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1041 points mpweiher | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.73s | source
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jama211 ◴[] No.45225631[source]
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
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1. credit_guy ◴[] No.45228653[source]
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.

People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?

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2. dalyons ◴[] No.45234939[source]
Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.
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3. credit_guy ◴[] No.45236399[source]
A 10x reduction is very doable. Consider this: the Vogtle units 3-4 cost about $37 BN [1]. The similar size Karachi units 2-3 cost about $10 BN [2]. The difference is that the Karachi units were built by China. The design used at Karachi is called Hualong One [3], and since China built the 2 Karachi units, it has built 5 more, and has 15 more under construction and 9 more approved for construction. The cost of the reactors that China builds for itself is not known, but it's very likely lower than the ones that China built for Pakistan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One