces a lot of energy in any environment without polluting the air or contributing to climate change

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

There is nothing cheap or simple about wind and solar. This is especially true if you attempt to do an apples to apples output comparison.

ttfkam 4y ago

Georgia is subject to hurricanes, which nuclear plants can weather much better than solar panels or wind turbines. And aside from aforementioned hurricanes, wind is simply not plentiful or reliable across the southeastern United States. Just by virtue of geography, the options are more limited. Nuclear makes a lot more geographic sense in places where there are no reliable wind corridors to harvest. https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325 https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325 Also, unlike many "Red Dawn" fantasies, the US isn't getting successfully invaded anytime in the near (or distant) future. Mexico, Canada, and the islands of the Caribbean are neither inclined nor capable of such an action, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans make one hell of a moat.

infamia 4y ago

> By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." > I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run. Trying to get solar and wind to reliably provide baseload will likely be a big engineering project too (assuming it can be done). I also like the idea of smaller power generation sites. I think it would be really healthy if we had a mix of small nuclear, gas, and renewables, so we're not reliant on one thing. We need a bit more overlapping capacity in our grids.