[mschuster91]

> I don't know any pro-nuclear that is anti-renewables. We see nuclear as an alternative to burning coal, gas or oil, not to renewables.

We have a ton of these people in Germany. "Technologieoffen" they call themselves - the reality is that they want to keep the old structure of big utilities and massive profits for shareholders alive.

> Renewables are great. We all love them. It's just that they are not here just yet, not 24h/day 265days/year anyway. They need a complement.

That's what a grid is for. Build a national grid with serious transfer capacities (China can do it over 1000s of km's, so the US can just as well if it wanted), and suddenly you can use East Coast solar to power the West Coast. Or here in Europe, with French and Portuguese offshore wind and solar from Northern Africa. On top of that, incentivise large consumers (data centers, heavy industry) to upgrade their processes to be able to handle dynamic load shedding, and invest into powerful gas and hydrogen fuel cell based peaker plants to cover for the very small amount in a year where neither solar, wind nor dammed hydro is enough to supply the entire country.

The serious issue with nuclear is that they cost billions of dollars to build. At the moment, in Germany 44% of the total power is generated using renewables [1], in peak times (i.e. summer) renewables account for up to 70% of the month's load [2]. The investment for NPPs can't ever be recouped at that point, which is why even small scale projects such as NuScale got the boot [3]. No matter what the pro-nuclear crowd hopes, the free market has decided against it.

[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch...

[2] https://www.focus.de/earth/news/knapp-70-prozent-unbemerkt-f...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...

[nickpp]

Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. Hence no free market when it comes to building nuclear power plants, unfortunately. Otherwise we’d have a glut of safe electricity at amazingly low prices. Of course safety was the pretext for that overregulation but when such a complex technology has the lowest deaths per megawatt (except solar) [0] - maybe we can relax the rules a little.

I know about your suggestions and while they are all good ideas I just don’t see them widely implemented in reality for some reason. Maybe because they all require government intervention which is slow, expensive and prone to corruption from the fossil fuel lobby.

Meanwhile the non-renewable part of energy generation is made burning coal, gas and oil and spewing pollution and even radioactive particles in the air, pollution that kills millions every year. Also spewing CO2 causing climate change, e civilization-ending danger getting closer and harder to avoid.

Maybe nuclear deserves a second chance?

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

[hef19898]

No free market for nuclear? Interesting, but not true. Simoly kWh prices show that wind and solar were cheaper than Hinkley C already, what, 5 years ago? Since then, solar is getting cheaper every year.

On electricity markets, which in Europe only take variable coats into account, the ranking, cheapest to most expensive, is: wind and solar, hydro, coal, nuclear and oil followed by gas. So even there, in hard cold numbers, nuclear looses. Even without taking the huge fix costs of nuclear plants into account, or the long term coats like waste storage.

Why do you think even small, and potentially cheaper, reactor projects get axed?

[mschuster91]

> Nuclear is expensive because of overregulation. There is no free market when it comes to nuclear, unfortunately.

And for good reason. There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear. The cost of Chernobyl was at least 235 billion dollars [1], Fukushima is estimated to end up at around 200 billion dollars [2]. The only other kind of power generation that can destroy entire swaths of land in a single strike is dammed hydro, but even the largest catastrophe to date, the Kakhovka dam destruction in Ukraine, cost only 14 billion dollars [3] - and it didn't render the affected land permanently uninhabitable and only cost the lives of about 50 people, compared to Chernobyl's death toll.

It's utter madness to risk this much money and this much destruction when there are so many different ways of getting power. Nuclear power may be the cheapest per kWh on paper, but that is only because the worst-case risk is implicitly assumed by the government without accounting for it in insurance premiums - at least the major Western countries limit operator exposure to liability claims to a fraction of the potential cost [4]. This is beyond unsustainable, it's financial russian roulette.

We will not be able to live entirely without NPPs, I agree on that one, as we need them to create Co-60 for radiotherapy sources and the nuclear weapon powers to get new feedstock to maintain the warheads, but we should try as a species to get rid of nuclear weapons anyway and only keep the minimum we need for radiotherapy and fundamental research.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/chernobyl...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253929/

[3] https://www.voanews.com/a/un-reports-staggering-14-billion-c...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...

[nickpp]

> There is no power generation that has a potential for serious damage compared to nuclear

Of course there is. Good old oil, coal and gas burning. Since we’re fear-mongering on potentials here, would you like to estimate the cost of a runaway green house effect that turns the whole Earth into Venus? Climate scientists are warning we may already be beyond that point of no return. And we are still putting CO2 into the atmosphere while arguing the “potential” dangers of nuclear!

[mschuster91]

> And we are still putting CO2 into the atmosphere while arguing the “potential” dangers of nuclear!

We're building renewable generation capacity at a far greater speed (as said, Germany alone > 1GW a month...) than we ever could using nuclear power. This in turn enables us to shift residential and commercial heating to heat pumps - even assuming a gas power plant, 1 kWh of electric power replaces 4 kWh of heat power.

[nickpp]

Let me know when you start closing fossil fuel power plants like you closed your nuclear ones. So far you’ve just restarted some coal-fueled ones until the LGN terminal is done next year. And that terminal will bring in GAS, not solar or wind. [0]

Till then - you’re selling pretty dreams, while in reality killing people and dooming the planet.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-approves-bri...

[hef19898]

I totally forgot that now insurance, or re-insurance company is willing to insure against that risk. I am sure that is because those companies a anti-nuclear environmentalists and it has nothing to do with their risk models showing nuclear power plants to be uninsurable from a risk / profit perspective.