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1041 points mpweiher | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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m101 ◴[] No.45230060[source]
I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.
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kolinko ◴[] No.45230658[source]
So far it was either the cheapest or the safest.

Also, solar is now both cheaper and safer.

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pzo ◴[] No.45230728[source]
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).

And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

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1. kubav027 ◴[] No.45230861[source]
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
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2. Luc ◴[] No.45230901[source]
Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
3. ukblewis ◴[] No.45230943[source]
I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me