Hacker News tends to be pro-solar, pro-wind, and anti-nuclear. Discussions on Hacker News tend to overlook the unreliable nature of intermittent solar and wind

Hacker News tends to be pro-solar, pro-wind, and anti-nuclear. Discussions on Hacker News tend to overlook the unreliable nature of intermittent solar and wind power sources. The hidden costs of solar and wind are also overlooked: the cost of land, the cost of transmission infrastructure, the cost of battery storage, the short lifespan of the hardware, the requirement for fossil fuel backup generators, etc. Here's Yann LeCun (Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta) describing the advantages of nuclear versus solar and wind in a different, larger-scale context: AI datacenters will be built next to energy production sites that can produce gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously. Basically, next to nuclear power plants. The advantage is that there is no need for expensive and wasteful long-distance distribution infrastructure. Note: yes, solar and wind are nice and all, but they require lots of land and massive-scale energy storage systems for when there is too little sun and/or wind. Neither simple nor cheap. Link to LeCun's comment on X here, along with a discussion of why solar and wind are not enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097 The same is true on smaller scales.