Best way to provide power to a population over 10 million

And if the world goes to shit again, having a baseline for building an Alpine nuclear deterrent isn't the worst thing to have on soil.

	▲	philipkglass 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Switzerland has several operating nuclear reactors: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... Switzerland also studied nuclear weapons production until 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_and_weapons_of_mas... If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.

iso1631 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Best way for who?

Nuclear is vastly more expensive per MWh than renewables. It's better than pumping stuff out the ground sure, but that's about it.

	▲	iso1631 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective. It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand. They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh. If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.

rz2k 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder if they’ll stagger their waking hours so that electric power consumption matches the inflexible output of nuclear reactors.

If only there were a supplemental daylight-based power source that precisely matched peak output to waking hours.

IAmBroom 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Storage is a thing.

	▲	Arodex 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If storage is a thing, then solar makes more sense.