I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s). Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the current path.

Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason.

But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.

I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for the down periods.

It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.

Don't forget to count storage and grid updates.

Nuclear doesn’t work in a market based electricity market. The capital costs are high and it’s difficult to make money if you aren’t paying down those expenses.

IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.

Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out. In what world do you think our energy needs plateau? I'm always so surprised to see this 1970s hippie attitude making a comeback, especially since it makes less sense today than ever before.

I think it makes a lot of sense to build out if the construction and remediation costs are born by a persistent entity that can amortize all those expenses appropriately. It makes almost no sense to build out if your entire energy market is privatized into small entities and you lack the regulatory willpower to ensure proper cleanup funds are reserved and thus open up a loophole for companies to run with minimal costs after construction and disburse funds internally freely. Such was the case with Vermont Yankee and it is very possible (likely even) that it'd be repeated.

If you have a strong central governance authority that can ensure proper maintenance and remediation then they're wonderful... France and China have these advantages - Japan was often held up as a paragon of this approach until massive internal mismanagement was revealed with Fukushima.

I am excited to see my country (Canada) investing more into Nuclear energy as we have a track record (ignore our uranium mining please) of doing this responsibly. I don't think America could safely manage this especially with the destabilization the current administration and lack of legislative backbone has demonstrated is possible.

This is the first time I'm accused to be a 70's Hippie. I graciously accept the compliment ;)

BTW: Is this some kind of new alchemy I don't know about ? How exactly do you renew fissile or fusion-able material ?

We can probably agree that renewable is a misnomer, sine yesterday's sunlight isn't magically showing up again - it's new light from the same sun. Once the sun dims, we are in big doo-doo.

But for fission: fission end products are either useless for future energy production, or require fairly messy breeder reactors that, as I understand it, do not lend themselves to nice modularization and reconditioning that stuff isn't particularly easy (Sellafield may be a good example of how horrifyingly costly all this is). And the end fission products are never the same as the input, so I would like to understand better how you see fission as a "renewable" source.

Also, just to understand the logic in:

"Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out."

Why? A lot of "renewables", like underwater tide plants, should probably not be built out, at least right now, because the economics are just not supporting it. Just because something is "renewable" does not automatically mean we should "of course" building it. that would be the real 70s hippie attitude we so eschew on hacker news.

There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even scratching nuclear from the list.

My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.

Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints.

Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.

> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.

This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or just below capacity).

> it's hard to make the whole thing profitable

Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"

> This is presumably intentional

It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do things, but the people running the power plants really would rather run at much higher capacity

I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like 90% or something?

> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"

Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work. This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be everywhere".

It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work out.

And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a buyer's market!

I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is bad by any stretch of the imagination.

That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for. Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world as a dumping ground for our excess.

This is the worst part. Wind and solar don't come within a thousand miles of being sufficient unless we massively improve our generation density, invent new magical batteries that aren't even on the horizon yet, and build out hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels and windmills.