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nixasslast Friday at 7:45 PM3 repliesview on HN

> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on.

Come again?


Replies

derrizlast Friday at 9:15 PM

The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s.

We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.

Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.

All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.

Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.

iknowstufflast Friday at 7:54 PM

We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables.

We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.

Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years

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DarkNova6last Friday at 8:28 PM

Look at the boom of nuclear in the 70s. The industry wide and deep expertise from production, to planning, to logistics. Particularly the french did this par excellence. But nuclear has first languished and is now almost non-existent in Europe.

Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.

We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.

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