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Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/06/can-we-afford-to-be-afraid-of-nuclear-power
5•sandebert•4h ago

Comments

audunw•4h ago
As a technology, I love nuclear power.

But I don’t think it’s the way to decarbonise the world in the short term. If we look beyond just electricity, to transportation, industry, fertilisers, etc, it’s clear that full decarbonisation will bring with it an enormous amount of flexible load that pairs very well with renewables.

Say you electrify industrial heat. There are already heat batteries in the market that can store enormous amount of heat energy at very high temperatures for a very long time. They can be recharged when there’s excess renewable power on the grid. In fact, it may be the only economical way to electrify industrial heat. If they have to pay the full price of electricity for all their heat it’s probably too expensive.

I’d recommend Tony Seba’s presentations or Marc Z Jacobsens papers for the full picture.

I also think advanced geothermal may end up becoming far more important to solve the crisis. A lot of expertise, workforce and capital can more easily and quickly be transferred from oil and gas sector. The politics around a big shift to geothermal would be far easier, since you won’t have a problem with a huge amount of people worried about losing a job and companies worried of going bankrupt. There’s still high uncertainty in the viability of advanced geothermal but there are good signs that it can be made economical in many parts of the world, if not most. Think what we can achieve if it received a fraction of the investments and subsidies that fossil fuels and nuclear does.

We shouldn’t stop nuclear either though. We can continue what we’re already doing and build where it makes sense.

And maybe in some decades we can replace some renewables with nuclear and free up some land.

Hacker News is my digital home – why I left X but stayed here

1•FerkiHN•2m ago•1 comments

Qantas contacted by suspected cyber criminal

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/07/qantas-contacted-by-suspected-cyber-criminal-but-airline-wont-confirm-if-hacking-ransom-demanded
1•Bluestein•3m ago•0 comments

WhatsApp for iOS to get threaded replies for clearer conversations

https://www.neowin.net/news/whatsapp-for-ios-to-get-threaded-replies-for-clearer-conversations/
1•Bluestein•7m ago•0 comments

How a big shift in training LLMs led to a capability explosion

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/how-a-big-shift-in-training-llms-led-to-a-capability-explosion/
1•pseudolus•7m ago•0 comments

EVM-UI – visual tool to interact with EVM-based smart contracts

2•magnusgraviti•10m ago•1 comments

Atlassian migrated 4M Postgres databases to shrink AWS bill

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/atlassian-engineering/migrating-jira-database-platform-to-aws-aurora
1•maxloh•13m ago•0 comments

Report on China Eastern 5735 Crash Withheld over National Security Concerns

https://airlinegeeks.com/2025/06/27/report-on-deadly-crash-withheld-over-national-security-concerns/
1•agubelu•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CPU Shit Drawer – AI Generates JSON Coordinates, CPU Renders with PIL

https://poops-draw.site/
2•thunderlab•16m ago•0 comments

Ultracite – Zero-config Biome preset for JavaScript

https://github.com/haydenbleasel/ultracite
1•fmerian•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to create a website to express bad product experience?

1•hownotcensored•17m ago•0 comments

Interaction with megafauna in S. America earlier than widely accepted theory

https://archaeologymag.com/2025/07/sloth-bone-shows-possible-human-inflicted-trauma/
1•gametorch•17m ago•0 comments

VMware's rivals ramp up their efforts to create alternative stacks

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/07/vmware_rivals_ramp_virtualization_efforts/
1•rntn•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tallya – The minimal UX foundation for count labels

https://github.com/faizanu94/tallya
1•faizanu94•25m ago•0 comments

Why Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress

https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/693052/automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-wordpress-drama-wp-engine-open-source
2•donohoe•25m ago•0 comments

VibeTunnel: Turn Any Browser into Your Mac's Terminal

https://steipete.me/posts/2025/vibetunnel-turn-any-browser-into-your-mac-terminal
1•teehemkay•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Promptbuild.ai – Version control for LLM prompts

https://www.promptbuild.ai
1•error7891•28m ago•0 comments

PhantomGPU: GPU performance emulator to benchmark ML models on virtual GPUs

https://github.com/bugthesystem/PhantomGPU
3•ziyasal•31m ago•2 comments

The untold story about how Olive Garden's most popular special came to be

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/05/food/olive-garden-never-ending-breadsticks-story
1•mooreds•32m ago•0 comments

Meta's grand WhatsApp fintech experiment in India has fizzled

https://restofworld.org/2025/whatsapp-pay-download-india/
1•Brajeshwar•34m ago•0 comments

Subscriptions That Respect Users

https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/subscriptions-that-respect-users/
1•mooreds•35m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Any resources for finding non-smart appliances?

34•everyone•35m ago•19 comments

Catalytic converter theft is down by 80% in NYC

https://gothamist.com/news/catalytic-converter-theft-is-down-by-80-in-nyc-heres-why
1•geox•39m ago•0 comments

The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness Principle (2021)

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance-05.html
1•mooreds•40m ago•0 comments

Kyocera Pegatron and Smart Show CXL over Optics at Computex 2025 – ServeTheHome

https://www.servethehome.com/kyocera-pegatron-and-smart-show-cxl-over-optics-at-computex-2025/
1•rbanffy•41m ago•0 comments

Free AI Girl Generator: Create Your Dream AI Girl

https://dreamyify.com/
1•treecyx•45m ago•0 comments

It doesn't make sense to wrap modern data in a 1979 format, introducing .ptar

https://www.plakar.io/posts/2025-06-27/it-doesnt-make-sense-to-wrap-modern-data-in-a-1979-format-introducing-.ptar/
1•touristtam•45m ago•0 comments

Side Quests Are the New Main Thing

https://sidequest.substack.com/p/side-quests-are-the-new-main-thing
1•jsmoov•45m ago•0 comments

I'm Building LLM for Satellite Data EarthGPT.app

https://www.earthgpt.app/
4•sabman•46m ago•1 comments

Radiocarbon dating reveals Rapa Nui not as isolated as previously thought

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-radiocarbon-dating-reveals-rapa-nui.html
1•pseudolus•49m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a tool to list your AWS account Lambda Function invocation time

https://github.com/alvin-rw/alli-lister
1•pxsnlrbg•50m ago•0 comments