I’d much rather look out across a city and see solar panel islands rather than a coal smoke stack belching smoke, a nuke cooling tower or a massive dam.
Just because old school power generation is often out of sight, it shouldn’t be out of mind
I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams. They're majestic in the same way ancient pyramids are majestic. On top of being useful infrastructure and not just oversized landscaping pieces.
The problem with dams is that for the most part in the West all the good sites near population centers have been taken. In developing countries you have the issue of new dams potentially making older downstream ones less useful, which is now a real conflict point with Egypt vs Sudan vs Ethiopia, Afghanistan vs Iran, China vs India and SEA, etc.
In addition, because silt will back up in reservoirs there are an increasing amount of old dams where removal makes more sense than spending more money on dredging and maintaining the dam; and with droughts becoming more common hydro is not as reliable for baseload anymore.
> I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams.
^That’s not “cherry picking.“ They are saying the two things that they would not mind seeing in the distance. It is reasonable to assume that it was not an omission to avoid hurting their point, but rather that coal power smoke stacks are not on list.
It strikes me as the much more obvious reading. “Of the things you listed, these two don’t really bother me.”
I read the original comment by ACCount37 in the same way Forbo and BolexNOLA did - that ACCount37 is fine with cooling towers or dams, but not with coal stacks. This is a fully reasonable interpretation, considering the comment they were responding to explicitly listed those 3 examples; had they not been so explicit, it might be more reasonable to interpret it as simply not having an opinion on items not listed, but that isn't the case.
And since you're so keen on pointing out that this is public: you don't come off looking very great. Might wanna work on that.
We need you to avoid perpetuating or escalating flamewars on HN. Energy/climate topics are among the most predictable flamebait topics, and as a longtime user we need to see you being circumspect and making your contributions de-escalatory rather than escalatory. We've had to ask you several times before respect the site's guidelines and purpose. Please try harder.
You and I can disagree about interpretation all day long but there’s no misinterpreting your incredibly condescending tone. Have a good rest of your Sunday man.
Call it what you want, either way it was rude and unnecessary.
As for your point: If that’s what he’s doing then he’s doing a piss poor job because several of us clearly heard an implied “but not coal fire plant smoke stacks” while he said infrastructure for renewables on the skyline can be pretty.
That's not even unique to nuclear. Gas and coal can have them too. Typically they're only used if the other source of coolant is not sufficient.
For example, you take in cooling water from a river. When the river gets too hot in summer you want to use that cooling tower to evaporate water to provide additional cooling.
What about the billions of tons of solar panels that turn to toxic garbage every 20 years or so, and can't yet be recycled? Not to mention the huge amount of land consumed by solar farms.
Base load becomes very expensive under free and fair market conditions. The reason is simple: wind and PV are extremely cheap, and surplus capacity costs little. PV module price in EU is just 0.086 UDS/W fob. Wind turbine price in China ~2200Yuan/kW inclusive tower.
In a free market, this leads to attractive conditions for batteries, and that is where the problem of base load begins: there is a lack of real demand, and base load then remains unused because its OPEX cannot compete with wind and PV.
There's just one problem. There is virtually no free and fair market in the electricity market. Utilities lobby very successfully for highly regulated markets to protect their monopolies. Nuclear power requires massive government protection from competition, which makes it attractive to utilities.
Yes, electricity is becoming very cheap in China, and it will be difficult for the West to keep up here. Exorbitant US tariffs are also counterproductive, as they only serve to secure monopoly profits for old utilities.
Everyone who has an electricity bill or pays taxes should be against new-build nuclear power because it is pretty much the most expensive way to produce electricity. You should instead lobby for wind, solar, and even closing coal power plants in favour of modern natural gas plants. All of those will cut more emissions, more quickly, per dollar spent.
No I'm 100% in factor of lots of new build nuclear. It's only expensive because it's rare. The more we build the cheaper it becomes. And it does not have the issues like wind and solar and even gas.
Base load is something of the past. Base load does no longer exist as such as during daytimes the solar curve will / should push it to zero as surplus capacity is cheap.
Running base load plays at night is then also no longer sensible.
Given the trend line of the cost of renewables + storage, by the time you’ve built one if you start now we could’ve done it cheaper and easier with renewables in most locations in the world.
Let's also not forget about the haze of photochemical smog everywhere there are combustion vehicles.
Today I walked by someone dropping off people from his diesel VW Passat B6. You could smell that thing from afar and it bothers me that it's still considered roadworthy.
I admit this is subjective, but they're giant ugly concrete chimney-like structures spewing stuff into the air. Sure, intellectually I know it's just water vapor and they're form is dictated by their function, but they look like they belong in some pollution riddled dystopian hellscape.
I'm actually pro-nuclear power, but the cooling towers are a pretty significant eyesore and a non-trivial downside. But apparently some people hate the way wind turbines look while I think they're sleek and futuristic looking, so taste as ever is subjective.
They’re elegant structures venting water vapor into the atmosphere. It looks like clean power. Way nicer than solar panels, which take up a lot of space.
And that's just the direct impacts from failure. Long-term environmental costs are real, if indirect.
I write this somewhat reluctantly as hydro is carbon-neutral,* and affords one of the better energy-storage options, as pumped hydro. Even allowing that dam failures tend to occur under regimes with significant organisational issues (low trust, low public concern, low levels of organisation, conflicted interests), dams have a pretty horrific track record for direct fatalities. Almost all those risks are mitigatable, and the underlying root cause (organisational dysfunction) would likely create similar risk patterns for other energy modalities. But we have a direct history to point to.
I've written on this topic a few times at HN should you or others be interested, I do hope my thoughts come across as nuanced, as they in fact are:
‘Health’ is generally used to refer to things like pollution, etc. that cause long term chronic impacts.
Not individual sudden events which drown/murder massive numbers of people regardless of their general health status (except perhaps for their ability to run really fast and really far on no notice).
So are cholera and other diseases accompanying flooding.
And other factors associated with reservoirs: desertification and lake evaporation can lead to increased dust, common where water is diverted or impounded (Aral Sea, Lake Powell, Lake Mead). Disruption of silt flows has various impacts, more on the general environmental side.
Generally, if your concern is overall mortality risk rather than a specific disease/pollution mechanism, dams do not get a free pass.
The public health department doesn’t concern itself with things like national defense, if skyscrapers are likely to fall over or not, and local gang violence. Those have their own specialities.
Otherwise, literally everything is a ‘health issue’, including agriculture and commercial/residential zoning.
And notably, no one has actually provided any examples of where any of these are actually in major cities. Because it’s absurd, hah.
I haven’t seen an active smokestack with actual smoke in a city in decades, dams are where mountains are - and usually require the opposite terrain for a city, and no one builds nuke plants in major cities. That would be silly.
I personally don't know but I feel like, we also need to think of the environmental changes of something like solar batteries if we store the energy
There was a michael moore's documentary regarding climate change and I personally think that the best solution climate-wise speaking is probably nuclear but the whole world's sentiment is so regulated by lobby-ists which is why the cost of production of them and regulations shot up to an unreasonable amounts but the world was already transitioning to nuclear energies.
There are some new modular approaches to it which aren't as efficient but feel safer to the general public but nuclear is one of the most safest and compact sources of massive amounts of energy generation compared to solar and wind.
Nuclear Energy is cool.
Now am I right/wrong in saying this, let me know, I think I am right but I maybe wrong too, but its just that every expert I have seen on this topic really prefer's nuclear and my own "research" on this topic makes me feel the same really.
Somebody should write more clearly as to why nuclear is superior to solar and the others as a comment as I feel like I have written similar things atleast once more and maybe if there could be a nice website like why.nuclear or why-nuclear.net etc. which could give points of why nuclear is a superior form, it could be really great and I would love to hear more arguments both good and bad comparison with nuclear (primarily) and maybe comparing it with solar if somebody's an expert on this topic as I would love to hear an expert about it as well.
Just because old school power generation is often out of sight, it shouldn’t be out of mind