[desro]

It appears as though Apple doesn't consider nuclear energy "clean". They don't mention it in writing anywhere, and from my locale in Chicago, the "Grid Forecast" available in the Home app is very stingy with its determination of "cleaner" energy, despite IL running on at least 58% nuclear energy (as of 2020).

[jillesvangurp]

Maybe they don't consider it economical? He was pretty clear about wanting to have solutions that are actually economical. Another consideration is that his timeline of seven years is not compatible waiting for nuclear plants to be built.

Many recent nuclear plants come online years late and many billions over budget. So he'd have a good point.

[epups]

Nuclear plants are economical for their use case. In days in which renewables cannot provide enough energy, your clean energy alternatives are batteries (of which we don't have nearly enough of, and are not economically viable today as an option) and hydro (we already tapped most possible resources for it).

[hn_throwaway_99]

Those are not the only alternatives for storage. I think Power-to-gas, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas, will be an important part of energy storage. Basically, use excess renewable energy to create hydrogen and methane by means of electrolysis. That's essentially natural gas, which can then be used by conventional natural gas power plants.

[epups]

Will be, or is? I'm talking about the current state of technology. There is no clean viable alternative to nuclear except hydro.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Well, if you're talking about "the current state of technology", the general consensus as I understand it is that building new nuclear power plants is not cost effective with other forms of energy storage/generation capacity.

I'm all for keeping existing nuclear plants online, but I don't think building new ones is the right decision.

Also, yes, there are viable green hydrogen plants being built today: https://totalenergies.com/media/news/press-releases/total-an... . Also, France is likely to lead in this area because they just got hydrogen produced with nuclear to be considered "green", which is a great thing in my opinion.

[epups]

> the general consensus as I understand it is that building new nuclear power plants is not cost effective with other forms of energy storage/generation capacity.

Different forms of energy generation serve different purposes. I hope you can see why comparing nominal prices of solar panel installations vs a nuclear power plant is misguided. The latter can take you through a tough winter, the former cannot. Renewables are great, let's keep building them. For the times where they cannot help us, we can then choose to use a technology that is costly in dollars (nuclear) or lives (gas/oil/coal).

[jillesvangurp]

Economical viability of renewables is being proven by the hundreds of GW per year deployment. Real world deployments. Across the world. Batteries too (produced by the twh/year now). Nuclear, ... not so much. For whatever reason, it's not happening at any scale worth talking about. A handful of plants here and there. Invariably and reliably way over budget years later than planned.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but nuclear has an absolutely terrible track record. Compared to the things you dismiss that are currently running circles around nuclear in terms of cost, GW delivered, etc. It's outpacing nuclear every year more and more.

If somebody figures out how to do nuclear 10-20 times cheaper and faster, I'm all for it. But so far that doesn't exist.

[epups]

Please cite one example of an alternative to nuclear that is viable today - no trend, no future projections, today - that fulfills the following criteria:

1) Can be deployed at scale (ie, can cover for up to at least 10% of the world's energy needs) 2) Costs less than nuclear 3) Is cleaner than nuclear 4) Is not hydro

Nuclear is not a replacement for renewables. It does not have to compete in price with them. It is, however, our only viable alternative TODAY for base load needs, which obviously cannot be reliably supplied only with renewables.

[jillesvangurp]

What do you mean by viable? There are hundreds of GW in renewables deployed worldwide already growing at a rapid rate every year. Those are more than viable. So viable in fact that countries keep on doing more of it. Very lucrative business. If you have other information, please share it.

These are of course not hypothetical fantasy projects that may or may not happen but actual panels on the ground or spinning wind turbines delivering lots of power to grids today.

It's well proven technology. Clean, cheap, predictable in performance and installation cost, etc. Sort of the opposite of nuclear where every new plant is a bespoke thing that is all but guaranteed to blow through it's time and cost budgets. We can speculate on why that is but the fact is that there just isn't a whole lot of nuclear capacity coming online. Which is perhaps part of the reason why it is proving so expensive and hard to build more of it. You might even say it has perpetual issues proving, or rather disproving, it's viability in recent decades.

Whatever the reason, renewables are now dominant in newly installed capacity. These don't need more viability studies. That happened years ago. Renewables are now well on their way to being the dominant source of energy in a lot of markets. In some markets it already is. 10% would be a a distinctly unambitious goal. 50% is a more ambitious goal that could be reached in a decade or so. This decade possibly. With nuclear, that amount of contribution is unthinkable. The cost would be astronomical and there are no concrete plans to make that happen. The budgets for that don't exist. All we have is a lot of magical and wishful thinking.

Also, base load is a very loosely defined notion that somehow never gets nailed down to actual GW of capacity or GWH of storage needed. Can you be specific? The reality is that the only western nation plagued by rolling blackouts is the US, which has a lot of aging nuclear plants and is a bit behind on investments in infrastructure. In places with a much higher dependence on renewables, more modern infrastructure, and less nuclear (like essentially most of Northern Europe) blackouts are basically not a thing.

And of course nuclear sometimes goes offline for maintenance and that can take up significant amounts of time. When it does, it's gone for months or longer.. France is a good recent example that had a large portion of their reactors offline for maintenance just when there was a big energy crisis on courtesy of Russia. Where did their base load come from? Imported energy. France was a net electricity importer during 2022 because of this. 16wth or so. Only about 4% of it's needs; but still. They managed fine. The European grid has a lot of resilience. What grew massively during this period? Renewable energy production.

[epups]

> Also, base load is a very loosely defined notion that somehow never gets nailed down to actual GW of capacity or GWH of storage needed. Can you be specific?

An energy grid must have a capacity to produce a given amount of energy over a certain period of time reliably, and this is called the base load. The capacity varies according to the region or grid - for example, for Europe you can find the average amount of energy consumed here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

We cannot use renewables for that, because they can be unreliable. Even if we saturated Europe's most suitable spots with solar panes and wind turbines, there will be days in which not enough energy would be produced in this scenario. Energy production from renewables is also seasonal, obviously. Therefore, you need a stable energy source that you can use to accommodate for that.

So, your alternatives for when that happens are essentially nuclear or carbon-based power plants. The latter are heavily favored at the moment, as you can see in the link above. They are currently what Europe largely relies on as a reliable energy source generator. Therefore, nuclear is the only existing alternative to oil/gas/coal.

I would appreciate if you read my comments carefully and realize that I am not arguing against renewables, so you can save your lectures for someone else. I am merely pointing out that renewables are not a solution for a reliable grid without another energy source, and that every alternative people like to cite to nuclear in this scenario (batteries, hydrogen, you name it) are currently not viable.

[bryanlarsen]

A large, diverse, distributed grid.

[epups]

No, the energy ultimately has to come from somewhere. If its a day without wind or Sun over, say, Europe, how do you propose a distributed grid would work without nuclear energy?

[DrScientist]

The problem with the current generation of nuclear tech is 4 fold.

* fuel sources are finite ( non-renewable )

* disposal of waste is an issue.

* safety concerns makes building very costly ( have to be built to withstand an attack - not just an accident )

* nuclear energy is too adjacent to nuclear weapons for it to be a global solution.

Current nuclear tech is a transitional technology - important for providing base-load, until better storage & better distributed grids are put in place.

[esjeon]

> Current nuclear tech is a transitional technology - important for providing base-load, until better storage & better distributed grids are put in place.

Yup, but the reality so sucks that we don't have alternatives proved to be effective in scale. We don't even have renewable energy that is eco-friendly through out its whole life cycle, just yet. Recycling tech is not catching up fast enough.

[DrScientist]

Yep - lots of work to do.

On the positive side - battery technologies [1] are still improving fast, there is lots that could be done on the energy efficiency side.

While big central powerstations are always going to be needed, I think the future will be more distributed generation and storage than today.

We don't actually have a problem with lack of energy - the problem is capture, storage and distribution.

[1] We need to think beyond just batteries for storage of course.

[audunw]

In terms of global warming, nuclear energy can never get to zero because they’re thermal power plants that directly contribute to warming of the planet. The effect is surprisingly significant. Though, as long as we’re burning fossil fuels, green house gases will dominate enough that I personally think we can consider nuclear energy as clean. I’m just wary of making it the primary solution.

[danw1979]

The thermal output of any nuclear or fossil fuel power station is not a significant source of global warming.

[fodkodrasz]

I’m happy to inform sounthat the palnet does emit thermal energy via radiation, so we likely won’t ignite it with nuclear/fusion powerplants emitting heat. Also: solar panels can actually get hot themselves. Think about it.

[nonethewiser]

How do they warm the planet? They don’t emit CO2 right? So are you saying its just from radiant heat, or what?

Seems hard to believe the heat it generates actually warms the planet.

[lozenge]

The process of refining ore is energy intensive and probably emits co2 in itself.

[eptcyka]

This is a moot point, if a power plant operates at any significant efficiency, it doesn't matter what the process of generating power is - the generated power will 90% of the time be turned into waste heat anyway.

[zelos]

In the long term, I guess light emitted to space and the embedded energy in spaceships are the only things that don't end up as heat in the atmosphere?

[eptcyka]

Electrically induced chemical reactions would also store the energy in a way that might not be released as heat, I think.

[127]

What's your alternative for cleaner primary solution for base load?