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> still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know.

by nickpp 3y ago

> still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know. But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.

8ytecoder 3y ago
The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
>We can have both, you know. TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece. But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over. In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China. The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  A US government backed SMR just quit their pilot project as they can't compete on cost in the current market. Nuclear is basically obsolete. We need to subsidize it to safely use all the current waste and while extracting energy turn that into safer leftovers.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    The problem is that nuclear can't compete on cost with fossil fuels, and we've failed to make those obsolete.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      The reason nuclear is so expensive and slow to build is overregulation. It also slowed R&D so much that we haven't created and tested the reactor designs that were safer, smaller and easier to run. It's like when inventing the airplane we would've stopped because the high number of crashes and never reached today's safety and convenience.
danielbln 3y ago
Exxon Valdez, Deep Water Horizon, Three Mile Island, and so on. How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing, play by the book, not cut corners? Especially with the smell of deregulation in the air?
- nickpp 3y ago
  > How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing Just as much as I trust any giant megacorp to do the right thing?! Which is to say slightly more than my government and slightly less than my neighbors. Everything around me that I use and enjoy (my phone, my car, my laptop, my clothes, my food, movies, music, internet etc) is created&delivered by a megacorp or other. I hope someday we will each produce our own energy but so far solar mostly works on sunny days and home nuclear is probably illegal - regulated to death.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    That's why I wrote "Energy" megacorp. Apple dropping the ball on the iPhone has slightly different externalities than BP's corner cutting causing a blowout on Deep Water Horizon and creating havoc an entire ecosystems, or Met Ed causing a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania with all the fun stuff that came with that. The reason why you don't die of lead poisoning while enjoying your megacorp food is regulation by the way.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      So what exactly are you proposing?! Who is supposed to generate all that energy we are using instead of "megacorps" and how?
      - danielbln 3y ago
        We made our bed and need to sleep in it, but we should be careful what sort of technology we allow them to handle, especially if/when we push for more deregulation. Corps have a singular goal, making money, everything else is secondary unless imposed externally. Exxon can't mess up wind or solar power in a way that it pollutes entire landscapes, but they can do (and have done) so with fossil fuel production, and heavy heavy regulation is presumably one of the few reasons why we haven't seen more issues with nuclear fission on that front. If not for that, some Exxon exec will one day get the bright idea on how to cut a lot of corners to boost quarterly profits, and a windmill toppling over has different externalities than a meltdown, or even just inadvertent radioactive gas/particle release. I'm not saying the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon can't handle it (they certainly can) but it needs to happen in an environment that prioritizes safety above all else, because in the case of fission the fallout is quite severe if they/we mess up (compared to other energy sources).

by nickpp 3y ago

8ytecoder 3y ago

The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

>We can have both, you know. TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece. But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over. In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China. The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.

Projectiboga 3y ago
A US government backed SMR just quit their pilot project as they can't compete on cost in the current market. Nuclear is basically obsolete. We need to subsidize it to safely use all the current waste and while extracting energy turn that into safer leftovers.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  The problem is that nuclear can't compete on cost with fossil fuels, and we've failed to make those obsolete.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    The reason nuclear is so expensive and slow to build is overregulation. It also slowed R&D so much that we haven't created and tested the reactor designs that were safer, smaller and easier to run. It's like when inventing the airplane we would've stopped because the high number of crashes and never reached today's safety and convenience.

danielbln 3y ago

Exxon Valdez, Deep Water Horizon, Three Mile Island, and so on. How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing, play by the book, not cut corners? Especially with the smell of deregulation in the air?

nickpp 3y ago
> How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing Just as much as I trust any giant megacorp to do the right thing?! Which is to say slightly more than my government and slightly less than my neighbors. Everything around me that I use and enjoy (my phone, my car, my laptop, my clothes, my food, movies, music, internet etc) is created&delivered by a megacorp or other. I hope someday we will each produce our own energy but so far solar mostly works on sunny days and home nuclear is probably illegal - regulated to death.
- danielbln 3y ago
  That's why I wrote "Energy" megacorp. Apple dropping the ball on the iPhone has slightly different externalities than BP's corner cutting causing a blowout on Deep Water Horizon and creating havoc an entire ecosystems, or Met Ed causing a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania with all the fun stuff that came with that. The reason why you don't die of lead poisoning while enjoying your megacorp food is regulation by the way.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    So what exactly are you proposing?! Who is supposed to generate all that energy we are using instead of "megacorps" and how?
    - danielbln 3y ago
      We made our bed and need to sleep in it, but we should be careful what sort of technology we allow them to handle, especially if/when we push for more deregulation. Corps have a singular goal, making money, everything else is secondary unless imposed externally. Exxon can't mess up wind or solar power in a way that it pollutes entire landscapes, but they can do (and have done) so with fossil fuel production, and heavy heavy regulation is presumably one of the few reasons why we haven't seen more issues with nuclear fission on that front. If not for that, some Exxon exec will one day get the bright idea on how to cut a lot of corners to boost quarterly profits, and a windmill toppling over has different externalities than a meltdown, or even just inadvertent radioactive gas/particle release. I'm not saying the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon can't handle it (they certainly can) but it needs to happen in an environment that prioritizes safety above all else, because in the case of fission the fallout is quite severe if they/we mess up (compared to other energy sources).