HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This article fails to present a fair view and it's too shallow to be taken seriously.

I have had the opportunity to be involved with a big player in the mid-C power market and it quickly showed me that the real challenges are different than what Reddit armchair experts identify.

tl;dr: just head over to [MIT's EN-Road Climate Simulator](https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/), move the Nuclear dial to maximum adoption, and see what changes. You have gone from 4.1 degrees of temperature change to 3.9C. The 0.2C that is almost negligible compared to other solutions like reducing methane emissions.

The US's Green New Deal is a comprehensive document not only about climate protection but also about social injustice. The US does need something like this Deal and making a case for a "Nuclear New Deal" does not address the same issues. The internet appears to think of nuclear energy as this misunderstood miracle that the interest groups and politicians have killed.

I do think nuclear has an important role in lowering electrification costs when the carbon pricing goes up and we do need to start looking at SMRs and nuclear fusion much more seriously; below I will try to balance some of the article's points.

Before I start, I'd like to highlight that to my understanding, the biggest sustainable energy challenges come from the demand side not the supply.

> when wildfires broke out the following month, a blanket of ash blotted out the sun in some places, cutting the state’s solar energy output by one-third.

Under the wildfire circumstances many of the energy generation plants, including nuclear, may need to adjust. Solar is 20% of california's generation, so the roughly 7% cut is significant but [was not the culprit as someone pointed out](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...).

Solar has an important advantage over nuclear in a disaster: it is decentralized. Independent communities can rely on their own solar power while they connect to the bigger grid as well. This creates resilience in case one of them is cut.

> Energy in California is incredibly expensive for ratepayers

Some reasons for this are environmental restrictions that stops California from buying relatively cheaper hydro power, inefficiencies in PG&E, and just generally not enough ratepayer anger.

> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs and nuclear waste isn’t a glowing toxic ooze.

The reactors work under extreme safety considerations. Prior to Chernobyl the scientists [did not hold the concern](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg) that a reactor is capable of making such disaster. The problem is that like most engineering we need to see what happens to fix it, and the sensitivity around nuclear increases the cost of that. The waste does glow, just not in the visible spectrum.

> elements such as uranium and plutonium have such long half-lives, the radiation they emit is low enough to safely hold in your hand.

You probably do not want to do that for a prolonged period. Also, the big issue is not only with the direct radiation but with the particles getting into the body.

The article mentioned half-lives, it is long enough that [we can't quite comprehend what to do about it](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/). That is true even for Thorium, though relatively much better.

The idea behind our green movement is not leaving a problem for the next generations. The nuclear energy at the advancement level of today does not guarantee that.

Scott Manley made a more condensed form of the explanation of the nuclear physics involved here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg (~21 minutes). It's an excellent explanation of the processes.

The HBO show is also an excellent drama and worth a watch.

Most of the time? Isn’t that why everyone was pushing for molten salt or pebble reactors?

I was going to say coincidence but this was clearly Google doing creepy stalker things after it saw what else I was searching for on the Internet (even not using google.com) This popped into recommendations an hour after you asked:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Scott's video on Chernobyl is also well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3d3rzFTrLg