Nuclear vs Renewables

You can't.Nuclear currently is 6x as expensive as wind and solar. Emphasis on currently.Now nuke plants take 10 years, and alas they aren't getting cheaper. Solar / wind however is almost certainly going to get cheaper. Solar has perovskites poised to revolutionise it, and both have a huge economy of scale coming in manufacturing.Storage wise sodium ion and longer term sodium sulfur will vastly cut the cost of grid storage.So by the time you build a nuke plants in 10 y

> Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's FalloutNuclear has a (much) higher levelized cost of energy than solar and wind (even if you include a few hours of battery storage) in many or most parts of the world.Nuclear has been stagnant for ~two decades. The world has about the same installed nuclear capacity in 2024 as it had in 2004. Not in percent (i.e. “market share”) but in absolute numbers.If you want energy generation cheap and fast

Renewables haven't scaled yet, even if they are making progress.Nuclear is interesting in that we have around 70-90 thousands years of fuel for the plants, which can only get cheaper/safer over time as the technology gets better. Currently, their capital requirements (they are expensive to build even if they are cheap to fuel) and waste problems make them fairly unviable. Couple that with being even less on demand than coal...

Not sure what do you mean? In many countries nuclear is government subsidised and is the cheapest & cleanest source of energy available compared to say renewables. In fact countries build these because of the price of other alternatives: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-17/czechs-st.

Nuclear fanboys (and I'm one) need to make peace with the fact that we've regulated them out of existence. Building a new nuclear plant takes more time, costs more per MWh, and involves more risk than current solar + batteries. I think nuclear had great potential, and if we'd been innovating on it for the last 70 years like we have in other fields it would be competitive. But we didn't and it's not, and it's probably late to change the momentum on that. Batteries ar

Nuclear takes too long to build and is too expensive.Renewables are quicker, cheaper and sufficient.A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability over an entire year.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Why is it an exercise in futility? Hydro power accounts for a huge amount of our power already, and there's enough in wind and solar for the rest of it. Nuclear is presently quite expensive and takes a very long time to build. There are new technologies being pursued, but there are new technologies being pursued in wind and solar, too.

Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage

Thats an audacious claim without any sources.If you look at (the very few) recent nuclear projects in western countries, you will notice that a) they take very long to build (longer than to bridge any gap from gas and coal and longer than we have due to global warming), b) they are way more expensive than (over-provisioned) solar/wind PLUS energy storage to make renewables "stable", even when not fully factoring in implied state-guarantees (nuclear is still uninsurable and thus

No, nuclear was never considered a renewable source of energy. It’s low-carbon, maybe.Look, HN loves nuclear. You’ll find people here who propose running an actual nuclear reactor in every backyard. You’ll find excuses why the Sowjets were obviously incapable of securely running a nuclear plant, but capitalist societies can do it without a hitch. Then, two years later, you’ll have people telling you the Japanese were obviously incapable of running a nuclear plant, but France is obviously diff