7 ms·

My imagination still prefers nuclear! I don't mind solar projects but think it's a big mistake to not invest in nuclear.

by vasco 3y ago

pydry 3y ago
Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage (studies prove that unlike the river dams it is often confused with, geography for pumped storage is plentiful)). Meanwhile tariffs like https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ reduces the need for that storage for easily shiftable demand sources like heaters/electric car batteries [edit in response to coldpie]. Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even in spite of the war. If up-front cost is your only concern, gas+solar+wind wins on all fronts. It also takes ~20 years to build a nuclear plant, while new solar capacity can start taking meaty chunks out of current gas usage after 12 months. Given that western countries are between 40-60% gas powered these days and we don't have 20 years to avoid climate catastrophe, it leaves only two obvious choices of power source to decarbonize quickly - solar + wind.
- tigroferoce 3y ago
  Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part. A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs. And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement). Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?
- michael1999 3y ago
  That was always the killer for CANDU. If industry has to carry the whole cost of research, education, regulation, and training operators, our market is too small to support it. And the big buyers all have their own (weapon program adjacent) programs. We might have a renaissance with SMRs, but we’ll be contributors, not independents.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage). I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order. (To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Why are you skeptical? A blanket statement without an argument to back it up is not addressable or useful.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Because they've never been deployed at the scale we're talking about. They're unproven. Hydrogen is inefficient to make and hard to store safely; current battery tech isn't efficient enough and has resource limitations; pumped hydro requires certain relatively rare combinations of geographic properties. Are those solvable problems? Probably, hopefully, some day. Meanwhile, nuclear works right now and is well understood.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Those are vague, nebulous, handwavy arguments. Some (like the inefficiency of hydrogen) are dog whistles that fall apart on close examination of the applications for which hydrogen would be suitable. The geography for OFF RIVER pumped hydro is not rare at all; it's present basically anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief (feasible even in deserts), in enormous amounts. The generic problem with "it can't be done" arguments is you are claiming all possible ways of solving a problem don't work. This is a very strong claim, and is not backed up by such vague arguments.
        coldpie 3y ago
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  > but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point. We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland. > Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage). Do you have any sources to back up these figures? I’m genuinely interested. How is hydrogen a viable storage form when you cannot burn 100% hydrogen and fuel cell aren’t available or cost effective at utility scale? How are batteries a viable storage form when there isn’t enough global manufacturing capacity to store energy at scale? How is pumped hydro a viable storage form when you are limited by geography and can’t really build any more?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    In fairness, in a renewably powered world Finland is going to be a really bad place to be. It's one of the worst places for energy (I'd call it the energy butthole of that world but I'll reserve that label for Russia). Solar is seasonal and wind is relatively sparse there. What this means is you're going to lose your heavy energy intensive industry. Going with nuclear won't save you from that, if you're then competing with industry in places where solar is available all year at costs likely to be below $0.01/kWh.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point. Not really. Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again (10x solar's LCOE). Theres a reason only France tried that - and that is strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt. Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options are economically infeasible. I have to say that an ignorant #2 is a pretty anti-climate position to take.
    - ftth_finland 3y ago
chinathrow 3y ago
Even with current lead times?
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  If we start building nuclear now, in a number of years we we have nuclear power plants. If we wait the same number of years, we might have some form of viable long term storage. Or not.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.
    - ftth_finland 3y ago
      > The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine? > If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. What we need is to build nuclear power at scale. Doing the same thing repeatedly for years in bound to bring both the construction time and cost down. > Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? What use is 15GW of solar in northern climes when you cannot use it when you need it and you cannot store it? In Finland solar has no output three months of the year and an additional two months of marginal output. Additional we need power 24/7, especially in winter. > Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. I must confess I am unsure how the long term economics of renewables will work out. Around here renewables are pushing prices into the negative and increasing volatility. As a funny aside, 15 GW is the peak power usage in Finland. Adding that much generation capacity would totally saturate the market. > The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs. How many GWh of storage can you get for $200M? My guess is far from enough. We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.
grej 3y ago
I think solar makes sense in all of the places that otherwise are unused. Roofs and the shades of car parks, for example. But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint and smallest overall environmental impact) + solar & wind is the way forward.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Why are there any negatives here? A field of solar panels is far more valuable than a field growing corn to feed to cows. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint This doesn't matter, there is no shortage of land. People living in high rises in the center of big cities think there is, but once someone looks at a map they see how much land is actually out there. smallest overall environmental impact According to what metric? You can't put a nuclear plant anywhere, you have to be able to cool it.
  - kbar13 3y ago
    there are always environmental impacts to land when we deprive it of sunlight, which is why picking the low hanging fruit of covering man-made structures with panels would be preferable over large fields
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Trees deprive land of sunlight, that seems to work out fine. Do you have any actual information or data?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Since there are environmental impacts of land use, it seems we should maximize the return from each unit of land, to minimize the impact per unit of benefit. Now, compare the value returned by an acre growing feed grain, to an acre collecting solar energy via PV. The latter has enormously higher return. The argument you are making is not an argument against freestanding PV, it's an argument against agriculture. And yet, it is selectively applied to PV.
ianai 3y ago
My state proposed a grid battery solution that would have provided power for the entire state for up to 1-2 days IIRC. They didn’t approve it, but the budget wasn’t astronomical. I honestly wonder if the worry about off hours use is a little overblown. Infrastructure has a history of both being expensive up front and funded. Imagine if the US didn’t have highways and trying to explain all the impacts to the GDP that modern highways make. The price would almost seem trivial compared to the trillions per year of GDP that goes over asphalt.
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  Where can I find more information about this? I can find very little information about long term storage, not that 1-2 days is much. Most seem to think 4 hours qualifies as storage.
  - pydry 3y ago
    This model thinks that 5 hours gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... 5 hours is pretty doable with batteries and pumped storage. It's a lot and very expensive but not an impossible amount and there aren't any cheaper/quicker alternatives that I'm aware of. I think Australia will be almost half way to 5 hours already once Snowy 2 is finished. That's just one pumped storage plant & studies show that the geography to build more is plentiful. That last 3% can probably be eventually provided with via hydrogen, which, unlike the other two, is inefficient to roundtrip (~45%) but it lets you store large amounts of power for long durations easily.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Glad to hear someone else beating the hydrogen (or some e-fuel) drum for that last few percent.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.
r00fus 3y ago
For baseload power I agree, but looking at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, it's hard not to see the downsides of nuclear: it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. Solar has none of these issues, and is resilient/decentralized as well.
- the8472 3y ago
  > and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. > it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues Yeah that seems more like an issue but may be solvable by using sea water for cooling?
  - r00fus 3y ago
    > These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. That’s part of the problem. It’s an asymmetric risk/cost issue. The attackers only need to get it right once, you need to defend your installation constantly. Security for nuclear power stations already increase the upkeep cost considerably.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- xyzzyz 3y ago
  Same can be said about cities: they are vulnerable to water issues (if a city loses access to water, it’s a major disaster), and military can weaponize them as fortification. Does it mean that we shouldn’t build cities? No, obviously not, that’s silly: it just means that you have to make sure water is flowing, and that military invasions are hugely destructive.
  - bwb 3y ago
    That isn't a good analogy. Cities have multiple water sources, and it is a very complex system. Not to mention we have special trucks and responses when that happens (at least in the USA). Nuclear has some problems.
prai1SE 3y ago
I‘m also a fan of nuclear but do you think as a global economy we can collectively invest into multiple huge industries at the same time which aim to solve the same issue (too-cheap-to-meter & renewable power, deployed asap to avoid runaway climate change)? What I mean is that wind + PV are on a roll at the moment. This has turned into a huge and hungry global industry which has a lot of momentum (people wanting to work there, technical readiness, investors ready to supply capital, public acceptance, pretty decent public opinion on the industry). From personal experience, I used the live in Munich where one of the main industry fairs (Intersolar) takes place, and it‘s a huge and ever growing event. So even though I like nuclear and agree that the currently running reactors should stay online as long as possible, I appreciate that getting the nuclear power industry to the same fitness level as the solar industry would take a long time (which we don‘t have) hence me preferring solar. This is a zero-sum mindset, which I believe applies here.
mastax 3y ago
Nuclear has been and is being invested in. Governments fund a huge amount of nuclear R&D and also often heavily subsidize plant construction. When utilities crunch the numbers to decide what to invest in building, they overwhelmingly don't choose nuclear. And yes, they are certainly taking into account intermittency, "base load" whatever you want to call it. There are arguments to be made that decision-makers at utilities aren't taking into account certain factors, for example in deregulated markets like Texas where reliability has perhaps been under-rewarded by the market design. But I think one should be especially skeptical about arguments posted by laymen versus the experts who are actually putting their money where their mouth is.

My imagination still prefers nuclear! I don't mind solar projects but think it's a big mistake to not invest in nuclear.

by vasco 3y ago

My imagination still prefers nuclear! I don't mind solar projects but think it's a big mistake to not invest in nuclear.

pydry 3y ago

Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage (studies prove that unlike the river dams it is often confused with, geography for pumped storage is plentiful)). Meanwhile tariffs like https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ reduces the need for that storage for easily shiftable demand sources like heaters/electric car batteries [edit in response to coldpie]. Pairing it with non-green gas is cheaper still, even in spite of the war. If up-front cost is your only concern, gas+solar+wind wins on all fronts. It also takes ~20 years to build a nuclear plant, while new solar capacity can start taking meaty chunks out of current gas usage after 12 months. Given that western countries are between 40-60% gas powered these days and we don't have 20 years to avoid climate catastrophe, it leaves only two obvious choices of power source to decarbonize quickly - solar + wind.

tigroferoce 3y ago
Cost and time are a big part, but not the only part. A real question is whether we can do with REN alone or not. If we can, good, let’s do it. If we can’t, then we must find something else, regardless of costs. And by “do it” I mean electrify as much as possible (transports, heating, industries where possible) and compensate where we can’t (airplane, agriculture, cement). Are we positive that we can make it? And what happens if we can’t? Should plan for the unhappy scenario too?
michael1999 3y ago
That was always the killer for CANDU. If industry has to carry the whole cost of research, education, regulation, and training operators, our market is too small to support it. And the big buyers all have their own (weapon program adjacent) programs. We might have a renaissance with SMRs, but we’ll be contributors, not independents.
coldpie 3y ago
> paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage). I'm skeptical that these can actually scale to the required level to provide baseload when renewables are unavailable. Don't forget to include EVs and electric heating, which we don't have in massive quantities today but will need to have in short order. (To be ultra-clear: I would never argue against more renewable deployments. Yes, more renewables, always more. But I think not building nuclear, right now, is a big mistake.)
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Why are you skeptical? A blanket statement without an argument to back it up is not addressable or useful.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Because they've never been deployed at the scale we're talking about. They're unproven. Hydrogen is inefficient to make and hard to store safely; current battery tech isn't efficient enough and has resource limitations; pumped hydro requires certain relatively rare combinations of geographic properties. Are those solvable problems? Probably, hopefully, some day. Meanwhile, nuclear works right now and is well understood.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Those are vague, nebulous, handwavy arguments. Some (like the inefficiency of hydrogen) are dog whistles that fall apart on close examination of the applications for which hydrogen would be suitable. The geography for OFF RIVER pumped hydro is not rare at all; it's present basically anywhere there is sufficient vertical relief (feasible even in deserts), in enormous amounts. The generic problem with "it can't be done" arguments is you are claiming all possible ways of solving a problem don't work. This is a very strong claim, and is not backed up by such vague arguments.
      - coldpie 3y ago
ftth_finland 3y ago
> but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point. We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland. > Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale storage (hydrogen, batteries, pumped storage). Do you have any sources to back up these figures? I’m genuinely interested. How is hydrogen a viable storage form when you cannot burn 100% hydrogen and fuel cell aren’t available or cost effective at utility scale? How are batteries a viable storage form when there isn’t enough global manufacturing capacity to store energy at scale? How is pumped hydro a viable storage form when you are limited by geography and can’t really build any more?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  In fairness, in a renewably powered world Finland is going to be a really bad place to be. It's one of the worst places for energy (I'd call it the energy butthole of that world but I'll reserve that label for Russia). Solar is seasonal and wind is relatively sparse there. What this means is you're going to lose your heavy energy intensive industry. Going with nuclear won't save you from that, if you're then competing with industry in places where solar is available all year at costs likely to be below $0.01/kWh.
- pydry 3y ago
  >Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point. Not really. Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again (10x solar's LCOE). Theres a reason only France tried that - and that is strongly related to the reason why Areva went spectacularly bankrupt. Theres no reality in which it makes any economic sense except #1 providing military support or #2 a pretend reality where all available storage options are economically infeasible. I have to say that an ignorant #2 is a pretty anti-climate position to take.
  - ftth_finland 3y ago

chinathrow 3y ago

Even with current lead times?

ftth_finland 3y ago
If we start building nuclear now, in a number of years we we have nuclear power plants. If we wait the same number of years, we might have some form of viable long term storage. Or not.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    > The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine? > If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. What we need is to build nuclear power at scale. Doing the same thing repeatedly for years in bound to bring both the construction time and cost down. > Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? What use is 15GW of solar in northern climes when you cannot use it when you need it and you cannot store it? In Finland solar has no output three months of the year and an additional two months of marginal output. Additional we need power 24/7, especially in winter. > Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful. I must confess I am unsure how the long term economics of renewables will work out. Around here renewables are pushing prices into the negative and increasing volatility. As a funny aside, 15 GW is the peak power usage in Finland. Adding that much generation capacity would totally saturate the market. > The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs. How many GWh of storage can you get for $200M? My guess is far from enough. We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.

grej 3y ago

I think solar makes sense in all of the places that otherwise are unused. Roofs and the shades of car parks, for example. But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint and smallest overall environmental impact) + solar & wind is the way forward.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Why are there any negatives here? A field of solar panels is far more valuable than a field growing corn to feed to cows. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint This doesn't matter, there is no shortage of land. People living in high rises in the center of big cities think there is, but once someone looks at a map they see how much land is actually out there. smallest overall environmental impact According to what metric? You can't put a nuclear plant anywhere, you have to be able to cool it.
- kbar13 3y ago
  there are always environmental impacts to land when we deprive it of sunlight, which is why picking the low hanging fruit of covering man-made structures with panels would be preferable over large fields
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    Trees deprive land of sunlight, that seems to work out fine. Do you have any actual information or data?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Since there are environmental impacts of land use, it seems we should maximize the return from each unit of land, to minimize the impact per unit of benefit. Now, compare the value returned by an acre growing feed grain, to an acre collecting solar energy via PV. The latter has enormously higher return. The argument you are making is not an argument against freestanding PV, it's an argument against agriculture. And yet, it is selectively applied to PV.

ianai 3y ago

My state proposed a grid battery solution that would have provided power for the entire state for up to 1-2 days IIRC. They didn’t approve it, but the budget wasn’t astronomical. I honestly wonder if the worry about off hours use is a little overblown. Infrastructure has a history of both being expensive up front and funded. Imagine if the US didn’t have highways and trying to explain all the impacts to the GDP that modern highways make. The price would almost seem trivial compared to the trillions per year of GDP that goes over asphalt.

ftth_finland 3y ago
Where can I find more information about this? I can find very little information about long term storage, not that 1-2 days is much. Most seem to think 4 hours qualifies as storage.
- pydry 3y ago
  This model thinks that 5 hours gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... 5 hours is pretty doable with batteries and pumped storage. It's a lot and very expensive but not an impossible amount and there aren't any cheaper/quicker alternatives that I'm aware of. I think Australia will be almost half way to 5 hours already once Snowy 2 is finished. That's just one pumped storage plant & studies show that the geography to build more is plentiful. That last 3% can probably be eventually provided with via hydrogen, which, unlike the other two, is inefficient to roundtrip (~45%) but it lets you store large amounts of power for long durations easily.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Glad to hear someone else beating the hydrogen (or some e-fuel) drum for that last few percent.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.

r00fus 3y ago

For baseload power I agree, but looking at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, it's hard not to see the downsides of nuclear: it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. Solar has none of these issues, and is resilient/decentralized as well.

the8472 3y ago
> and can be weaponized by terrorists or an invading army. These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. > it's vulnerable to water/cooling issues Yeah that seems more like an issue but may be solvable by using sea water for cooling?
- r00fus 3y ago
  > These risks seem vastly overstated for a large fraction of the world. That such events happen occasionally does not mean the entire world needs to be on a war footing all the time. That would be incredibly wasteful. That’s part of the problem. It’s an asymmetric risk/cost issue. The attackers only need to get it right once, you need to defend your installation constantly. Security for nuclear power stations already increase the upkeep cost considerably.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
xyzzyz 3y ago
Same can be said about cities: they are vulnerable to water issues (if a city loses access to water, it’s a major disaster), and military can weaponize them as fortification. Does it mean that we shouldn’t build cities? No, obviously not, that’s silly: it just means that you have to make sure water is flowing, and that military invasions are hugely destructive.
- bwb 3y ago
  That isn't a good analogy. Cities have multiple water sources, and it is a very complex system. Not to mention we have special trucks and responses when that happens (at least in the USA). Nuclear has some problems.

prai1SE 3y ago

I‘m also a fan of nuclear but do you think as a global economy we can collectively invest into multiple huge industries at the same time which aim to solve the same issue (too-cheap-to-meter & renewable power, deployed asap to avoid runaway climate change)? What I mean is that wind + PV are on a roll at the moment. This has turned into a huge and hungry global industry which has a lot of momentum (people wanting to work there, technical readiness, investors ready to supply capital, public acceptance, pretty decent public opinion on the industry). From personal experience, I used the live in Munich where one of the main industry fairs (Intersolar) takes place, and it‘s a huge and ever growing event. So even though I like nuclear and agree that the currently running reactors should stay online as long as possible, I appreciate that getting the nuclear power industry to the same fitness level as the solar industry would take a long time (which we don‘t have) hence me preferring solar. This is a zero-sum mindset, which I believe applies here.

mastax 3y ago

Nuclear has been and is being invested in. Governments fund a huge amount of nuclear R&D and also often heavily subsidize plant construction. When utilities crunch the numbers to decide what to invest in building, they overwhelmingly don't choose nuclear. And yes, they are certainly taking into account intermittency, "base load" whatever you want to call it. There are arguments to be made that decision-makers at utilities aren't taking into account certain factors, for example in deregulated markets like Texas where reliability has perhaps been under-rewarded by the market design. But I think one should be especially skeptical about arguments posted by laymen versus the experts who are actually putting their money where their mouth is.