[HN Gopher] In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega ...
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In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega dams (2024)
Author : prmph
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-07-21 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Please can we just get back to building nuclear
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| $80B is buying 40MW of hydro. What would that get you for
| nuclear? 4MW?
| ginko wrote:
| It's 40GW of hydro
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| If we use Vogtle as a cost benchmark you'd get roughly 5 GW
| (note you typo'd units to MW).
| erentz wrote:
| Given these projects will be overseas we shouldn't use the
| extreme outlier of Vogtle in the US as the benchmark.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| Looks like at least 30GW
|
| https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-
| regulat...
| daymanstep wrote:
| There is a finite amount of hydro in the world. They will run
| out of viable dam locations pretty quickly at this rate.
| Animats wrote:
| All the good sites were used by 1940.
|
| The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a
| desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No
| major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded
| above the dam. That's the best case.
|
| Most later dams are at worse sites.
| tomrod wrote:
| In which continent?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Make nuclear cost-competitive and people will start building
| it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale
| of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except
| unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-
| rights disputes (and potentially wars).
| janice1999 wrote:
| > Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and
| cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
|
| The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling
| systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of
| heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major
| problem.
| tomrod wrote:
| How major? Would not a temporary lake be sufficient to
| dissipate heat?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The unit economics of dams get more and more competitive
| when their size increase.
|
| So, hell no, nuclear is not competitive with mega-dams.
| It's not even competitive with small dams.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of
| building plants and if folks get out of the way of location
| permits and waste storage and people can actually make
| decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits.
| The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap
| between project inception and when investment returns start
| coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few
| panels and accessories online and start producing energy
| within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more
| planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an
| electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or
| expand your production in a very short time achieving break
| even in a few years.
| V__ wrote:
| Nuclear just isn't economically viable. Maybe fusion someday.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| Tell that to China
| bobthepanda wrote:
| China has been building them at a relatively lukewarm pace
| compared to its solar and wind expansion
|
| > China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to
| 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-
| renewa...
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > isn't economically viable
|
| That is not an intrinsic truth. We have chosen to make it
| economically unviable.
|
| Most things get cheaper to build with time. Nuclear is an
| outlier where it used to be affordable and now it isn't.
| That's insane.
| permo-w wrote:
| why is it different like that?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Nuclear has never been particularly affordable. It's always
| been more expensive than coal or gas, even in France in the
| 70s-80s and China in the 2010s.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years
| produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants
| combined.
|
| Finland spent 18 years and 11 bn euros to get 1.6 GW of
| nuclear, the US spent 7bn in subsidies and got some 20 GW of
| solar in 2022 alone.
|
| Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same
| power that solar can add in weeks.
|
| Nuclear basically makes no sense at all in 2025.
|
| (For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and natural gas now,
| even cheaper batteries and generated hydrogen gas later).
| geysersam wrote:
| But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm
| massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this
| seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter
| time scales but not over the entire year.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Dammed if you do, damned if you don't
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Dam!
| jeffrallen wrote:
| No more dam jokes.
| tomrod wrote:
| This made me chuckle. Well done!
| Rover222 wrote:
| We have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be
| massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage.
| China is crushing in this.
| landl0rd wrote:
| Hard agree on pumped hydro and other forms of grid-scale
| storage, but can you understand concerns around batteries?
| There are environmental ones on the mining/metals side, but
| producing and disposing of them in a clean manner is often
| hard. Getting them from anywhere save mostly china is hard (if
| you want large, dense, affordable, and grid-scale options) and
| depending on somebody who's nobody's geopolitical friend is
| probably a bad idea.
|
| Ditto for the panels themselves.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Hydro is a great complement for solar, you can decrease flow
| when the sun is shining, and increase it when it isn't.
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