[_diyar]

Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart.

50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.

Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.

To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.

[cogman10]

Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.

[Plankaluel]

Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:

The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.

People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.

[s1artibartfast]

yeah, some it has been shaped by man, but that does not negate or invalidate the fact that they like it the way that it is.

My clean dinner table is completely artificial, but that doesnt mean I should be neutral to someone placing a bowl of shit on it.

[palata]

Also wind turbines kill birds and bats, it is an actual problem to be put in the balance.

The balance being: do you build a ton of those turbines, or one nuclear plant?

[cogman10]

Skyscraper windows kill birds and bats.

It's not a real problem. If it were actually a problem you should be able to walk under a wind turbine and find a bunch of dead birds/bats. The reality is you might find 1 or 2, but not enough to actually observe any sort of impact on the population. Outdoor cats are a far bigger menace to birds and bats.

So yeah, you build a ton of those turbines. Because by the time you can deploy 1 1GW plant (10 to 20 years) you can install 10 or 20 times that much power generation via wind. By the time the nuclear plant is operational, you can be talking about refurbishing some of the early installed turbines.

A nuclear plant requires fuel sourcing, waste management, engineering and planning, constant management and monitoring, security, and a fairly large construction footprint for the likes of the cooling towers.

Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.

[palata]

> If it were actually a problem you should be able to walk under a wind turbine and find a bunch of dead birds/bats.

That's not how it works, but thanks for not thinking about it for more than a few seconds. It is documented, you can read about that. In Germany, tens of thousands of bats are killed by wind turbines every year. For birds, they do have camera systems that detect bird migrations and stop the turbines.

So yeah, it is very much a real problem, you just have to read about it.

> Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.

So it's not only the birds problem: you don't know how wind turbines are maintained either!

[Matumio]

They do and it's a problem, but it's a minor issue compared to, say, cars or rat poison. Both kill lots of birds, but somehow when it's wind turbines people suddenly care about the birds. See also: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/technology-articles/...

[cogman10]

People that repeat these lies are very incurious. It's incredible how quickly and easily this lie can be debunked yet it still comes up at the same time wind does. It's almost as bad as the "wind turbines cause cancer" BS. Fortunately people usually have enough common sense to see how ridiculous that one is. But not always.

[palata]

> Fortunately people usually have enough common sense to see how ridiculous that one is

The problem is actually that people don't have enough attention to actually read about it. People are stuck in "I am a smart adult, I don't have to think, whatever I believe is right".

Those are actual problems and wind turbines actually deploy mitigations for them. Possible for birds, not for bats. Many endangered bats are killed as a result.

Sure, as compared to not giving a shit about the living condition of, say, billions of chickens, it may sound like it doesn't matter. But not everybody wants to live on a lifeless planet surrounded by the worst species ever (I mean humans).

> It's almost as bad as the "wind turbines cause cancer" BS.

If you genuinely believe it is, then you vastly overestimate your common sense.

[eldaisfish]

no, this is not an "actual" problem. It is a problem in the sense that it happens, but not at a meaningful enough scale.

The bats and birds is an issue that the oil and gas industry regularly pushes because it sounds concerning, but really isn't.

[palata]

Are you aware that tens of thousands of endangered bats are killed every year just in Germany (by wind turbines)? It is an actual problem for that species.

Are you aware that wind turbines have detection systems for bird migrations and stop to avoid killing too many birds? If it was not an "actual problem", why would they spend money in actual solutions?

[eldaisfish]

yes, i am.

Are you aware of the context of this bat killing "problem"? it is almost entirely a problem for older, unregulated wind farms in Germany. The "problem" has a simple solution, which has been proven to work - stopping wind turbines when bats are known to be moving, for a total of about twenty minutes per day.

[Arodex]

See this long-form investigation:

https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...

[stymaar]

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327

[julkali]

nimby

[cogman10]

Yeah, that seems like it'd be something that would also stop nuclear deployment.

[Moldoteck]

nimby to have solar/wind in alps is even higher vs nimby against nuclear. With nuclear you can at least throw another unit in Aarau

[shermantanktop]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind

Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s

I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.

[pjc50]

Where's the solar currently? Is it also victim to NIMBYs? Or shading?

I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.

[AtlasBarfed]

...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?

I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.

I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.

I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.

I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....

I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.

Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale

[tribaal]

Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.

We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)

[cogman10]

Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.

[tribaal]

Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.

The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).

Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.

[palata]

> Mine is a net producer for example.

All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?

Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?

[tribaal]

Almost the latter - I can almost live without pulling anything from the grid. The huge caveat being that my system is way oversized for a normal house, since my building is multi-use (including commercial tenants who obviously only need power during the day). I am definitely injecting more during the summer though, of course.

I have a 40kWp system and a 20kWh battery.

[calvinmorrison]

It's not in the EU. It is part of the Schengen Agreement.

[jsnell]

It's not an EU nation.

[cogman10]

Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.

[Arodex]

Switzerland unilaterally got out of negotiations with the EU, which also dealt with energy grid coordination.

As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.

[estebank]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

[palata]

> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.

Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?

[AtlasBarfed]

Build a solar plant in the Sahara desert and ship the energy long range,

Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.

I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.

In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.

But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math

[Moldoteck]

lol you think power from Africa is strategically safer dependency? And no, nuclear will be miles cheaper considering infra cost of sending power from Africa

[pmontra]

As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.

[empiricus]

to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.

[orwin]

Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.

[includenotfound]

I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.

[Arodex]

>I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor

[Moldoteck]

you subcontractit instead of building yourself. It's not like Switzerland is building all it's trains

[FabCH]

I will probably vote in favor of nuclear, but you have to admit that us not having any uranium and having huge solar and pumped hydro potential up in the alps makes Switzerland pretty bad match for nuclear.

Still much better than gas though…

[Moldoteck]

Nuclear requires least amount of materials so you can stockpile uranium for a decade and be fine

[FabCH]

You can also use the same money to flood many of those empty bunkers we have with water and pump it up and down indefinitely, with no radioactive waste to get rid of and no dependency what so ever on other countries.

Solar panels on each square cm of roofs together with agrovoltaics and solar on every farm and a few more of those 2TWh hydro storage plants we have, and we are energy independent and can service a large part of our infrastructure ourselves.

[Moldoteck]

No you can't. Hydro is already mostly tapped with few exceptions.

Solar requires more materials per kwh even compared to nuclear. But even if it didn't - since hydro potential isn't sufficient - gas is required for firming. This was also mentioned by axpo

[FabCH]

axpo is not independent. They have an agenda.

Solar doesn’t require more materials per kWh. LCOE of solar is order of magnitude lower than Nuclear.

And we do have more mountains that we can build out.