While I actively campaigned to get rid of a nuclear power plant in the PNW that had been offered an extended license, and while nuclear power advocates can sometimes annoy me (much like militant vegans can annoy me despite my vegan diet) when they repeat fossil-fuel industries’ talking points bashing renewable power, there is sure as hell an argument for nuclear power being incorporated into our modern energy mixture, and it’s this:
While much of the criticism surrounding the burning of fossil fuels focuses on the long term impacts to the health of the planet, it can also have devastating short-term effects on the health of the human population. A new study led by Harvard scientists has shed new light on the extent of this problem, finding air pollution arising from fossil fuels to be responsible for more than eight million deaths around the world in 2018.
While I’m all for passive energy projects such as tidal, wave, solar, and wind, and while it’s quite obvious we could do more than we’re doing, quicker than we’re doing it, nuclear power, for all its risks, isn’t nearly as damaging as the fossil fuel industry. There have been deaths in uranium mining and during disasters such as Chernobyl, and, yes, Chernobyl even contaminated many square kilometers, forcing the evacuation of humans and creating demographically certain suffering for many animals, the harms simply do not compare to the scale of harms created by fossil fuel extraction and transportation. And, of course, the use of fossil fuels is another matter entirely: the burning of fossil fuels threatens global climate systems with massive change, which in turn leaves living things in changed environments, environments to which they are not adapted and because of which they might go extinct.
If we can save lives and reduce damage to the environment by building new nuclear power plants we should. Eight million deaths so that we can fill our cars in minutes instead of hours is cruelest indifference.
Consider the health impacts of Fukushima.
Case closed.
Seriously, Pierce Butler? The only response you’ve got to an entire, reasoned argument is one citation, and “case closed”? Not much of a debater, are you?
Using your debating tactics, we might as well just say that people freeze to death every year due to not enough heat, therefore we shouldn’t bother doing anything about global warming.
With global warming, we are talking about OUR OWN POSSIBLE EXTINCTION AS A SPECIES. The consequences of doing nothing are a lot worse than some displaced people.
Case closed in which direction? As a matter of sheer scale, the harm from all of the nuclear accidents in history do not compare to the harm inflicted by fossil fuel power running under normal conditions. A nuclear is even safer when you don’t play beyond the known safety protocols or build them on documented fault lines.
We are really not all that far away from sustainable fusion power, once that is sorted out we have virtually limitless power on tap.
All other forms of energy that we use today are derived from fusion, so why not just use it directly?
@Pierce R. Butler
There is no case that nuclear power is harm free. The question is whether the harm of widespread nuclear power sufficient to electrify the transport sector is equivalent to 8 million deaths per year.
While I want other sources long term, saving 8 megalives per year isn’t nothing. Hell, even if nuclear power killed 2 million people per year when scaled up to the level necessary to replace the transport energy sector, that’s 6 megalives per year saved.
For me, the argument isn’t as simple as “nuclear power bad”. For me, the reason not to do nuclear power would be if we could effectively scale up non-nuclear, non-carbon based sources of energy as fast as we could effectively scale up those sources of energy + nuclear power for whatever reason. (One reason might be the regulatory lead time on new power plants, such that by the time we could get anything producing grid power we don’t need more grid power.)
OR, of course, if the harm per unit of energy caused by nuclear power is equal to or greater than that caused by fossil fuels. But combine climate change (not accounted for in the above report that only studied deaths due to fine airborne particulates small enough to reach deep into the lungs), the vast environmental degradation from spills and leaks, and other deaths / harms (such as occupational accidents, etc.), and I’m not convinced that the harms caused by nuclear power approach those caused by fossil fuels on a unit-of-energy basis.
I’m happy to be proven wrong. I’ll go with the experts, but 8 million deaths per year! We can’t fuck around with this. The costs of inaction are obviously ridiculously high.
@Patrick Slattery:
While I’m in agreement that fusion power is a great source of energy, and that it may finally be less than 30 years away, it’s still 25 years away **at minimum** from being connected to the grid at anything more than a pilot-plant scale – and the closest I’ve seen even to that stage is General Fusion here in British Columbia, and they’ve taken something like 18 years now to get to the point where they are – which is still not connected to the grid. If things don’t work out favorably, fusion could still be more than 30 years away, and is certainly 30 years away at minimum for multiple, gigawatt-scale plants to be producing grid electricity.
So the question is, what to we do about the 240 million deaths that are going to happen between today and 2051? If fission power is a safer part of the bridge strategy between now & 2050 than fossil fuels, and if it can be built quickly enough without slowing down development of other carbon-neutral energy sources, then I’m open to some new fission plants being built.
MIT’s SPARC reactor is maybe 15 years away from grid attachment.
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
I’m certainly not against use of other fission reactors but they should be of the small modular type rather than the traditional gigawatt sized fission reactors that take decades to build, the small reactors can be built rapidly in a factory and installed closer to where the need for power is.
There are plenty of newer fission designs that are comparatively very safe. The pebble bed reactor design is one that is very appealing for many reasons. There is no reason beyond fear itself that we should not be building such reactors. I note that China licensed the design and is currently testing a 250MW pebble bed reactor that should go live later this year.
@Patrick Slattery:
Sort of. They would be designing a new reactor based on data from the SPARC experiment. That hypothetical reactor is called the ARC Reactor (after the one in Iron Man, but the acronym in this case stands for “Affordable Robust Compact Reactor”), and might indeed be online in 15 years… but also might not.
What I said, though, is that
ARC is a pilot project. They would have to run it for multiple years before being able to design the successor reactor for commercial purposes. The reason being multiple, but one of the ones that most obviously requires long-term pilot-plant operation is the need to be able to measure wear-and-tear under real life conditions so that they can create a maintenance schedule.
So they have to operate the ARC pilot plant (up and running no sooner than 15 years) for multiple years before they can design (a couple years? five years?), site, permit, and then build (five more years?) the commercial reactor. I stand by my 25 year minimum for anything other than a pilot project plant being connected to the grid.
It occurs to me that you also might have been responding to this:
I like the optimism of the MIT folks, and I’m certainly not saying that they’re wrong about their time scale. (IANAPhysicist after all), but General Fusion is undoubtedly farther along at the moment, and they’re being cagey about their timelines, but they’ve mentioned having a pilot plant that’s grid connected this decade, which would seem to be 5 years ahead of ARC in the worst case, possibly more like 7-10 years ahead of ARC. So I stand by what I said: from what I’ve seen, General Fusion is farthest along. There are no guarantees (for GF, for MIT, or for anyone else), but GF at least has some pulsed fusion devices built and have operated them over long periods with a chance to measure the effects of running their test reactors on the materials and systems that would need to be dependable in a future commercial reactor. So I like their chances to get something grid connected by 2030 and a 2nd generation, nearly-ready-for-full-commercialization advanced test plant (able to generate consistently enough to sign contracts to sell the resulting energy) in 2040. Maybe they could have one fully commercial reactor in 25 years from now, and that would get them on schedule for multiple gigawatt-scale plants by 2050. Ten years after that, only 40 years from now, they could have dozens of gigawatt-scale pants. But now you’re talking 2060/2061, and that’s pretty late in the game for carbon reduction.
There are great uses for gigawatt scale fusion plants even if we can’t get them fully commercialized before 2060, but that’s still 40 years of time we need other carbon neutral sources of energy.
OP: “Hell, even if nuclear power killed 2 million people per year when scaled up to the level necessary to replace the transport energy sector, that’s 6 megalives per year saved.”
6 megadeaths is also known as one holocaust.
When I was a young physics student in the 1970s, it was joked that in the 1950s fusion power was only 20 years away, and in the 70s it still was. Now, half a century later, it still is. We know better why, but we don’t have a working solution, and the worst case scenario is that we never will. Therefore we better keep developing alternatives.
Given the hostility from one specific commentator on another thread, I am exceptionally wary of commenting on this topic again. Nevertheless:
I am less of a nuclear power advocate, and more of a GHG-emission reduction advocate. However, it is worth noting that (to the best of my knowledge) the IPCC includes nuclear power (and, IIRC, expansion of nuclear power in terms of generation) as part of all considered scenarios. Given this, and the likely issues we face in the very near future, it would seem reasonable to me to conclude that nuclear must comprise at least part of future power generation solutions.
GHG emission reduction is critical due to the risks represented by climate change – we need as much power generation with as low GHG as possible in the shortest possible time. Despite the criticisms I received for saying this before, I still think the best thing to do is to build as much of the relevant systems as possible (e.g. VRE, RE, Nuclear, etc.) as fast as we can – particularly given that all technologies have issues anyway (e.g. intermittency, timescale of implementation, waste storage, etc.). This should also take place in addition to other strategies (such as improving power usage efficiency, and non-power generation related GHGs, etc.).
Inaction isn’t really an option, and as far as I can tell pretty much the bulk of relevant experts support this sort of approach – and I don’t believe we can afford the luxury of indulging highly speculative or idiosyncratic ideas.
“If we can save lives and reduce damage to the environment by building new nuclear power plants we should.”
This.
There may be reasonable arguments as to specifics – e.g. how much of each form of power generation we should adopt; the best implementation; best approaches when considering infrastructure, local conditions, limitations of technologies, etc.
There are, as far as I can see, no reasonable arguments against the necessity of eliminating fossil fuel use as soon as possible.
Grid-ready fusion power is like jetpacks and flying cars. In the 50s and 60s they were in all the comic books and futuristic things, all the “here’s what life will be like in the distant future of the year 2000”. (It was always “the year 2000”, never just “2000”.) And there were even exotic demonstration models to “prove” that it could be done.
And here we are. “The year 2000” is so long ago that people born after then can vote… and jetpacks, although WAY better and more advanced, are still just individual demo units developed, owned and flown exclusively by people like David Mayman and Franky Zapata, rather than the mass-market item we were promised. There are excellent reasons for this – flying is HARD. And even now, as the promised revolution in self-driving cars seems to have stalled as well, one could still posit a “near” future in which you will be able to buy and (kind of) fly your own jetpack. But how near? 10 years? 50? 100?
[Side note: when I was a kid if you wanted to fly a model, you had to learn to fly. That high hurdle was an obvious barrier to flying cars or jetpacks. Now, if you want to fly a model, you buy a drone. As a model flyer of my acquaintance said when I first asked him how hard it was to fly a drone – “I’m not flying it. All I’m doing is telling it where I want it to go. IT is doing all the actual flying.” Flying cars and jetpacks can only ever be a thing once we trust, completely, the computers and software that will fly them for us, because there will be no pilot on board. I’m not holding my breath.]
I think we were all seduced by the moon landings. Presented with an engineering problem, the US just threw money and man-hours at it to a frankly ludicrous degree, and succeeded. This presented the world with the idea that ANY engineering problem would similarly crumble if enough time and money were thrown at it. But has anything had that kind of time or money devoted to it? Something like 20% of the GDP of the US over eight years was spent on Apollo. If the US stopped spending money on things like the F-35 and all the other military boondoggles and put that effort and job creation into fusion power instead… would it help? And controversially – would it be better to spend that money on safe fission plants and the means to dispose of the waste from them?
Patrick Slattery @6
That’s extremely unlikely.
The MIT site shows basically a (somewhat) bigger TFTR or ITER, machines which were being built back when I was a grunt in fusion research in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The machine does not have any way to extract the energy being created, so it’s really just an attempt to build a Tokamak that will reach “break even,” for some definition of “break even.” There’s a cute sketch of what they think a fusion power plant might look like, but it finesses the issue of exactly how the increased energy (heat?) in the plasma will be extracted, since anything you stick into the plasma will cause an instant disruption.
Once you solve that problem, there are all the problems involved in scaling your reactor up to a size that can be connected to the grid. So far, with each significant increase in scale, people have discovered new issues, e.g., instabilities.
There are also a number of issues once you finally built a practical power plant:
1. The reactors use deuterium (from heavy water?) and tritium (which doesn’t occur naturally, it is made by smashing lithium atoms.) So you’ll need a steady supply of lithium, as well as going through tons of water to collect the tiny fraction which has deuterium instead of hydrogen.
2. Fusion releases high-energy neutrons, which damage the structure of the materials and in most cases make them radioactive as well. So pretty much all of the inner structure will have to be replaced regularly and the neutron-damaged, radioactive parts will need to be dealt with.
If experience is any guide, each step towards a power plant (regardless of how the fusion is produced) will uncover a host of hard to solve and usually hard to even understand problems. If you’ve ever climbed a mountain where each time you think you’re about at the top, it turns out it’s just a little knob and the next apparent peak is still a ways away, that’s how fusion has gone for the past 70+ years.
Basically, unless someone has a machine that actually generates power (and more power than it takes to run it!), we have at best a lower bound on how long it will take, and no upper bound.
It’s like the SST — supersonic airplanes were finally developed, at great effort and expense, and they actually worked — but as ways of transporting people, they proved to be inferior to conventional jets. Which is why no airline flies them any more.
Another issue with jet packs: we all know how many people are driving cars who don’t (or can’t) drive them safely. Imagine a cloud of tens or hundreds of thousands of people like the general public jetting around over a city, going wherever and however they like.
The number one issue for scaling any putative practical fusion power plant will almost certainly be the same issue which is currently preventing the further deployment of fission power plants in most of the world – our approach is dependent on private investment, and private investors do not like the risk / return profile of massive construction projects with heavily front-loaded costs and long payback periods. There’s just too much financial risk involved. Who knows – or would even like to hazard a guess at – what the interest rate regime is going to be over those sorts of timescales? What’s the chances that some new technology is going to come along during the lifetime of your plant and render you obsolete? Can you make more money by doing something else entirely, like shorting bitcoin or buying Tesla stock? Even with extremely generous government guarantees, nobody’s interested in touching it with the proverbial barge pole. Investors want returns NOW, not in 10, 15, or 20 years time.
Does anybody think we can make fusion not only practical, but cheap? Anybody?
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s money.
brucegee1962 @ # 2: The only response you’ve got …?
No, just the first.
Not much of a debater, are you?
At least I stayed on topic and had more to offer (such as links to, y’know, facts) than a petty ad hominem.
Callinectes @ # 3: As a matter of sheer scale…
The scale of nuclear power is, please note, a matter of millennia. Given the vast tonnage of radioactive waste, its biological toxicity and tendency to leak unless controlled by expensive high-maintenance containment, pro-nuke advocates would do better to avoid “big-picture” perspectives whenever possible.
Crip Dyke… @ # 5: The question is whether the harm of widespread nuclear power sufficient to electrify the transport sector is equivalent to 8 million deaths per year.
Only if one ignores numerous other questions, such as whether renewable sources, restructuring around localized economies, and other conservation strategies could meet social needs. I, for one, favor a global voluntary contraceptive education & availability campaign, along with economic changes to provide the security that incentivizes smaller-sized families, as a component of energy & food policies.
… even if nuclear power killed 2 million people per year when scaled up …
Again, that counts only those killed during each year of the (at most) 50-year lifespan of a given reactor, not the unknown (but assuredly non-zero) number of people (and other organisms) poisoned throughout the following centuries.
I’m not convinced that the harms caused by nuclear power approach those caused by fossil fuels on a unit-of-energy basis. … I’ll go with the experts…
As you note, the “experts” reporting on particulate pollution do not factor in climate change; likewise, the nuclear “experts” do not seriously consider ecological issues or long-term consequences. (For that matter, the anti-fossil-fuel “experts” do not – at least that I’ve seen – adequately assess the problems of de-plasticizing our existing technostructure.)
Given that you, and apparently your sources, seem to have dodged the Fukushima disaster and its implications (as have, by all indications, Japanese public-health authorities, much like those of Russia and Ukraine after Chernobyl), I urge you to look more deeply into the core arguments of the anti-nuclear movement over the last 50 years and ask yourself whether those points have been refuted or just disregarded.
One word: Hanford.
I’d be fine with nuclear if — IF — there were a safe way to dispose of the waste left behind.
Perhaps some pragmatism is needed here.
We can either not explore every possible avenue that could help avert our species’ imminent demise, give or take a couple of hundred years.
Or we can do what we always do when we have no solution: Pass the buck to the next generation.
Even if today’s nuclear waste is still going to be a problem in 10.000 years, that at least implies that there are going to be humans around in 10.000 years to deal with the nuclear waste crisis.
When the alternative is literally everything dying in a few centuries because of catastrophic climate collapse, I’ll take that gamble any day.
Plus, every carbon atom takes a comparable amount of time to clear out of the atmosphere. And is, in large enough quantities, no less dangerous to human, animal and plant life. As noted by Crip Dyke.
The terrible truth that we are out of time for these deliberations. We cannot even wait for 10 years. We don’t have fusion today or molten salt or whatever. So it’s irrelevant.
What we have is flawed technology and the looming spectre of mass exctinction. Whatever ideal solution may once have been perpetually just around the corner, it’s too fucking late now.
It’s going to take every bit of human ingenuity to unfuck ourselves, this time. And it’s going to take a massive amount of social engineering to make us behave in sustainable patterns.
It’s certainly going to take us (rich western countries) consuming less for a hot minute. And stop having children and stop eating meat and–
…Yeah, you can stop laughing now.
sonofrojblake @ # 11: Something like 20% of the GDP of the US over eight years was spent on Apollo.
Citation desperately needed. From CBS News:
Nuclear is a huge, expensive long-term proposition, and not recyclable.
They use a lot of water, too.
That’s leaving aside waste disposal after decommissioning; again expensive, but a solved problem (e.g. via vitrification and deep burial in tectonically-safe isolated places). Even a potentially valuable resource, when technology advances in a possible future.
Right now, small modular reactors are proposed, and it’s… um, well, expensive but doable.
I note that the old paradigm of centralised generation and simplistic distribution results in a very large amount of waste and opportunity cost. Thing is, the more efficient the system is, proportionately less is the power demand.
—
[meta]
Cutty Snark, the person to whom you refer has already dismissed any likelihood of health effects from deliberate use of radioactive material (whether aerosolised or in other forms), claims it’s quite safe, really.
(This is the second mention, let’s not test the outcome of the third 🙂 )
Incidental to the main topic, but consider this: many, many household items run on DC. They are all powered from the house circuits, which are AC — this, due to historical reasons.
So, they all use a rectifier to convert AC to DC, obs at < 100% efficiency.
Here’s the thing: solar panels generate DC voltage which is put through an inverter to convert it to AC, which then feeds the house circuits (and the grid, usually). And electric cars can charge from a household, but they need DC, so they usually come with a built-in heavy and expensive inverter to do that.
You see where I’m going, I’m sure.
I mean, I know, sunk costs, amortisation of assets, etc.
But still… <wistful sigh>
I’ve often thought that myself, John.
If we could get a different standard plug – hell, just a wall USB plug – connected directly to the solar panels/batteries so there’s no double-conversion loss. Same can be true (albeit not using USB) for the car charger.
I’m no electrician, but it seems like if you’re going to install solar panels & batteries you could run at least a few direct lines to different areas of the house for laptops, phones, etc.
I have 2 fundamental objections to nuclear power:
1. Current reactor designs are inherently unsafe. They rely on active input to stay safe. Let’s take Fukushima as an example: the flood protection of the plant compound was insufficient to withstand a tsunami, but the reactors did exactly what they should do in this case: they SCRAMed. So far the safety measures worked.
Alas, a reactor in shutdown state still has to get rid of the heat of the radioactive decay of the fission reaction byproducts. And for that it requires cooling, because that heat is enough to cause a meltdown. In Fukushima, the generators powering the cooling pumps were in the same compound, and also damaged by the tsunami, hence the meltdown.
Every modern reactor has the same flaw: even in shut down state, they require active input to stay safe. Every security design decision is based on adding more active measures as backup, but they don’t get rid of the fundamental issue: reactors do not fail safe, they fail open.
Modern experimental designs acknowledge this. PBRs and Liquid Salt reactors are based on passively absorbing waste heat in case of a shutdown. But these are experimental. Which leads me to point 2.
My other problem with nuclear power is the industry. It has the bad habit to treat existing problems as PR issues. Even now, when you raise the issues with modern PWR designs, you get advocates shouting “Thorium!”, “Pebble Bed!” as if that will solve anything (@Patrick, above: have the Chinese solved the friction problem in Pebble Bed Reactor designs? The problem that left the German Jülich reactor with an Sr-90 pollution problem?).
The industry has been trying to sell us a pony for 6 decades, while telling us that it is perfectly normal that it has two heads. It’s not just Chernobyl or Fukushima; it’s French coastal waters polluted with low-level radiactives, it’s Sellafield, it’s nuclear workers outside plants having accidents with large cleanup costs; all these might be relatively rare or even inexpensive, but as long as the glib PR from the industry tries to do away with “no big deal, just a cost of doing business”, I have no faith that safety culture will improve. And if it doesn’t, then expanding our use of nuclear power will ipso facto lead to more, and more expensive accidents.
So I’m not against per se, but sceptical that the costs are worth it.
John Morales @ 19
Thank you for the comment, and the suggestion – duly noted 🙂
So, some general ramblings on V2G (vehicle to grid)…
Firstly, a (very brief and simplistic) overview of the battery technologies generally available for large scale storage:
Lead acid: moderate specific energy, high reliability, is a mature technology, relatively cheap, and is frequently employed in substations (main life-time determining factor is electrolysis at limits of voltage window leading to water loss over time, acid concentration, and thus corrosion and degradation);
Li-ion: high energy density and energy conversion, but is a bit costly (and relies on Li, which is identified by the EU as an “at risk” resource). However, examples of stationary storage do exist (cf. Hornsdale, a 150MW/194MWh grid-connected energy storage system co-located with the Hornsdale Wind Farm used for energy arbitrage and as a continuous spinning reserve; the Vermont GMP 4MW facility used to backup power, for microgrid capabilities, and demand charge reductions);
Vanadium redox flow: high response time, good cyclability, can flexibly alter the depth of discharge on the fly (cf. the Hokkaido 6-MV vanadium redox flow battery configured to the 30-MW wind farm for peak frequency regulation);
Sodium sulfur: relatively mature technology offering a long, continuous discharge and high cycle time which helps shift energy in time and traces wind power schedule output (cf. Japan´s 34-MW sodium-sulphur battery coupled with a 51 MW wind farm, which has a 42 MW stabilisation operational voltage).
Redox flow batteries: less common, but purely speculatively I think advances here will prove very interesting when compared to other longer-term storage systems (like pumped hydro). But this is pretty tentative on my part.
In terms of large scale storage, I think it makes sense to look for non-Li systems so as to avoid direct resource competition with EVs – but that is just my opinion. For EVs, however, the story is simple – Li-ion batteries are the most optimised batteries for this purpose, and offer really good levels of performance in terms of both energy stored and potential lifetime (if you haven’t seen already, I’d encourage you to watch this presentation from Jeff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOQQTwYkg08&t=1348s; relevant paper DOI 10.1149/2.0981913jes).
As far as I can tell, V2G technology relies on having a “smart grid” (much like most forms of VRE mitigation, apart from curtailment), so as to enable participation in ancillary services (such as synchronous regulation or acting as a spinning reserve). While certainly an argument can be made that V2G will help smooth VRE intermittency (particularly for short timescales), I think discussion is still very much ongoing on this point as to the roles this is best suited to (for example, here is one open access review: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa9c6d).
Hope this is of interest.
@mvdwege:
This is exactly where I’m at. I actually see the arguments for it quite clearly (limiting GHG emissions to those involved in construction/decommissioning, ending particulate pollution that kills millions, etc.).
BUT I don’t currently trust that you can dramatically scale up construction and operation of fission electricity generation without large and not-fully predictable (or at least not openly predicted) safety & economic consequences.
Maybe we can do this not-quite-badly enough such that the harms done are less deadly to living organisms and less damaging to environments than the petroleum industry. With 8 million human beings dying each year, it’s easy to imagine that would be possible. But money is limited and the industry has a pretty terrible track record with regards to honest reporting, so I don’t currently see enough to convince me that we wouldn’t be better off just taking the money that nuke advocates would like to see invested in fission reactors and investing that in other forms of renewable energy instead.
We have vast wheat, corn & soybean fields in the center/west of the USA and the center of Canada, for example. It turns out that putting photovoltaics ABOVE crops can insulate them from heat stress and reduce the water requirements for irrigation by reducing mid-day transpiration. For at least some crops (as far as I know, it hasn’t been tried yet with corn & soybeans) the ambient daylight below the photovoltaics is still sufficient for fueling growth, and as a result you actually get **better** yields since the sunlight is sufficient but the heat shock is less and there’s a reduction of complicated effects due to excess transpiration (if you draw up too much water trying to evaporate it from your leaves to keep cool, you may draw up nutrients you don’t need into your stem and have it waiting, stored in unhealthy quantities, until your photosynthetic & protein synthesis centers are ready for them).
Now, in order to make this work with existing infrastructure, you’d probably have to put the panels about two stories above the ground to allow current farm machinery to pass unhindered beneath them, but if even just one of these three crops (wheat, corn, soybeans) turns out to do as well under solar panels as peppers, potatoes, and other test crops which have been **universally** successful so far (though that might be because they were specifically testing plants that have a known preference or tolerance for partial shade, so remember that possible selection bias in their 100% success rate), we would have a huge area of land that suddenly doubles in economic productivity.
On top of that, it’s virtually certain that pasture land for grazing cows, cattle, sheep & goats would benefit from such elevated photovoltaics. Sure, it’s more expensive than installing photovoltaics at ground level, but the possibilities seem to me to be much more predictable and risks/adverse effects more manageable than with nuclear power using unproven designs: the solar cells are proven. The only thing we’re testing is whether cows like shade and whether farmers & ranchers like having lower irrigation costs. I’m not too worried about either one.
Crip Dyke… @ # 25: … putting photovoltaics ABOVE crops …
Worth trying, but arguably absurd while we still have literal square miles of PV-less flat-topped roofs, parking lots, rail lines, etc, etc.
Hi!
Just don’t repeat the same old disproven things, and I’d be happy. I see you didn’t here. Thanks.
…
But it is basically zero. Radiation is like practically all other poisons – the dose makes the poison. The dose that anyone is remotely likely to receive is so minuscule that it’s actually harmless. Nuclear waste has not and will likely not hurt anyone. There’s so very little of it that we can afford to dispose of it safely. You are using homeopathic thinking. The real amounts of nuclear waste that anyone is remotely likely to experience are so incredibly diluted that the corresponding dose and dose rate will be minuscule and therefore harmless.
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/…
How many people died from Hanford? About zero. How many people die from coal power worldwide every hour? About a hundred.
Also, Hanford is nuclear weapon waste. Completely different thing, both chemically and radiologically. Light water reactor waste is something completely different. Citing Hanford to attack nuclear power makes as much sense as citing the number of deaths from trucks and tanks in World War 2 to attack the use of the internal combustion engine for cars on the road. It’s a complete non-sequitir.
…
It’s really quite cheap. Renewables (excepting hydro) are much more expensive in the context of a 100% renewables solution.
There’s a lot of water out there. And for minimal increased cost, the water usage can be dramatically reduced. And for substantial but reasonable costs, the water usage can be basically eliminated (e.g. dry cooling).
I didn’t do that. I probably quoted the NRC on “dirty bombs”, saying that more people would die from the conventional explosive than would die from dispersed radioactive material.
https://www.mass.gov/service-details/nuclear-regulatory-commission-nrc-fact-sheet-on-dirty-bombs…
No, current generation designs like the AP-1000 are passively safe. You could cut all power to all of the components, and nothing bad would happen within the first 3-6 months or something.
No. The same passive decay heat removal systems for stuff like molten salt reactors works just as fine for conventional pressurized light water reactors. The idea and implementation is exactly the same. Have a large enough reservoir of water nearby, and rely on passive heat differences to drive a current in the water to move heat away from the core. Again, for example, the AP-1000.
French coastal waters? What are you talking about? All coastal waters have low levels of radioactive elements in them. Your own body has radioactive elements in it. Did you mean a slightly elevated amount? I assume so. However, when you phrase it like that, then it sounds much less scary, because it is much less scary. It’s harmless.
Yes we should make better designs. However, it’s likely that a Fukushima every decade would still be way better for the environment and for human safety than continued use of fossil fuels, and it’s practically impossible to eliminate fossil fuel use without lots more nuclear than what we have today. Thus, we should strive to make things better, but also recognize that yes, this may be a cost of doing business. No option is completely free of negative side effects.
…
Interestingly, I just found this source which seems legit peer review which argues that we could actually dramatically scale up and solve this problem with all nuclear in about 30 years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-really-could-go-nuclear/https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124074Oh look, it’s another nuclear fanboi bait-and-switch. The AP-1000 is a new design that is in operation in how many plants again?
For the audience, you can count the number of operating or in construction AP-1000s on the fingers of two hands, if you’re generous in defining ‘operating’
To mvdwege
I was simply correcting your misinformation that “passive decay heat removal” is somehow inapplicable to conventional light water reactor technology. I’m sorry that reality has a pro-nuclear bias.
Since dealing with decay heat is in fact a problem for all current reactors except the bare handful of AP-1000s in operation, I think the audience can spot who is spreading misinformation here. And it’s not me.
Thorium and fluoride salts reactors seem like a potentially really good idea to me, FWIW, see :
http://gregladen.com/blog/2012/01/17/should-we-try-thorium-reactors/
Especially o’course the TED talk by Kirk Sorensen included there. From (Yikes! Really? Yeah.) 2011 so possibly outdated and does make me wonder why if such a good idea not alrey been done but yah..
Thing is, developing that technology and building enough of them fast enough to make enough difference in regard to Global Overheating and in comparison with existing and already developing renewable power options? Dunno.
Apologies, haven’t read this thread in full yet and have to go to sleep now so haven’t much free time to do so but if this hasn’t already been mentioned and linked thought it might be worth doing so befoe this thread gets too stale and old.
mvdwege
Again, you very clearly implied that only PBRs and molten salt reactors can have passive decay heat removal. As I already mentioned, this is false.
Then, you made the claim that “every modern reactor” is lacking passive decay heat removal. I noted that the AP-1000 exists. You asked about how many are in operation. AFAIK at least 4 are in commercial operation.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Fourth-Chinese-AP1000-enters-commercial-operation
It seems like you’re saying something like “those 4 don’t count because almost all other reactors today have this problem”. It seems that you’re confusing “current reactors” with “current designs”. The AP-1000 is a modern design. Most existing reactors today are not modern designs. Most reactors are like 40 years old. Is it true that most operating reactors today lack passive decay heat removal? Yes. I never claimed or implied otherwise. I made a claim regarding (some) modern designs, and not a blanket claim about all currently operating reactors. I was quite clear.
Please accept my corrections, issue a brief retraction and apology, and then we can move on. Please also avoid making these mistakes and repeating this misinformation in the future.
Not Kirk Sorensen’s project specifically, but other groups like Moltex and ThorCon seem to be making progress. It’s unclear how much progress, but ThorCon in particular seems like they found an investor and friendly government, and I seem to recall some level of regulatory success for Moltex too. There’s half a dozen little startups in the space with varying amounts of progress thus far.
Why hasn’t it happened yet? It’s a catch-22. “It must suck because no one has tried it yet. We shouldn’t try it because it sucks.” Then throw on copious amounts of ill-informed anti-humanist anti-nuclear sentiment, and it’s quite easy to see how it’s never been tried. (At least, it hasn’t been tried since circa 1960 with the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which was quite a resounding success as an experiment and proof of concept.) Because of this pervading anti-nuclear sentiment, most Western governments have been pretty hostile to nuclear, and you can’t do nuclear economically in a country with a hostile regulatory structure.
@ ^ GerrardOfTitanServer : Okay. Fair points there on that catch-22 I guess.
I’d certainly much rather see them develop thorium and other such alterantive reactors including fusion ones than fission. If they can do things safely and in a way that doesn’t create too much radioactive waste or nuclear weapon potential I am cautiously in favour of that sort of nuclear power generation.
OTOH, there is the end bit (5 min 35 seconds mark) of this video I stumbled over the other day :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsgL3Otcq4g
which is somewhat tangential but does give an idea why nuclear is a real worry albeit a bit different from reactors creating energy for peaceful use.
Datum: https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-construction-nuclear-reactors-worldwide/
PS
Tell ya what: send that to Q. Would fit right in, might make things happen, no?
😉
I won’t get in to the endless nuclear debate, that’s G’s job. However, on the DC side I offer these observations:
.
DC appliances usually require a specific voltage that differs from component to component. There are basically three ways to operate a DC appliance.
.
One. Run it direct off DC and accept a variation of output as the voltage varies. A simple tungsten filament light globe is happy to do this as a rule so long as you’re within the globe’s spec and don’t mind poor efficiency. Domestic 12V LED lamps already contain a driver board so can act like a DC lamp even if they have different operating voltages at the lighting chip. Some people have worked out that LED chips share similarities with solar panel output (roughly constant current) so a carefully chosen solar panel and LED chip set can work without regulation. You can build a cheap “solar skylight” that way.
.
Two. Regulate the DC with a shunt regulator that throws away the excess voltage as heat, most old fashioned voltage regulators work this way. Again, very inefficient. Fine if you don’t mind getting rid of a bit of surplus energy.
.
Three. Use a switch mode power supply. This basically rectifies the AC (if required), turns the DC into high frequency AC, transforms it and rectifies it again to DC for the device to use. They are surprisingly efficient and are now found virtually everywhere. Old fashioned heavy iron transformers that got hot when you plugged them into an outlet are now pretty much obsolete.
.
In other words, DC supply doesn’t really work without loss, smart electronics does. The real advantage of DC in a house is that it can be 100% DIY and very safe to handle. I personally have about 3kWh worth of 12V batteries in the basement running to a completely independent set of wires that can run a number of LED 12V lights inside and outside. PIR sensors run on the outside lights so doorways are always illuminated when needed, the washing line attended to and the car parked and unloaded. I can charge the batteries in a number of ways, solar panels with a regulator, a mains powered charger, a fossil fuel powered generator, or even wiring them to the car and charging off that.
.
No matter the state of the outside world I can run some lights, the fridge (off an inverter), entertainment and communications without fuss. Fire wood and bottled gas cover heating and cooking requirements. Distributed energy generation and storage FTW every time.
As a backup to the grid during rare occurrences, like in the southern US right now, especially Texas, sure. Sounds great. However, as a replacement to a power grid with conventional uptimes measured at about 99.95%, no.
PS:
A typical fridge draws IIRC about 100 W in “typical” conditions. If you ran just the fridge, your 3 KWh of battery is barely enough for slightly more than one day.
Aah, good ol “single track minded nuclear shill” strikes again. Did you miss the bit about my charging methods in my post? Plenty of power in the batteries to keep my house humming silently all night. Come dawn I engage the most appropriate charging device as needed. Solar primarily, fossils last.
.
Also, my fridge being an eco friendly device (Danish “Vestfrost” brand) uses around 1kWh per day so your argument is bollocks anyhow. The primary mantra of energy security is to first apply the rules of efficient usage. Halving energy consumption is cheaper than doubling energy storage.
My longest outage was for 66 hours back in 2016, cost us 2 gallons of fuel and we just sat around waiting for the emergency crews to clear the fallen trees on our road. Offered some power to a tearful neighbor who had no method of keeping her phone charged. Best home holiday all year.
Lofty
Ok. So you have an energy efficient refrigerator. Did you mean to rebut my other point about the need for a reliable power grid?
@G, not at all, after all I know from previous encounters that you will only be satisfied with 100% nuclear powered hub-and-spoke grids run by benevolent despots who ban all other inputs. That of course won’t keep the power on everywhere when the crap hits the fan. In fact the power is out at home right now due to a fallen tree in the next street over. Courtesy of my distributed storage option my personal care factor is currently zero.
.
In my state the authorities have a range of storage options from household to 150MW grid scale. The path to a clean green reliable state grid grid is more than half way done and no nuclear plants are being included in the plans. If somewhere else needs a nuclear plant to help keep the lights on in the winter is not my discussion point.
In passing, I saw that the nuclear power plant that failed in Texas was up and running again yesterday. It tripped because the water intake froze.
Then you should work on your reading comprehension. I’d be totally satisfied with a level playing field, which means as solar and wind go up in percentage, they need to receive less to compensate for the “costs” that they impose on the grid, such as additional capacity payments to natural gas, additional transmission line costs, grid inertia and other frequency control services, blackstart capability. And of course a simple greenhouse gas emissions tax (preferably fee-and-dividend). If solar and wind or whatever renewable could compete in that fair playing field, then great. As a separate matter, I’m pretty sure solar, wind, and all other renewables – excepting hydro – basically can not compete in that fair playing field.
So, what accounting cheat are they using? Assuming that their neighbors can supply power at critical times to keep the lights on? Assuming radical advances in battery technology? Assuming ginormously more pumped hydro than currently exists?
South Australia.
(Hey Lofty, I lived in Springton 1997-2011, Birdwood 2011-2019)
In order:
No accounting cheats. Merely redistributing incentives from fossil fuels to renewables.
There are grid inter-connectors to neighbouring states, which have been (and are being) upgraded. So no assumption needed, and any power received is paid for, not gratis. Both ways.
No radical advances required, only money spent.
The blackout to which Lofty referred impelled the implementation of the The Hornsdale wind farm storage battery (interestingly, it was a bet by Elon Musk that precipitated it!), which has so far not only more than paid for itself and been increased by 50%, but has prevented the circumstances that led to the outage from repeating.
(It’s been so successful that there are plans for many more Australia-wide, and even bigger. cf. https://www.energy-storage.news/news/australian-states-push-forward-large-scale-battery-plans )
Again: South Australia. No existing hydro — pretty much the driest state in the driest continent, though pumped hydro projects are in the pipeline (cf. https://arena.gov.au/blog/south-australia-pumped-hydro)
Yeah, really? So when we’re establishing a “fair playing field” you do intend that each generating company has to purchase their own liability insurance on the private market, right? No government guarantees or subsidies to help out?
How many private insurers will insure a wind turbine and how many private insurers will insure a fission reactor?
Mind you, I’m not asking whether private insurers should, or whether prices by private insurers might not be artificially inflated by hysteria.
You believe a free, open market solution will dramatically favor fission-generated electricity, so when assessing whether that’s correct, you have to assess whether they win in the market as it is, not as you wish it to be.
Not only that, but wind & solar power don’t have to be the same price as electricity generated in a fission thermal plant. I know people who simply believe that wind power is better for the environment and voluntarily pay more so that they can purchase power from wind & hydro generation.
Just like brand name rice might not be any better than generic rice yet people still pay extra for the brand name packaging, if people like the “packaging” of wind & solar better than the “packaging” of nuclear and choose to pay more, that’s still the “free & fair” market you’re espousing.
When I read what you write, I feel like I constantly come up against the erroneous assumption so popular among economists but so utterly and routinely shredded by business majors: that people choose among fungible products based on reasons other than logic all the fucking time.
You may not like that people are scared of nuclear energy. It might not be rational that people are scared of nuclear energy. But people are scared of nuclear energy. This is why I think we’re better off with experts making the decisions about how to bring down CO2 emissions and particulate pollution and other by products that produce negative externalities. I want the government making the decision about which nuclear reactors deserve insurance and financing because the private market will simply not make rational decisions. Ever. If we get the right regulatory scheme in place through good legislation, then it will be people who actually know what they’re talking about making the decisions -not demagogic politicians or scared mobs of consumers.
You say you want a free market, a level playing field. But if the government backed out of nuclear power entirely, it would die – and quickly.
Crip Dyke
Assuming again we use fair analysis, e.g. science-based and evidence-based analysis, to determine risks, I would be ok with requiring nuclear power plants to have the comparable insurance obligations as any other industry, and be required to purchase such insurance from private insurers. Using that science-based and evidence-based analysis, most of the cleanup being done at Fukushima is medically unnecessary and a giant waste of money.
I’m not a free market worshiper. I often describe myself as a card-carrying radical Marxist, or more accurately as a mainstream European social democrat. I said that I wanted a fair playing field. I’m not for a free market with private for-profit players. However, this is the language that comes to me naturally to respond to ridiculous claims like solar and wind (in the context of 100% renewables plans based primarily on solar and wind) are cheaper than plans involving large amounts of nuclear. Fundamentally, it’s a question about which is “easier” for society to do, and I remain convinced that it will be far easier with lots of nuclear vs without. Also, the difference between a “carefully crafted, highly regulated free market” and a government run utility is rather small. It’s academic.
I agree that actors are not perfectly rational. I also think that there are other problems, namely that hypothetical perfectly rational actors favor short term profits whereas we as society should have a longer time horizon. I rail against this constantly when I rail against financial tricks like interest rates and especially discounting when comparing electricity production prices. I think nuclear would flourish even if we were to use standard discount rate assumptions, but if we were to properly plan society without short term profits driving the discussion, the nuclear would look even better and solar and wind would look even worse (due to the relative difference in the lifetime of the capital).
I am unsure why you think nuclear would fail to compete in a hypothetical fair free market. Is it primarily because individual consumers would choose not to purchase? Or is it primarily because of the insurance costs? Or do you need both for nuclear to be uncompetitive?
I’ll say it again. Excepting the particular regions and countries with lots of geography conducive to hydro and relatively small population densities, 100% renewables plans are basically impossible. They just won’t work without some radical breakthrough in technology. So, it’s a choice between the pre-industrial age, or some solution with lots of nuclear, or runaway climate change. Then assuming that we put a large tax on greenhouse gas emissions, we narrow down the choice of the end consumer down to two – nuclear or the stone age – and I think most people would choose nuclear rather than live without reliable electricity, food (refrigeration), water, medicine (refrigeration), etc. Nuclear would flourish because there is no other option.
Crip Dyke
Let me quote this again in part to justify my assertion that 100% renewables plans are basically impossible. Quoting the world’s preeminent climate scientist, James Hansen.
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdfHe’s not alone. Most climate scientists seem to agree with him about the fundamental insufficiency of 100% renewable plans and the need for nuclear.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.htmlhttp://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/10/25/open-letter-to-heads-of-state-of-the-g-20-from-scientists-and-scholars-on-nuclear-for-climate-changePS: See also:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
“China is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world and is the largest user of coal-derived electricity. The share of coal in the energy mix declined during the 2010s, falling from 80% in 2010 to 57.7% in 2019.”
I’m going to tackle your two comments separately, since you wrote them separately (I haven’t even read the 2nd one yet, btw). Here’s my response to your first:
I am not saying fission-thermal electrical generation cannot compete. When someone says,
I believe in god,
and I say,
I am not convinced,
Theists too frequently respond by insisting that I am definitively saying, “There is no god.” But this is not true.
Likewise, YOU said:
This is a strong assertion for which you should provide strong evidence if you want to convince anyone.
I am not convinced that your statement is true. In fact, I think that your statement as currently conceived is very likely (but not certainly) false. This is not an assertion that nuclear can’t compete.
I provide reasons for my doubts, including unspecified aspects of your “fair playing field” which might not play out favorably for nuclear, as well as other things that provide an advantage to wind and solar.
At the current time the evidence that wind and solar can compete includes the brute fact that many, many people are voluntarily, as consumers/end purchasers of electric power, spending more than market rate per kilowatt hour of electricity consumed in order to get that electricity from renewables.
I don’t know of any program anywhere where people can voluntarily spend more on their bill to ensure that they’re purchasing power from fission-generation sources. I don’t know of any such programs at all. Yet not only do solar & wind programs like this exist, I personally know several people who participate in them.
This is proof that for at least some people, on a fair playing field, they would simply choose to spend more for wind or solar power.
The natural conclusion, then, is that even if nuclear power worked out to be cheaper literally everywhere in the world – Saudi Arabia, Mali, New Mexico, Iceland – some people might find the price differential to be small enough that they would be willing to pay that differential to have non-nuclear generated electricity.
How much cheaper nuclear power would have to be for wind and solar to lose all their customers, to reach the point where, to use your language, such power
is as yet unknown.
Without knowledge of the % premium people are willing to pay for non-nuclear power, even if you had certainty that nuclear power would end up cheaper, you would still need to know exactly how much cheaper before you could justify your assertion above.
I’m not asserting nuclear can’t compete. I’m denying that you have presented anything like the evidence you’d have to show to convince me that there’s no competitive role for wind, solar, geothermal & the like.
I’m not the one making assertions here. Show that you know how of much a price differential my best friend would tolerate to avoid spending on nuclear, and then show that she’ll never get solar, wind, or geothermal power within that price differential.
Otherwise you simply are making assertions about human behavior, about human willingness to act rationally as you define rationality, fitting into a specific narrow range where as soon as nuclear power is “cheaper” then nuclear power “wins”. You say that you do not believe economic actors act rationally, but you write as if price alone determines whether wind and solar can compete. You can’t have it both ways. People don’t make decisions based on price alone.
Until you can explain why and how the willingness to pay extra for, as one example, reputation (as in, but not limited to, brand name products) either doesn’t apply to electricity or how you’ve quantified that factor and shown it to be insufficient to bridge your expected price gap, you’ve cannot support the assertion that wind and solar cannot compete with nuclear even if we grant as a premise that nuclear generation will be cheaper per kilowatt hour.
You’ve made an assertion about solar/wind non-competitiveness. I don’t believe you. Why do you have to pretend I’ve asserted something I haven’t (i.e. that I believe that nuclear fission power is as unable to compete on a fair playing field as you believe wind and solar are unable to compete on that playing field)? Why can’t you simply accept that I don’t see your case as proven and then
1) provide evidence to convince me that wind and solar “basically cannot compete”
or
2) move on to something else.
You’re inventing a statement I haven’t made so that you can rebut it instead of simply supporting your own statements. It’s annoying.
Finally, this:
But that’s not what you said before. You said that solar and wind literally cannot compete. You didn’t take some nuanced position like, “Right now I don’t see how intermittent sources can supply more than 40% of grid electricity”. You said that they cannot compete.
They can compete. They do compete now, and under any plausible scenario for the future you can imagine, even one with little to no subsidies for solar & wind generation, there will be lots of megawatts of solar and wind generation in various parts of the world for the next 50 years, minimum, and almost certainly longer than that, though it’s always possible that society or technology will change in a way that 20-40 years from now we stop installing solar & wind generation sources, in which case it’s at least theoretically possible that 50 years from now we would be at small and falling levels of those energy sources.
You’re mixing up your claims. Before you said they can’t compete, now you say that they can’t be 100% of all electrical generation. It’s just silly that you can’t maintain a coherent, stable position so that we can productively discuss this. I, personally, have seen studies that show that a combination of intermittent sources & a long-range direct-current, low-loss transmission grid to balance the variability of local intermittent sources could handle 40% of Europe’s electrical needs right now at a reasonably competitive cost. I don’t remember what subsidies may or may not have been built into that number, but given that we don’t know how much extra people are willing to pay to get power from solar, wind, & hydro sources, I’m perfectly willing to believe that with governments planning, building, & managing the grid, intermittents could handle 20% or much more of European electricity at a price consumers would be willing to pay.
That’s not 100%. I’ve never asserted 100%. But it’s also not a failure to compete. A minimum 20% market share is a darn good market share.
So, again, straw man me if you like, but I’d much prefer it if you quoted the statements to which you’re objecting since that would seem to be much more likely to generate a productive conversation, given how often you seem to attribute other meanings to me. Perhaps if you focussed on an actual quote you would be less likely to engage in the flights of fancy that lead you to think that I or anyone here was proposing a grid of 100% intermittents.
My apologies. I often don’t sufficiently make clear that I promote a weak position and a strong position. My strong position is that some (large) amount of nuclear is necessary to avoid regular power outages and maintain society. The weaker position is that an all-nuclear plan is “cheaper” than a plan that is part nuclear plus part solar and wind – put another way, adding solar and wind to a working nuclear solution will increase, not decrease, total system costs. So, I’m sorry for not being sufficiently clear between these two positions that I hold and promote.
Then, on top of that, I might have confused “cheaper” with “out-compete”. I agree that if there’s enough irrational people who want to pay more money for solar and wind, then solar and wind can compete. They can’t compete on what I would call “the technical merits”, but clearly they could compete. Sorry again for my confusion and lack of clarity regarding “cheaper” vs “out-compete in the market”.
Oh, goodness me.
Yeah, once again the statement to which I objected was your assertion that renewables “cannot compete”. They can compete. They do compete. That has nothing to do with whether 100% renewables plans are possible with today’s technologies.
And look at that! He doesn’t even support your position that 100% renewables plans are impossible. He only supports the idea that it’s impossible that 100% renewables plans would “let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels”.
Yep. I agree. It’s hard or impossible to get to 0% fossil fuels with renewable energy alone at the speed that is required to mitigate climate change. It’s possible. It’s just that there’s this issue of climate change which has put a clock on our transition away from fossil fuels. Even with this clock running it’s still possible in some countries (which is not what you said originally with your “cannot compete” statement, but let’s allow you to amend that to “cannot compete in the vast majority of countries of the world”).
But Hansen says that intermittents will not get us where we need to be fast enough to head off the worst effects of climate change. Good thing I never said one word about how fast the world could switch over to 100% renewable energy based largely on solar & wind! Phew. That was close there.
…and looking through the rest of your second comment there’s nothing there to which I feel any need to respond. Not a bit of it bears on the question of whether you were originally correct that renewables cannot compete on a fair playing field, and what there is suggests that they can compete for a significant share of the market.
This isn’t a question of all/nothing. I don’t think that. Hansen doesn’t think that. Hansen thinks there’s a role for renewables and a role for nuclear.
In one statement you’ve asserted that renewables “cannot compete” and in another you attributed to me that nuclear “cannot compete”. Both of these are absolutist positions. I neither believe your assertion to be substantiated nor the position you falsely attribute to me to be substantiated.
You have done a lot of research and reading on issues related to carbon emissions & power generation. I believe you could add a lot to productive discussions about these issues if you could actually read what other people are saying and stop making (and attributing to others) the unevidenced, (poorly phrased?,) hardly credible absolutist statements that you make.
I also haven’t forgotten that you argued against a plan to breed multiple Godzillas & chain them up in coastal cities around the Pacific Rim so as to use their lightning/laser breath to generate electricity. You argued about it vociferously. You were outraged that someone might suggest that seeding Pacific atolls with radio-nuclides would cause mutations that would lead to disruption of habitats while entirely ignoring the fact that the plan was fictional and meant to be ridiculous and the “mutations” were the spontaneous creation of multiple Godzillas.
You do your own credibility harm when you don’t listen to others. It led you to respond to a joke post with real outrage and now it’s leading you to attribute to me positions which I clearly did not take.
If you care about your causes, I implore you now as I have implored you before to engage in actual dialog where you take the time to understand others and what they are saying.
You don’t need to do that to be right. You’re right or wrong regardless of how well the conversation goes. But you do need to do that to persuade others, and whatever we do to mitigate climate change, it is certain to be through cooperation and coordination because individualist solutions here are doomed to failure in the face of this global problem. You can’t be part of the cooperation & coordination if you’re not taking time to understand what others are saying when they talk to you.
So take the time. Respond better. Be part of collective action even if that means you spend more time listening to people being wrong than you would really prefer. The alternative is failure, and none of us wants that.
Oops, I posted my 51 without yet having been able to see your #50.
I think we’re in a better place now, though I continue to encourage you to think carefully about the comments to which you’re responding since that has gotten you into trouble in the past.
Sigh. This is basically a quote-mine. It ignores all of the surrounding text, and the broader context of the supplied citations.
First, please see the other quotes which I already provided:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2149Second, please see the citation that I’ve already provided, and these newly provided quotes from that citation from other leading climate scientists.
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=123https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=252https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1959This is how big of a disconnect there is between the science and reality vs public understanding. It’s not just a little hard to do 100% renewables worldwide. It’s not just very hard to do 100% renewables worldwide. It’s practically impossible – excepting a miracle. 100% renewable positions and anti-nuclear positions are delusional, just like young Earth creationism and other cult-like conspiracy theories. This delusion is based on wishful thinking and outright technical lies from the leading Green orgs which they have been spreading for close to 70 years, including pro-renewable feasibility lies, many anti-nuclear lies, and racist colonialism neo-Malthusian lies like “The Population Bomb” by Ehrlich and similar driving sentiment behind many of the leaders of the Sierra Club circa 1970. Most Greens are just as delusional as young Earth creationists. They’re both (quasi-)religious cult-like conspiracy theories.
It is no wonder that James Hansen and Kerry Emanual both suggest / outright say that anti-nuclear Green advocates are a bigger problem than the climate change deniers.
Almost everything you know about solar, wind, and nuclear power is wrong, or at least grossly distorted. Solar and wind are much more polluting than you think they are. Nuclear is much less polluting and much less dangerous than you think it is. Solar and wind are much less practical than you think they are.
PS:
One problem is that the fossil fuel lobby has hired paid experts to shill for renewables as a means to attack nuclear power. If you follow the money, there’s good circumstantial evidence that much of the Green worldwide movement is covertly funded by fossil fuel money. We know that the original anti-nuclear Green org, Friends Of The Earth, was started with Rochefeller money. We know that the leading Green scientific expert today, Mark Jacobson, is being funded by Precourt money. It’s just like the tobacco and leaded gasoline misinformation campaigns all over again.
Ugg, I should offer the correction: Kerry Emanuel in the video later says that he’s (somewhat?) hopeful for advances in storage technology, but just nowhere near in time for climate change. I should say that 100% renewables worldwide is basically impossible with technology now and with technology in the (immediate) foreseeable future.
It’s not just a matter of “it’ll take too long to build”. We cannot do 100% renewables worldwide at all, no matter the time horizon, with current tech. Perhaps we could with future advances, maybe, but barring a miracle, we’re not going to get those advances in time.
So, again, it’s runaway climate change, or the stone age, or lots of nuclear. Those are the options that reality has given you.
PPS: I should also add that one of the former German Chancellers, Gerhard Schröder, leader of a political alliance with the Green party, the guy who decided to phase out nuclear power, is now on the payroll of the Russian natural gas national firm Gazprom. I can’t even make this shit up.
There’s also the other place that I like to hate on, my home state of California. Who decided to phase out nuclear power? Jerry Brown. Whose family had huge financial stakes in fossil fuels? Jerry Brown. Who got a new coal power plant build when he was first in the governor’s office? Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown was instrumental in the birth of the anti-nuclear movement, attending and coordinating with the founding leaders, attending the original “no nukes” concert, etc.
They’re barely trying to hide it. While not conclusive, there’s a lot of smoke here for there not to be some fire, e.g. there’s a lot of interesting evidence for there not to be some significant level of fossil fuel funding of Green orgs because of their utility to attack nuclear power in order to increase marketshare for fossil fuels.
In Australian news:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-24/coal-energy-closures-forced-by-renewable-boom/13186438
Massive? Do mean mean like “10 minutes of storage – massive” like the much touted ‘massive’ Hornsdale battery? We need at least 2 orders of magnitude more than that. They’re not planning the necessary 1+ days of storage that is necessary in order to go near 100% solar and wind.
Also, there’s not enough lithium in estimated worldwide reserves and resources for the whole world to do the same thing.
Also, new nuclear is basically an order of magnitude less in upfront capital costs and total yearly costs (total costs divided by equipment lifetimes) than this cockamanie solar wind transmission Li-battery plan.
It’s a delusion to think that you’re going to eliminate fossil fuel usage for electricity in the whole of Australia without lots of nuclear.
Meanwhile, in Australian news: Energy Australia to close Yallourn power station early and build 350 megawatt battery
No talk of nuclear, here in Oz.
Basically, no need.