10 ms·

Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart. 50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are g

• AtlasBarfed 3mo ago
  ...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind? I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind. And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either. I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive. I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive. I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design.... I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize. Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
  • tribaal 3mo ago
    Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro. We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
    • cogman10 3mo ago
      Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.
      • jsnell 3mo ago
        It's not an EU nation.
        • cogman10 3mo ago
          Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.
          • estebank 3mo ago
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
          • Arodex 3mo ago
            Switzerland unilaterally got out of negotiations with the EU, which also dealt with energy grid coordination. As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.
      • tribaal 3mo ago
        Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule. The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you). Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
  • palata 3mo ago
    > I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind. We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil. Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
    • AtlasBarfed 3mo ago
      Build a solar plant in the Sahara desert and ship the energy long range, Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that. I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years. In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears. But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math
      • Moldoteck 3mo ago
        lol you think power from Africa is strategically safer dependency? And no, nuclear will be miles cheaper considering infra cost of sending power from Africa
• cogman10 3mo ago
  Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.
  • julkali 3mo ago
    nimby
    • cogman10 3mo ago
      Yeah, that seems like it'd be something that would also stop nuclear deployment.
  • stymaar 3mo ago
    See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327
  • shermantanktop 3mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.
  • Arodex 3mo ago
    See this long-form investigation: https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-achille-electrique-de-la-suisse https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
  • Plankaluel 3mo ago
    Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol: The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely. People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
• orwin 3mo ago
  Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.
  • includenotfound 3mo ago
    I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.
    • Arodex 3mo ago
      >I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor
  • Moldoteck 3mo ago
    you subcontractit instead of building yourself. It's not like Switzerland is building all it's trains
• pjc50 3mo ago
  Where's the solar currently? Is it also victim to NIMBYs? Or shading? I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.
• pmontra 3mo ago
  As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.
  • empiricus 3mo ago
    to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.
• FabCH 3mo ago
  I will probably vote in favor of nuclear, but you have to admit that us not having any uranium and having huge solar and pumped hydro potential up in the alps makes Switzerland pretty bad match for nuclear. Still much better than gas though…
  • Moldoteck 3mo ago
    Nuclear requires least amount of materials so you can stockpile uranium for a decade and be fine
    • FabCH 3mo ago
      You can also use the same money to flood many of those empty bunkers we have with water and pump it up and down indefinitely, with no radioactive waste to get rid of and no dependency what so ever on other countries. Solar panels on each square cm of roofs together with agrovoltaics and solar on every farm and a few more of those 2TWh hydro storage plants we have, and we are energy independent and can service a large part of our infrastructure ourselves.
      • Moldoteck 3mo ago
        No you can't. Hydro is already mostly tapped with few exceptions. Solar requires more materials per kwh even compared to nuclear. But even if it didn't - since hydro potential isn't sufficient - gas is required for firming. This was also mentioned by axpo
        • FabCH 3mo ago
          axpo is not independent. They have an agenda. Solar doesn’t require more materials per kWh. LCOE of solar is order of magnitude lower than Nuclear. And we do have more mountains that we can build out.