Comment by yellowapple
Comment by yellowapple 12 hours ago
[flagged]
Comment by yellowapple 12 hours ago
[flagged]
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.
The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.
Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.
Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
For something that is supposed to be clean it sure keeps making places unhabitable.
> limitless clean energy source
Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.
How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.
None of this happens to be true.
A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.
And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.
What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?
Here the Finnish environment minister:
""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.
He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."
Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.
It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.
> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.
True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.
> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.
With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment
Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.
> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.
The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.
> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.
Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
> It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant
This, again, is not true. The average is currently at 6.5 years and dropping slightly, the time has been fairly consistent over the last decades.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.
Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.
> and use just isn't that important of a factor.
It is when land is expensive.
> With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.
> Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.
That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.
> At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize
That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.
> The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables
That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.
> Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?
There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.
Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.
This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.
Solar and battery have had immense investment to bring down that LCOE. Where can we get if we invest similarly in nuclear.
lol at wind though. that's not real.
That's only true because both solar panels and batteries are produced in China off cheap coal power.
LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics.
And even then it's not actually true.
First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).
Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.
Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.
System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
Maybe you could argue against the actual arguments Greanpeace make against nuclear instead of making ad-hominem statements.
Relatedly, you could read what scholars like Langdon Winner say about nuclear energy (in short that they require an almost authoritarian posture in order to safely deal with nuclear fuel and nuclear waste); in contrast with solar which can be deployed at a local and decentralized scale.
The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
Last I read Onkalo was testing empty casks and had stored zero waste for zero years.
Bit of a rush to close the GitHub ticket eh?
True, they haven’t stored any waste yet but the facility is completed.
And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.
It does seem like one the best designs we've had. I hope it works well.
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.
You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading...
Greenpeace is both halves of the name.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
"Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes."
Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer?
Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb.
And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well.
You need more centrifuges, several times more, but not orders of magnitude more.
And you need nuclear reactors to make plutonium. The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium.
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.
Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA.
If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.
Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".
In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.
In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
This comment is entirely orthogonal to my discussion, to the point that it's confusing.
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.
It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.
Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.
>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office
>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...
The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:
>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...
Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.
In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.
If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
>Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid?
I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power.
>shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable
It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate.
Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
It's bizarre.
>I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades.
Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it:
>>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy.
>Germany is merely transitioning the fastest
Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though.
>Not the country next door to it that didnt even try.
You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal.
>...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.
However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.