[HN Gopher] China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nucle...
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China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors
Author : 1cvmask
Score : 212 points
Date : 2021-11-08 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (smallcaps.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (smallcaps.com.au)
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Maybe something like this will inspire the US to do something
| similar.
| holonomically wrote:
| Meanwhile the US is focusing on renewables. This is not going
| well for the US.
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| Uranium stocks have been soaring since 2020, some have 10x gains
| already. Check UUUU, DNN or if you want ETF then maybe URNM.
| bduerst wrote:
| Are these holdings? Mining companies? Production?
| Zigurd wrote:
| This is a really shoddy article: It is in a "small caps"
| newsletter, mentions a couple specific small cap mining
| companies, and does not provide any sources for the assertion
| that China will build 150 nuclear power plants. It just jumps to
| "Buy these stonks."
| ActionHank wrote:
| $100 says China makes deals to store the waste in Africa.
| s5300 wrote:
| Can't imagine why they'd choose anything other than just
| tunneling into one of their many mountain systems and leaving
| it there, safe from quite literally anything.
| laluser wrote:
| Is the waste really that large? I was under the impression that
| the waste was rather manageable.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It actually is a pretty large volume depending on what you're
| disposing of.
|
| There's a common sleight of hand where you talk about nuclear
| waste and proponents will reply something like, 'You could
| fit all of the spent nuclear fuel from the US in a football
| field.' -- which is technically true if the waste was stacked
| 30 feet high. But the real sleight of hand is the switch
| between Waste <-> Fuel.
|
| Nuclear fuel is something like 2% of the total volume of
| waste that must be dealt with. It's the highest activity
| waste and the most dangerous so it's given the most credence
| but there are orders of magnitude more waste generated that
| _also_ must be safely stored away from humanity for dozens-
| hundreds of years. From the initial fuel processing
| biproducts, to activated components in reactors, to resins
| and claddings, just tons and tons of dangerous radioactive
| material. Then beyond that, there 's another few orders of
| magnitude of low-level waste that is less dangerous still but
| can't be just buried in a dump.
|
| There are processes to turn the liquid components into glass
| and encase the rest in iron and concrete but just add it to
| the list of things we haven't really "solved" in order to
| form a responsible nuclear civilization.
| onecommentman wrote:
| Then 2% means for all waste (high level, low level, mixed)
| 50 football fields stacked 30 ft high for the US for all
| waste. Or one tenth of a square mi sunk 30+ feet down. The
| US is a very big energy-intensive country and that's a very
| small patch of land for that fraction of energy needs met.
| And since most is low level, 90% of that just gets stuck in
| a salt mine for a few decades. Not exactly a dump and not
| exactly a vault (monitoring, retrievable), but it's not
| exactly rocket science, cf. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in
| New Mexico.
|
| If delaying nuclear until we "fully solved" nuclear waste
| means that tens of thousands of Asians die of lung diseases
| every year instead, maybe a half-solution is good enough.
|
| Weapons proliferation via (theft and) reprocessing of the
| much greater amount of high-level nuclear waste resulting
| from a "nuclear future" is the real thorn in the rose.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Putin is the richest person on earth because of the money
| Germany pays him to dump nuclear waste in the urals.
| chomp wrote:
| It's not, storage is mostly a logistical and political
| problem. Logistical in the sense that the storage needs to be
| secure on timelines longer than a few generations. Political
| in the sense that no one wants it in their back yard.
|
| Low level waste is the largest by volume by the way, so
| mostly not related to nuclear reactors.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| There's also talk of storing the waste inside of the
| Chernobyl Exclusion zone. It's already no-one's backyard.
| effie wrote:
| That's a great idea. Ukraine could turn bad situation
| into opportunity and make some big euros here.
| renaudg wrote:
| It is indeed. IIRC, 40-ish years of waste of the French
| nuclear power program fits in a couple of swimming pools.
| Compared to the alternatives (including the tons of particles
| released by coal power plants, causing thousands of deaths a
| year in Europe), it's a complete non-issue.
| Accujack wrote:
| I'll take this. They don't need to store the waste anywhere
| other than their own land, there's not going to be that much of
| it.
| Tenoke wrote:
| They've indeed just opened a facility for reusing nuclear
| waste locally[0] though in all fairness they have stored some
| waste in Sudan before[1].
|
| 0. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1234033.shtml
|
| 1. https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/official-
| ch...
| justicezyx wrote:
| https://chinadialogue.net/zh/4/40625/ (in Chinese) There is a
| state-backed research project for underground storage of
| nuclear waste that can be kept safe for 10,000s of years.
|
| Where can I collect the $100?
|
| Edit: http://hexuehuim.kechuangfu.com/site/content/8023.html
| This is the researcher who is working on this project. The
| research project's base is called "city 404" nice name too.
| [deleted]
| novok wrote:
| China has a lot of uninhabited dessert land in the west that
| they don't treat that well already, I don't think they really
| need to do something as elaborate or expensive as shipping it
| to africa.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I think you'd be surprised how well they treat it. That
| desert is subject to a decades-long reforestation effort --
| with results. Many parts that were once desert are now filled
| with fruit trees, a major source of income for locals, as
| part of their poverty allevation efforts (which, yes, extends
| to all minorities in that area). Plus they already put a
| shitload of solar panels in that area.
|
| They still have a lot of empty land left for storage but it's
| not like they can randomly dump stuff somewhere.
| skmurphy wrote:
| This is good news if they follow through. Likely to have a number
| of beneficial effects directly in China and as follow on effects
| globally.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is that alternate timeline where the US built the 500
| reactors we were planning to build by 2000 and in which, in 2021,
| global warming was seen as a minor issue rather than a "climate
| crisis".
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Not really: nuclear only impacts electricity production, which
| only covers 25% of greenhouse emissions in the US [1]. So even
| if that went to zero, it would be a huge help, but there's
| still 3/4 more to improve on.
|
| [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
| emis...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 100% is too optimistic, yes.
|
| 25% is too pessimistic, though. If you have universal nuclear
| power, EVs don't ever have to charge from coal plants, so
| you've got a direct path to attacking the transportation 25%.
| Gas heating and cooking have electric alternatives, so you
| have a direct path to attacking _that_ 25%. As for industry,
| I suspect a very decent fraction of its 25% consumes energy
| (and, therefore, could be readily substituted for electric)
| rather than hydrocarbons.
|
| In any case, the many gigatons of CO2 we put into the
| atmosphere by killing nuclear are completely indefensible.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > In any case, the many gigatons of CO2 we put into the
| atmosphere by killing nuclear are completely indefensible.
|
| I cannot defend that. Big Oil is tough competitor.
| uhtred wrote:
| Any idea why didn't the US keep to that plan?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I thought it was well known: Building nuclear power stations
| has been extremely expensive and time-consuming.
|
| Why would anyone invest in that? The answer is climate
| change, but conservatives in the US have opposed any action
| on that issue, so there hasn't been political will.
| leesec wrote:
| Nixon left.
| deathcalibur wrote:
| I'm guessing Three Mile Island + Chernobyl. Maybe start here
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| nuclear_movement_in_the...
| trimbo wrote:
| I long thought that the simultaneous release of "The China
| Syndrome" and TMI led to public fear of nuclear power (TMI
| happened two weeks after the movie debuted!). But
| apparently people have studied this and these disasters
| really didn't have a major effect -- public sentiment
| generally stayed the same around the time of the
| accidents[1]
|
| [1] - This link only covers Chernobyl and Fukushima:
| https://www.ans.org/news/article-321/new-polls-show-
| substant...
| pfdietz wrote:
| The passage of PURPA in 1978 had a bigger effect. Suddenly
| utilities were opened to competition. Combined with a
| slowdown in growth of electric power demand and the window
| closed on new nuclear.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Fossil fuels are too cheap and approval times for new fossil
| fuel power stations are surprisingly still much faster than
| for nuclear. Even though the health impact from the latter
| has historically been orders of magnitudes (at least 1000x)
| higher.
| njarboe wrote:
| The generation that had a great fear of nuclear bombs due to
| duck and cover exercises in schools when they were kids
| started coming into political power (the boomers) and have
| been in power ever since. Most people don't really separate
| the idea of a mushroom cloud going up into the sky and a
| nuclear reactor meltdown in their head. The nuclear power
| industry should have taken a clue from all of the other
| industries that use nuclear/radioactive tech and removed the
| word nuclear from the technology description. Maybe call it
| isotopic power?
|
| Hopefully younger generations, that seem to be completely
| unaware that we still live 15 minutes to nuclear armageddon,
| won't have such a visceral negative view of it and see it as
| a viable zero carbon energy source.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 1. The conversion of airplane gas turbines to power
| generation which have about 1/10 the capital cost of the
| steam turbines used for coal and nuclear plants. (People
| still quote the cost of coal as if it was a benchmark but it
| has been uncompetitive since 1980. So much in energy research
| is like a stopped clock.)
|
| 2. A wrong model for what causes nuclear accidents (e.g. the
| pressure vessel doesn't burst, instead the power goes out
| like it did at Fukushima.) Existing plants and new designs
| had to be retrofit -- U.S. power plants went through post-TMI
| and post-911 upgrades, but Japan did nothing.
|
| 3. Racism and islamophobia. When Pakistan got the bomb the
| fear of proliferation exploded, putting an end to research in
| new nuclear reactors (which could have a gas-turbine based
| cost structure) and sustainable nuclear fuel cycles. (e.g.
| it's possible to not just use Plutonium as a fuel, but even
| destroy the most pernicious fission products.)
| mynameishere wrote:
| You are getting some truly bizarre responses. The real answer
| is that the same crowd of people obsessed with climate change
| today were against nuclear power yesterday.
| godelski wrote:
| > in 2021, global warming was seen as a minor issue rather than
| a "climate crisis".
|
| I just want to push back on this. The US isn't the sole
| contributor to climate change and I'm tired of pretending like
| it is. We need to stop with this Americentric thinking, this is
| a global crisis. Nor is electricity the only factor. The US is
| about 15%. We'll round up to 25% assuming the EU follows the
| US. That's still 75% of the emissions not coming from the west.
| We need to also look where emissions are coming from. In the US
| that is 29% transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry,
| 13% commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.
|
| If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't mean
| we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric
| appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy).
| It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these
| things to become more popular. For example, with cars the
| battery technology is a big example of why we see them now and
| not in the past. There may have been more pressure for this,
| but it isn't an assumption we can make.
|
| So if we're just talking the US, that's 25% (electricity) * 15%
| (US global contribution) or 3.75%. Let's say electricity and
| transportation and industry, that's still only 11.55% of global
| emissions, and that is an absurd overestimate. Yeah, 10% of
| emissions (I'll say conservative estimate that includes EU)
| would be a big deal, but it wouldn't turn climate change into a
| minor deal. Though we would have a large leg up from our
| current position as we'd be able to focus less on clean
| electricity production and more on all the things that produce
| emissions and carbon capture techniques/technologies.
|
| All sources are from EPA.
|
| Edit: I'm not sure why people think I'm anti nuclear or even
| uninformed on it (many people that know my account will know my
| expertise here). I'm also not sure why people don't think I
| care about China's emissions. I'm saying that the problem is
| much bigger and complicated than any single country. Even if
| one country should be picking up the mantle and leading the
| way, they aren't. So what do we do then? That's my complaint.
| Because "what do we do" has been mostly complaining.
|
| Edit 2: To be clear, my quip is about global warming being a
| "minor issue" if we had just built said reactors. This is just
| flat out wrong. If the US was 0 emissions, there's still the
| other 85% being produced. France is doing great, I know. They
| are an amazing example (I'm not anti-nuclear?), but they aren't
| 0 emissions either. No one is?
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Nobody's pretending the US is the sole contributor to climate
| change. China's emissions exceed those of all other developed
| countries combined[0]. And, when you look at the top 20
| companies in terms of carbon emissions, it turns out that 12
| of them are state owned (thus, non-US companies), and,
| unsurprisingly, all of them are energy companies[1].
|
| OTOH, the US is not at all blameless here. If the US military
| were its own country, it would rank 55th in terms of global
| greenhouse gas emissions, beating out 140 other countries[2].
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57018837
|
| [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/reve
| aled...
|
| [2]: https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-
| polluter...
| godelski wrote:
| Honestly? A lot of people are. Don't get me wrong, the US
| is a big part of the problem. I'm not trying to state
| otherwise. As a single country we are the second worse, and
| the worst on a per capita scale. To be clear, I'm not
| trying to say that the US is not a major contributor. We
| definitely are and should be leading the way to solve this
| problem.
|
| The issue is that we aren't leading the way, despite the
| best efforts of many of its citizens. But I also don't see
| anyone else stepping up. I also don't see people
| considering that the rest of the globe that isn't
| electrified is making the choice of "clean energy or a
| hospital." We know what they'll go with every time and we
| shouldn't blame them.
|
| This is the most complicated problem that humankind has
| ever faced. We are doing a disservice by over simplifying
| the problem. We are doing a disservice by turning this into
| a political "shoulda-coulda" or "but they waste more" game.
| At the end of the day it doesn't matter, emissions still
| happen even if one person is more at fault. The worst part?
| The countries that emit the most will also be able to deal
| with the crisis more easily, and thus have less incentive
| to actually solve it.
|
| I'm not saying the US isn't to blame. I'm saying the
| problem is far more complicated than the US and it's going
| to take more than them to solve it.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| You're absolutely right. However, I'd argue that per
| capita emissions is a misleading metric here, in light of
| the fact that when you drill down even deeper and look at
| the top 100 corporate polluters, which are collectively
| responsible for 71% of our greenhouse gas emissions[0],
| virtually all of them [1] are energy companies.
|
| Now, yes, individual people consume energy, thus forming
| most of the basis for this "per capita emissions" metric,
| but, in the alternative timeline where the world got
| serious about clean energy 20-30 years ago, guess what
| happens to that metric? It drops in direct correlation
| with the amount of investment in clean energy.
|
| But, as to the rest of what you write here, the solution,
| at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if not easy:
| developed countries _must_ invest massively and
| immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration
| technologies, as well as properly pricing carbon
| emissions via carbon taxes so that that negative
| externality is included in every single consumer
| decision. Further, developed countries must engage in
| clean energy technology sharing and development projects
| throughout the world[2]. We need the entire world to be
| on the same page, and, China, the US, and Europe need to
| be leading the way.
|
| So, yes, absolutely, the problem scope vastly exceeds the
| US (it's global), so, therefore, the solution must be
| global as well.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-
| business/2017/jul/10...
|
| [1]: Perhaps literally all of them. I had to scroll down
| to about number 75 before I saw one that might not be an
| energy company, just from the name.
|
| [2]: This solves the "clean energy or a hospital"
| problem.
| godelski wrote:
| > But, as to the rest of what you write here, the
| solution, at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if
| not easy: developed countries must invest massively and
| immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration
| technologies
|
| This is something I actively fight for. I often state
| that the US (and west) don't need to be carbon neutral by
| 2050, but carbon negative now. That's how we unburden the
| developing world. That's how we pay back for the damage
| cause mostly by us.
|
| But CCS is still a complicated subject and highly debated
| within the green communities (just like nuclear is).
| People think we can get away with just planting trees,
| but the research and experts don't think that's true
| (especially since new growth forests are carbon sources
| (fact that surprises many people) instead of carbon sinks
| (old growth forests are major sinks btw)). We're going to
| need a wide breadth of methods to solve this and we
| shouldn't be taking any off the table as long as the
| result is that we're carbon negative[0].
|
| [0] The arguments against CCS tend to be that if we have
| them then the coal and ng companies can still operate.
| Though this obviously misses the point since we care
| about the resultant emissions more than the source.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| China will be the problem in the future. The United
| States _has been_ the problem for decades.
|
| The US remains responsible for a large plurality of the
| emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the
| largest emitter, but it's not particularly close to the
| US yet if you integrate that function over time.
| redisman wrote:
| It's also a matter of seeing your spheres of control.
| There is basically nothing a random peep can do about
| China as it's state run. But at least in the US you can
| maybe have some marginal effect. Besides the US is
| nowhere near where they need to be just because China is
| worse
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > If the US military were its own country, it would rank
| 55th in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, beating
| out 140 other countries
|
| It's a valid point about the military, but all militaries
| run on fossil fuels and a handful of big carriers/subs that
| runs on nuclear.
|
| During WW2, we ran petrol/oil pipelines from the UK under
| water to Normandy. Each pipeline was a steel cable rolled
| up along an enormous floating drum called a _conundrum_
| that weighed as much as a destroyer. There were 7 of them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pluto
|
| Then we extended those pipelines on land as we pushed East.
| There were 73 allied divisions, each requiring an average
| of 7 tons of supply each day, with 2/3 of that being fuel.
| The USSR had something like 600 divisions.
|
| Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty. Oil
| and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare at the
| moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or jets on
| the horizon. So that's not going to be an area where will
| be reducing much CO2 any time soon.
|
| Long term, perhaps hydrogen might be a replacement for
| vehicles, and smaller nuclear reactors even for combat
| ships?? But we'd need to be able to make a lot of hydrogen
| very quickly, and have something like a strategic hydrogen
| reserve for wartime. The explosive nature of hydrogen is
| also a challenge when you are being bombed and shot at, and
| there are supply chain issues as to what operation Pluto
| would look like if it was hydrogen.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty.
| Oil and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare
| at the moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or
| jets on the horizon. So that's not going to be an area
| where will be reducing much CO2 any time soon.
|
| Well, we could just not maintain military bases all over
| the goddamn planet, and retain a mostly defensive
| military. More realistically, I suspect that
| significantly reducing overseas deployments would also
| significantly reduce the military's carbon footprint.
|
| I do concede that this may not be geopolitically
| realistic. I also agree that nuclear seems like a
| realistic solution for carriers and combat ships. Just
| eliminating diesel-powered aircraft carriers would
| probably go a long way, I would guess.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Hey, I'm all for reducing the presence of U.S. bases
| abroad. I don't think we should be policing the world.
|
| But at the same time, let's not kid ourselves - this will
| result in more wars, except it wont be U.S. ships and
| planes burning the fossil fuels, the fossil fuels will be
| expended by foreign troops and all the rebuilding
| necessary as a result of more conflict.
|
| Here is an article in the WSJ about the significant
| increase in coups in Africa as a result of the U.S.
| pulling back and Europe also easing off of its policing
| role due to covid:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-coups-in-africa-at-
| hig...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If the world was run on Uranium and Thorium which are
| universally distributed in the earth's crust and in the
| ocean people would have a lot less to fight about.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| TIL WW2 was fought for oil. I guess Korea, Vietnam,
| Afghanistan were about oil, too? I'll grant that Iraq was
| about oil.
|
| More likely, if the world was run on Uranium and Thorium
| then people wouldn't be able to blame wars on oil.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| There'll always be land.
| cmckn wrote:
| I feel like you're arguing a straw man; is anyone actually
| saying or thinking that the US is the sole cause of climate
| change? Everyone I talk to about climate is under the
| impression that China is the big bad wolf (although that's
| overly-simplified and not true either).
|
| The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many
| people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate
| policy.
|
| On your point, keep in mind that American consumption causes
| a tremendous amount of off-shore emissions. We have
| artificially "low" emissions because we outsource them to
| regions like Southeast Asia.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Yes, the OP did literally argue that if the US had
| transitioned to nuclear power, global climate change would
| have been "minor."
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The US has been responsible for a large plurality of the
| emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the
| largest emitter, but it's not particularly close if you
| integrate that function over time.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Looking at the data, it doesn't seem like the US
| transitioning to nuclear would have made climate change a
| "minor" problem:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-
| by-re...
|
| For nearly all of the time before China outstripped the
| US, the EU (if you include EU-27) was a larger
| contributor than the US anyway. And much of the early US
| emissions edge came before nuclear power was invented.
| Global warming itself was poorly understood prior to the
| 1960s:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-
| glob...
|
| A transition to nuclear would have helped, certainly! But
| climate change would not be "minor."
| godelski wrote:
| People seem to be missing that this was my entire
| point... The OP made too strong of a statement.
| godelski wrote:
| > The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many
| people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate
| policy.
|
| This is the root of my problem. Yeah, the US _should_ be
| the leader on climate policy. But we've been failing for
| the last 20 years. At what point are we going to
| acknowledge that someone else needs to pick up the mantel.
| And as you've mentioned, it isn't like China is going to do
| it (you can shift my comment to China + US and the
| sentiment will hold true, but maybe I conveyed my thoughts
| poorly. Communication is difficult, especially over heated
| topics).
| philwelch wrote:
| > Yeah, the US _should_ be the leader on climate policy.
| But we've been failing for the last 20 years. At what
| point are we going to acknowledge that someone else needs
| to pick up the mantel.
|
| If nobody has, then everyone has been failing, not just
| us. So the US might as well do the right thing "after
| we've tried everything else", as Churchill didn't
| actually say.
| cmckn wrote:
| I totally agree that China isn't going to step up on
| climate. I don't think there _is_ another power able to
| drive international consensus like the US on this issue.
| Whether that's a blessing or a curse is mostly a matter
| of perspective :)
|
| I genuinely believe that we can change course on climate
| policy, but it won't happen in one or two national
| elections. Electing people who care about sustainability
| at every level of government is necessary for big changes
| to happen federally and internationally. We've got a lot
| of work to do!
| kansface wrote:
| Do you know what percentage of the non-western sources are
| outsourced emissions or if that was already included?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| France is phasing out nuclear, their goal is to reduce
| nuclear from 70% to 50% by 2025.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Will they use the German plan, and replace nuclear with
| coal? Or will they use the California plan, and replace
| nuclear with rolling blackouts?
| neuronic wrote:
| Germany has not replaced nuclear with coal. They have
| massively increased rennewables, as should everyone who
| isn't a paid shill or from the 80s.
|
| Thank you for your alternative facts, now go collect your
| paycheck for that dumbass statement.
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
| energy-c...
|
| https://energytransition.org/2018/01/german-energy-
| consumpti...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I am ecstatic to see those numbers, which are very
| different from numbers I've seen in the past. My bad.
| (Probably.)
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd call 70%->50% "phasing out". I'd call it
| "reducing dependence." I see nothing wrong with this. It
| would still be one of the most heavily nuclearized
| countries. So that term is misleading.
|
| I wouldn't call anything "phasing out" short of a plan to
| denuclearize.
|
| France is still going to be the green model. Mixture of
| zero emitting sources. The energy problem is complex. As
| one example, a big reason for this change is that France
| heavily relies on others to get its uranium.
| neuronic wrote:
| As should everyone, there is no reason to build new nuclear
| plants in 2021 especially since there is STILL no
| acceptable solution for the waste problem.
|
| It's cheaper, faster and safer to build renewables. The
| only explanation for the strange amount of unsupported pro-
| nuclear posts on HN and Reddit is shilling.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You might be right on the minor local point that we would
| still have a climate problem if the US went all-in on
| nuclear, but it would be a lot easier to get the US to pass
| border adjustments ("carbon tariffs" if you will) on China or
| whomever if our emissions were in good shape. We wouldn't
| have a fossil fuel industry lobbying hard to preserve
| pollution and there wouldn't be as much pearl clutching about
| the effects of the economy. Moreover, if we had 70 years of
| investment in nuclear, we would probably be able to quickly
| and cheaply stamp out safe, cost effective nuclear power
| plants all over the world (think about how much progress on
| SMRs could have been made in the same amount of time).
| Moreover, abundant, cheap energy would have almost certainly
| precipitated the electrification of everything from heavy
| industry to transportation to indoor heating/cooking/water-
| heating/etc (on the near-certain assumption that nuclear
| would be far cheaper than fossil fuels).
| godelski wrote:
| Well the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of
| the fossil fuel industry lobbying. So I'm not sure we can
| really make these conclusions. It is post hoc thinking. As
| much as I'd love to live in an atomic punk era with SMRs
| being prolific. Luckily there's been a lot of investment
| lately into them and we're starting to see good results. So
| it isn't too late.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > The US isn't the sole contributor to climate change and I'm
| tired of pretending like it is.
|
| The hypothetical being discussed is "what if the US had went
| the same route as France and built an electricity grid with
| the majority of power being generated from nuclear rather
| than fossil" and for that we would consider the impact to the
| total (or cumulative) emissions during those decades.
|
| As such, here is an "Our World in Data" article on the
| cumulative CO2 emissions:
| https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
|
| In particular, the nominal cumulative emissions of the US
| were approximately the double of China. (A higher factor if
| considered per capita)
|
| If the US had built nuclear technology many other countries
| (particularly NATO) would have also seen a higher nuclear
| adoption.
|
| This would have accelerated some trends such as electric
| ovens and stovetops, electric trains (maybe even nuclear-
| electric rather than disel-electric), and local micro-nuclear
| generators on industry such as in metalwork.
| neaanopri wrote:
| US also influences policy adopted by other countries, so if
| the US adopted the French nuclear model, we would influence
| other countries.
|
| I think we're hurt by our domestic oil and gas reserves
| here. We have powerful interests who want the US to use its
| domestic oil and gas reserves, so a large-scale shift TO
| nuclear and AWAY FROM gas seems quite difficult to execute.
| godelski wrote:
| This is quite limited though and is why I talked about
| also including Europe. The limitation is that the US
| isn't going to let developing nations have nuclear power
| or they'll limit it, a la Iran Deal. The technology isn't
| really being exported, so that influence wouldn't be
| exactly global. Just to rich trading partners (i.e. the
| west, Japan, and Korea).
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > The technology isn't really being exported, so that
| influence wouldn't be exactly global.
|
| China has started exporting their Hualong One reactor
| with at least two Pakistani Nuclear Power Stations
| building a total of 5 Hualong One reactors: Karachi and
| Chashma.
|
| Argentina is expected to start building a Hualong One
| reactor by next year and it is under consideration in the
| United Kingdom.
|
| > Most reactors on order or planned are in the Asian
| region, though there are major plans for new units in
| Russia.
|
| https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/current-an...
|
| > China is planning at least 150 new nuclear reactors in
| the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has
| built in the past 35.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-
| cli...
|
| If it goes anything like their buildout of high speed
| railway China would probably end up doubling the reactor
| capacity built by 2035 over this plan.
| spfzero wrote:
| The article mentions Turkey as well, using Russian tech.
| When a NATO country chooses nuclear tech from the country
| that brought us Chernobyl, the US is definitely asleep at
| the wheel.
| godelski wrote:
| Let's say the US went to 0 emissions. That's 15% of the
| global emissions whipped out (note, France is doing
| awesome, and setting a great example, but not anywhere near
| 0 emissions). If the US was 0 emissions since 2000, we'd
| still be in a climate crisis. That is essentially what I'm
| saying. It would be decreased from where we are, yes. But
| it wouldn't be a "minor issue" as the OP stated.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| If the US had built 500 nuclear reactors, I have no doubt
| we'd be exporting tech and basing trade agreements on
| getting other countries to buy our reactors. China might
| still use coal, but US manufacturing would be more
| attractive with practically free electricity. There are
| lots of reasons what OP posited would be true.
| godelski wrote:
| To where? The EU? Yeah. I kinda mentioned that. But South
| Africa? Brazil? Pakistan? I doubt that very much.
| philwelch wrote:
| South Africa, Brazil, and Pakistan all already have
| nuclear power. South Africa and Pakistan even developed
| nuclear weapons, though SA gave theirs up just before
| they ended apartheid. IMO the proliferation concerns are
| a little irrational and overblown, so if we're positing a
| counterfactual where US policy wasn't governed by an
| irrational fear of nuclear technology, I think it's fair
| to assume this would change as well.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm very aware of the proliferation issue. To be clear, I
| have worked in the nuclear space.
|
| But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation
| would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on
| nuclear power.
|
| Those countries weren't said as examples of countries
| without nuclear power. They are examples of countries
| that have it but still likely wouldn't have had any
| exports from the US. I thought the Pakistan example made
| this abundantly clear. Maybe I confused people by
| including Brazil, but there was pressure on them during
| the cold war.
| philwelch wrote:
| > But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation
| would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on
| nuclear power.
|
| Not necessarily, but you're positing a world in which the
| widescale adoption of nuclear power has no effects at
| all, and I think that's an unreasonable assumption. Right
| now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear
| exports because we see nuclear as some dangerous fringe
| technology rather than as the default energy source for a
| 21st century civilization.
| merpnderp wrote:
| So you're saying this wouldn't have helped because only
| the industrialized countries would be using nuclear and
| that would still leave the industrializing countries
| using carbon? And this is a point worth quibbling over,
| since they produce hardly any of the carbon? If so,
| you're wrong, climate change would indeed be a minor
| issue if this had happened.
| godelski wrote:
| Honestly I feel like you're trying to pigeonhole me and
| ignoring major parts of my comments.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The EU and India/Asia would go a long ways toward solving
| the carbon pollution problem. Where we don't sell the
| reactors, then we'd sell the power using underwater HVDC
| cables (i.e. to Central and South America).
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I was always under the impression that the US gets the most
| negative press about emissions because we have the highest
| per-capita (no way we were ever going to top China in total
| emissions lol). However, the US doesn't even appear to be
| top-10 on the per-capita chart [0], even coming in under some
| large countries likes Canada and Australia.
|
| There's a bit of a cognitive dissonance here though. The US
| is the leader of the world and everyone looks to us on how to
| build their countries. No one wants to admit it but everyone
| wants to be as good as us. However, when we fail to live up
| to our reputation, the rest of the world is right to call us
| out for not living up to our reputation (that, to be fair, we
| regularly leverage). If you're in the US and you don't want
| to be criticized, that's fine, but then you can't also claim
| that the US is the best/strives to be the best.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_
| di...
| godelski wrote:
| The US should lead the way. The problem is that we aren't
| and can't get our leaders to do anything. I'm also not
| concerned with the criticism, as it is warranted. I'm
| concerned that the problem still persists and no one else
| will pick up the mantle. This is just kicking it down the
| road and saying that someone else should solve it. Even if
| that's true, it doesn't mean the problem isn't getting
| worse in the mean time.
| nuclearwast wrote:
| To be fair it's not even your leader's fault. Most of the
| people are against doing anything about green energy.
| Hydro quebec produce TWh of green electricity but failed
| to bring it sucessfully anywhere.
|
| here is the lastest failure.
|
| https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/baker-hydro-
| corridor...
|
| IMO they will fail in new york as well.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Nor is electricity the only factor....In the US that is 29%
| transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry, 13%
| commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.
|
| That 25% figure is not fully independent of where the
| electricity comes from.
|
| The primary baseload energy source for US electricity is
| natural gas. If you're using natural gas for electricity,
| it's wasteful for people to have electric ovens, electric
| ranges, electric hot water heaters, electric heaters, and
| other electric household appliances that primarily work by
| generating heat. It's more efficient to use gas directly,
| both economically and ecologically.
|
| Where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the primary power
| source is hydroelectric. I don't think it's a coincidence
| that I've lived my whole life without utility gas, and I've
| lived in a lot of different places. Other places have
| district heating systems--Iceland, for instance, can support
| district heating easily since their primary energy source is
| geothermal. Nuclear energy makes solutions like that more
| viable. It can also be a source of process heat for
| industrial applications.
|
| If we went highly nuclear, I think we _would_ have more
| electric appliances, for the same reason we already have more
| electric appliances in parts of the country that don 't use
| natural gas as a primary source of energy. In that world, I
| think climate change would be, maybe not a "minor issue", but
| certainly less major than it is now. It would be more major
| than the mitigations we adopted to fix the ozone layer, but
| aside from transportation (which we are currently
| electrifying anyway), it would be a lot more straightforward
| than it is now.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Electricity is an energy carrier. "Transport", "Industry",
| "Commercial" and "Agriculture" are categories of use.
|
| We could use more electricity in all of those areas.
|
| Next-generation nuclear reactors will operate at much higher
| temperatures and be more economical as a result. Some of the
| high cost of nuclear energy is because low-temperature
| operation is expensive. A PWR has huge steam generators
| inside the confinement vessel because using hot water to boil
| steam and spin a huge steam turbine is wasteful.
|
| Next-generation reactors will have a gas turbine powerset
| that fits in the employee break room of the turbine house.
| Next-generation reactors will make hydrogen for fuels and
| fertilizer using processes like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
|
| There is no reason the rest of the world couldn't follow if
| the "Union of Concerned Scientists" wasn't afraid of a Muslim
| Planet. (It was Pakistan getting the bomb that put the kibosh
| on advanced reactors are sustainable nuclear fuel cycles.)
| godelski wrote:
| I still think you're oversimplifying it. Let's look at one
| common technology: cooling. Our current cooling solutions
| aren't carbon free. They use 6% of US electricity and are
| nowhere near carbon free. These aren't amounts that can be
| ignored either nor are they the only emitting technology we
| don't have a great solution for (heating you can pump hot
| water to homes, which nuclear provides a great solution to
| generate said heated water). It's worse because the
| feedback loop.
|
| You also can't talk about next-generation reactors because
| they don't exist right now (at least in production).
|
| What I'm trying to say here is that this doesn't help our
| pro-nuclear case. It is cherry picking post hoc analysis.
| Climate change would still be a real problem, even with our
| leg up. Because frankly, climate change is much harder than
| getting solar, wind, and nuclear everywhere. It is also
| bigger than America, the EU, and China (total of 54%).
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >Our current cooling solutions aren't carbon free.
|
| Are you referring to HVAC cooling (refrigerators, heat
| pumps, etc.), or reactor cooling (cooling tower, etc.)?
| Neither has any intrinsic carbon emissions though. HVAC
| needs electricity[0], but has no emissions other than
| incidental CFC release[1]. Nuclear / industrial equipment
| cooling typically needs water, but doesn't release any
| carbon.
|
| [0]Ostensibly nuclear in the context of this thread.
|
| [1]Mostly a non issue post Montreal-Protocol
| cbsmith wrote:
| > If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't
| mean we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric
| appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy).
| It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these
| things to become more popular. For example, with cars the
| battery technology is a big example of why we see them now
| and not in the past. There may have been more pressure for
| this, but it isn't an assumption we can make.
|
| I don't know that the original poster is implying there's a
| certainty about this, but it's certainly a _possibility_. If
| the US had bet heavily on nuclear, there 's a lot of dominoes
| that would fall with this. There'd be more investment in
| nuclear and potential benefits from that. There'd be less
| demand for fossil fuels, consequently less exploration &
| development of fossil fuels. It would also have changed
| positioning and strategy when it comes to global climate
| change initiatives. It's at least conceivable there'd be a
| dramatic global impact, but modeling the systemic
| consequences of one decision is problematic at best.
| neaanopri wrote:
| Part of the reason to be critical of the US isn't just our
| high overall carbon emissions, but our per-capita carbon
| emissions. US citizens emit far more carbon per-person than
| Chinese people do. That is worth criticizing
| Invictus0 wrote:
| This is just standard CCP propaganda to deflect from the
| fact that China is the world's highest emitter of CO2.
| While US emissions have been trending down for the last 10
| years, China's emissions have been trending up.
|
| And at the end of the day, CO2 molecules have no
| nationality: it's why we don't waste our breath criticizing
| Qatar for having the world's highest emissions for capita
| when it produced just 0.1% the total emissions of China.
| tzs wrote:
| > And at the end of the day, CO2 molecules have no
| nationality
|
| ...which is why per capita is a better measure than per
| country. Here's a comment from a while ago that shows the
| math [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040704
| max47 wrote:
| > CO2 molecules have no nationality
|
| if that's the case, why do you think american citizen
| deserve to pollute a lot more than Chinese citizen? why
| would being born inside US border somehow makes it ok to
| pollute more than if you were born inside china
|
| By your logic, if China were to split in 150 small
| countries, they could pollute as much as they like
| because technically each of them would be low on the list
| of highest emitter.
| bllguo wrote:
| it's so obvious that per-capita metrics are a far more
| practical metric to use that I am convinced those
| repeating this flawed argument have no real interest in
| tackling climate change
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I'm willing to bet that per-capita, the US produces far
| more economic output per KG of CO2 than most of the rest of
| the world. Like with any statistic, you can slice and dice
| it any way you want to fit an agenda.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Here's a chart of carbon intensity vs. GDP per capita for
| various countries:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-vs-
| gdp
|
| Why don't you slice and dice that based on your agenda
| and tell us what we should conclude?
| jhgb wrote:
| Uh...why not the proper comparison, which is GDP per kg
| CO2? While I believe that GDP is Th(1) bound to CO2
| emissions, any comparison should include those constants.
| Your chart is missing the connection between kWh consumed
| and GDP generated.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > the connection between kWh consumed and GDP generated
|
| If you don't mind those numbers being normalised by
| population size, and CO2 emissions being used as a more
| relevant metric than kWh, then this chart might be
| helpful:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-
| capit...
| woodruffw wrote:
| The US (and EU) are largely deindustrialized, having
| offshored nearly all of their grossly polluting industries to
| the Global South and Asia. It doesn't feel particularly fair
| to point fingers at the developing world when we've
| externalized nearly all of our pollution onto them.
|
| (That doesn't, of course, excuse China's coal-fired plant
| growth, or any other form of egregious pollution. Only to say
| that these things don't happen in a vacuum.)
| barry-cotter wrote:
| To call the US or EU deindustrialised is hilariously wrong.
| It manufactures more than ever before in its history. It's
| less polluting because it pays to process waste and designs
| processes to minimise waste, not because manufacturing is
| done elsewhere.
|
| > The United States is the world's third largest
| manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the
| European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018
| of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009
| Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great
| Recession of $1.95 trillion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_S
| t...
| vimy wrote:
| A common narrative but also wrong. Even when we take into
| account the externalized pollution the US and EU still have
| lower emissions compared to 30 years ago. 87 % of China's
| emissions is caused by their own needs. 13 % for playing
| factory of the world. Asia has a lot of people, no surprise
| they pollute a lot.
| laurentb wrote:
| this is a point that seems to be largely overlooked overall
| on the impact a specific country has on global emissions.
|
| Overall, the US has a bigger impact than a country like
| Spain simply because you need to also factor in the supply
| chain emissions that come with it (in this case, a lot of
| it being generated somewhere else but being consumed in the
| US).
| beders wrote:
| You mean the alternate timeline where whole regions in the US
| become devastated by nuclear fallout?
|
| Look at this. Look at it as long as you like:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3886475,30.0983731,1302m/dat...
|
| https://www.satimagingcorp.com/gallery/worldview-2/worldview...
|
| Of course, noooo, can't happen to us. Our nuclear plants and
| waste disposal facilities are totally safe!
|
| Oops
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200118022609/https://www.abqjo...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Chernobyl exclusion zone: 1,004 mi2
|
| Fukushima exclusion zone: 1,600 mi2
|
| I can't seem to find great numbers of how much land we expect
| to lose to climate change, I expect it will be quite large.
|
| I'm personally pro nuclear, but it's pretty clear we were
| building fairly dangerous plants back when Chernobyl &
| Fukushima were built. I still don't think it's a foregone
| conclusion that the world would be worse or better if we had
| built many of them in the US.
| effie wrote:
| Chernobyl NPP wasn't really dangerous design if run by
| competent people, many of those kind of NPP reactors are
| still working decades without a major incident. It was a
| mistake of the chief of the shift to proceed with unsafe
| test caused by the failure of the Soviet political system
| to maintain proper level of understanding and safety in the
| NPP. The personnel did not have the correct mental model of
| the device.
|
| Fukushima was a bad plant because they built it in a
| tsunami zone. Otherwise its design isn't dangerous either.
| But it got destroyed by unexpected tsunami. People should
| have expected the tsunami can happen and not build the
| plant there. People were stupid, NPP design would be fine
| if built far from tsunamis.
| godelski wrote:
| The Fukushima incident shouldn't really be compared with
| the Chernobyl incident. Chernobyl was very preventable. As
| for Fukushima, the earthquake science didn't realize that
| such a quake was possible in the region until pretty close
| to the event happening, meaning little time to act in it.
| While people will point out early reports and hypothesis,
| that's not how science works. We need to peer review. The
| science has come a long way since then (specifically from
| computational modeling), but that's different from building
| reactors with the potential to explode (something the west
| didn't do) and pushing it's bounds (even if we didn't know
| about xenon spiking at the time).
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Um, no.
|
| Tepco was told years before to relocate the vulnerable
| support equipment for safety reasons. They just didn't
| want to pay for it.
|
| And there's ancient monuments along the coast saying,
| "Don't build here."
|
| But it gets better. Tepco staff planned to completely
| abandon the plant in the middle of the meltdown, until
| the Japanese PM told them to remain and deal with the
| problem. Yes, their PM had to personally act as the
| crisis manager for much of the disaster.
|
| Also, the US military intervened with a drone survey,
| finding that the cooling ponds were about to explode, and
| insisting that they get re-covered in water beforehand.
|
| Even more than Californians, Japanese people are very
| aware they're in earthquake zone. Yet Fukushima.
| mberning wrote:
| Only if the rest of the world followed suit. And I highly doubt
| 100% of other developed and developing nations would have. It
| also doesn't fix emissions from cars, planes, shipping vessels,
| etc. If carbon levels were 50% what they are I also doubt the
| propaganda would be much different.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| We are hearing crazy talk about using Fischer-Tropsch
| chemistry to make jet fuel for the same reason we are hearing
| so much about direct air capture and other pipe dreams.
|
| If we really decarbonized everything easy to decarbonize
| (including cars) we'd have very little to worry about.
|
| Moving the focus to airplanes and other science fiction, we
| create an excuse to not decarbonize what can be decarbonized.
|
| Also, next generation nuclear reactors like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_salt_reactor
|
| run at high temperatures which can produce hydrogen which can
| be put to all kinds of climate-protecting uses.
| godelski wrote:
| This is just false. There's a lot of sectors that produce
| emissions besides electricity and transportation. They
| aren't exactly getting their energy through other means,
| which still produce emissions. The climate crisis is a very
| difficult problem to solve and it isn't helping pretending
| that the only thing we need to do is get electric cars and
| convert our electric generation sources to zero emission
| sources. It is far more complicated than that. We also have
| to do it in a way that the rest of the world (which is 85%
| of emissions) can afford.
| godelski wrote:
| Fully agree. As a pro nuclear person, I don't get why people
| do this propaganda. It only hurts our position as it is very
| dishonest. Though I also really dislike how Americentric the
| global climate crisis is. Yeah, America is a big contributor,
| but only 15%. I don't see anyone else really stepping up to
| solve it. If America isn't going to act, why isn't _your_
| country stepping up? It's the global equivalent of "well the
| rich guy isn't playing fair, so why should I?"
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| I only have a limited understanding of nuclear reactors, but
| IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we
| currently don't have any long-term storage plans for. Not
| having storage plans for this waste (beyond "put it in pools of
| water near the reactors, or maybe send it to south carolina)
| suggests to me that nuclear power may not actually be a
| workable solution. Sorry to sound ignorant, but it seems like
| building 500 plants would exacerbate that problem dramatically.
|
| Doesn't it seem like solar + batteries is a much better
| solution? We could cover large parts of the US with solar
| panels, store it during the day, and charge large fleets of
| electric cars overnight. Then, the issue is one of non-
| radioactive toxic waste storage instead of radioactive toxic
| waste storage, which seems a bit more tractable.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Storing nuclear waste is a problem, but seems somewhat
| exaggerated. We have been doing it quite successfully. Waste
| reprocessing drastically reduces that amount too.
|
| Renewables + batteries, why not. This technology is not at a
| stage yet where we can use it. There are literally no
| "guaranteed power on demand" facilities from
| renewables+batteries.
|
| Nuclear technology is mostly old and boring by now.
| vkou wrote:
| > I only have a limited understanding of nuclear reactors,
| but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we
| currently don't have any long-term storage plans for.
|
| We currently have an inefficient long-term storage plan for
| it - store it on-site.
|
| We had an efficient, cheaper long-term storage plan (Yucca
| mountain) that failed for political, not technical reasons.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Nuclear waste is not waste.
|
| The LWR extracts about only 1% of the energy from uranium.
| Next generation reactors like
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ApH-0YHkA
|
| can burn much more of the fuel and even destroy much of the
| dangerous fission products.
|
| Looking at it that way we've already mined enough fuel to
| run our civilization for a few hundred years. It's good
| news.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The cost of batteries is declining rapidly, but it is still
| an order of magnitude too high. Will it get low enough? We
| don't know.
|
| Most of the time you can get away with a relatively small
| amount of storage but sometimes you get an extended "dry
| spell", so you might need two weeks or more storage to be
| entirely reliable.
|
| Renewables have been workable so far because of low-cost gas
| turbines fired by methane that take up the slack: we know now
| that methane is 80 or so times more potent a global warming
| gas than carbon dioxide, so if you lose 1% of the gas in
| handling it is a big problem.
|
| The fact is that nuclear waste is not waste. The light water
| reactor extracts about 1% of the energy that a fast reactor
| could extract from uranium. In fact, molten salt fast
| reactors can not only consume plutonium and other actinides
| but also destroy a good fraction of the most dangerous
| fission products.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Coal and oil also release methane as part of the production
| process. Gas isn't as good as renewables, but a shift to
| using gas produced electricity for heating and EVs etc with
| or without renewables is still a good move.
| ekiwi wrote:
| > nuclear waste is not waste
|
| There is a lot more to nuclear waste than just the fuel
| rods. Lots of materials that are either used by workers at
| the plant or part of the plant become radio active and can
| no longer go to a regular landfill of other trash
| processing facilities. That is why some energy companies
| are trying to default rather than pay for decommissioning
| plants once they have reached the maximum age that they
| were constructed for.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That "dry spell" storage doesn't need to be batteries. It
| will have a low number of charge/discharge cycles, so what
| you want is low capital cost, and you don't care much about
| round trip efficiency. Hydrogen burned in turbines serves
| this need rather well compared to batteries.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| There's a much bigger problem with solar than storage:
| Energy Density. And energy density isn't a problem we can
| solve, it's bounded by the laws of physics.
|
| An average nuclear power plant puts out 1GW of energy in
| under 2.5 square kilometers, or 1 square mile. To achieve
| the same output (Since you'd need double the panels +
| storage to produce energy at night) you'd need to destroy
| 450 square kilometers of natural habitat to generate the
| same energy with solar panels. Realistically you'd need
| much more than that to account for cloudy days, and even
| more to offset electrical transmission losses because no
| one is building a solar farm in latitudes that see 100+
| cloudy days per year.
|
| Detractors of nuclear will argue "Why don't we do rooftop
| solar".. well, 56% of the world's population lives in
| cities where that's not possible, and that number isn't
| decreasing. NYC for example uses on the order of ~50GW or
| 51 Terawatts per year. You'd have to cover 15% of the state
| in silicon glass to get anywhere close to powering it.
| Personally, I'd rather take a chance on nuclear in lieu of
| the the massive amount of environmental destruction
| required to power modern society with solar energy.
| hebrox wrote:
| Doing a quick sanity check, I think you're off by about
| 10x.
|
| 93% capacity factor nuclear [0]
|
| 1 GW
|
| 8700000000 kWh/year [1]
|
| 440 Wp @ 1960x1308x40 mm [2]
|
| 1.96 m
|
| 1.308 m
|
| 2.56368 m2
|
| 440 Wp
|
| 0.85 kWh factor for the Netherlands [3]
|
| 374 kWh per year
|
| 145.8840417 kWh/m2
|
| 59636406.42 m2 for to match nuclear
|
| 59.63640642 km2
|
| [0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-
| most-reliab...
|
| [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+GW+to+kwh+per
| +year
|
| [2] https://www.enfsolar.com/pv/panel-
| datasheet/crystalline/1049...
|
| [3] https://www.tentensolar.nl/semi-
| overheid/dossiers/item/zonne...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Excellent sanity check, and I'll add another calculation
| for comparison.
|
| 449 nuclear reactors in the world [0]
|
| 2 disasters leading to large exclusion zones
|
| average area of those exclusion zones 1300 square miles
| [1]
|
| average exclusion zone per reactor (very roughly) 5.8
| square miles
|
| 15.0 square kilometres
|
| So solar panels use up about 4 times as much space as
| "average" nuclear reactors (not including the relatively
| small area used by the plant itself[2]), but of course
| the value of land with solar panels on is much higher
| than radioactively contaminated land.
|
| [0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-
| that-have-t...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152930
|
| [2] https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-
| solar-dwar...
| rich_sasha wrote:
| To some extent, for a fair comparison, you should also
| use old sole panel efficiency here. Nuclear power plants
| have progressed tremendously in terms of safety.
|
| There's also widespread reporting that the evacuations
| and exclusion zones, in Fukushima at least, were
| excessive.
| Yoofie wrote:
| > but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we
| currently don't have any long-term storage plans for.
|
| As with most of America's problems, this is an entirely
| political problem, not a technical one.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Oceans rose 400 feet in past 20,000 year. We have been exiting
| an ice age.
|
| Climate change will continue regardless of people. Only
| possible change is the rate.
|
| Of course it will reverse course eventually and the ice sheets
| will be back.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > Climate change will continue regardless of people. Only
| possible change is the rate.
|
| The rate is the problem. No one is proposing massive, economy
| remaking, changes because of the planets nature ebb and flow.
| It's because the rate of warming we are causing is absolutely
| terrifying when you compare it to what would be expected
| naturally.
|
| > Of course it will reverse course eventually and the ice
| sheets will be back.
|
| And you're evidence of this is...? I don't see where you'd
| get it from considering current trends are so ridiculously
| out of whack from the natural record there isn't any analogue
| to compare.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed. I actually think China might be able to lead on climate
| in a matter of decades even though they aren't on a good
| trajectory. They don't have to worry about anti-nuclear
| activists. Also, a dictatorship does have the benefit of not
| needing to wrangle so many people to make a decision like this.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| This also means that they lack crucial self corrective
| capacity should something go wrong - their environmental
| track record is ugly, and that's just what is known.
|
| Dictatorships can cover things up, and with something that
| has potentially global consequences like nuclear, it's better
| to have a transparent, cooperative collective decision, not a
| paranoid "yes or death" regime mandating that everything is
| fine.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The US accounts for 18% of global emissions. In fact China and
| the US together don't account for even half of global
| emissions, tendency falling. The world is a little bit larger
| than those two players, even if not reflected in US discourse.
| FpUser wrote:
| I am curious what would be the number if you take into
| account that good chunk of the world is servicing US and
| Europe. Basically the developed countries outsourced the
| pollution.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Yeah I wish we had gone more into nuclear power. Oh well. We'll
| just pay through the teeth for power in the future.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| In this alternate reality, why didn't the entrenched fossil
| fuel interests delay it as they delayed, in this reality, any
| attempt to introduce pollution controls, banish lead from gas,
| efficiency mandates, recycling, renewables, trains, sensible
| city design and belief in science generally (all widely
| accepted to have happened) and also nuclear (the world seems
| split on whether to blame the same fossil fuel groups for this,
| or, and I feel this is where you were heading, those damn
| hippies and environmentalists who, coincidentally I'm sure,
| have been under attack for decades from the very same groups).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't understand why people are focusing on nuclear now, and
| not 5 years ago or 10 years ago. What has changed?
|
| If I understand correctly, technology hasn't changed. People want
| nuclear because either they don't think renewables can scale up
| quickly enough or because of the base load problem (renewables
| can't always provide energy on demand). Has any of that changed?
| Renewables generally are cheaper and have more scale now.
|
| If we'd started 10 years ago, we might have some plants coming
| online soon.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Pretty simple, we were in the middle of a nuclear renaissance (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_renaissance_in_the_Uni...
| ) in the US prior to Fukushima. Instead of informing the public
| of the facts (The plant was an antique, didn't meet safety
| standards, was built on a fault line), the media in the US used
| it as an opportunity for scare-mongering and politicized it.
| olau wrote:
| From your Wikipedia link:
|
| "A 2017 assessment put rising nuclear construction costs, low
| gas prices and improving renewable generation economics as
| the three main causes of the failure of the nuclear
| renaissance in the United States."
|
| While Fukushima may have made the public image worse, I
| believe, although I'm certainly not an expert, that its
| primary problem for the nuclear industry is that it
| demonstrated that a certain failure mode having to do with
| backup generators for the cooling circuit needs to be taken
| seriously in the design.
|
| I think this is one of the major sources of cost in nuclear
| plants. They need meticulous planning and execution to ensure
| safety.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| > Instead of informing the public of the facts (The plant was
| an antique, didn't meet safety standards, was built on a
| fault line)
|
| Knowing these facts makes it even more scary. We can't move
| countries away from fault lines, so plants are going to be
| build in these places again. Everything new is going to be
| old eventually. There's no reason to expect meeting safety
| standards in the future if we can't do it right now.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Everyone seems to forget that it took a _freaking tsunami_
| that displaced hundreds of thousands of people to take out
| a _60 year old reactor design_. While coal is killing
| people every day.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| Of course it should take a freak event to take out a
| nuclear power plant, it shouldn't happen every second
| Sunday. But I would also expect it to be an event that
| doesn't happen regularly every few hundred years [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stone
| s.html
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| I believe it is way before Fukushima, don't forget Chernobyl
| and Three Mile Islands. Chernobyl is fresh on a lot of people
| minds back then because of how disastrously it is. It took
| years to get people to start to be comfortable with nuclear
| plants after series of regulations and safeguards to ensure
| maximum safety to avoid another Chernobyl. Until Fukushima
| fked it up for everyone else. It is not because people don't
| want another Fukushima, it is because people don't want
| another Chernobyl and its severe fallout spread to Europe and
| Asia. Also it didn't help when the government, USSR, tried to
| keep it a secret from the rest of the world and refused to
| take responsibilities. I don't blame the citizen for not
| trusting the governments when it come to nuclear power plants
| due to those disaster events.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Nuclear power has very long lead-times. If you want to convince
| the public to build uranium fission power plants, you have to
| do it now or the time in which they would be relevant to the
| climate crisis will pass. That assumes the public will want
| current-generation uranium fission plants, which they did not
| want in the past.
| liuliu wrote:
| Because China encountered major setback on their nuclear
| ambitions due to the US ban (China was previous planning to use
| US technology for their nuclear plants). It took a few years
| (>5) for them to mature domestic technology and scale up
| nuclear plants.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >What has changed?
|
| Wind and solar were rolled out at state and national scale.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| People forgot the last set of nuclear boondogels. Nothing sells
| a pyramid scheme like 10 years without one...
| cbsmith wrote:
| I mean... the technology has changed, but it is hard to argue
| that it has changed in a way that makes the decision different.
| godelski wrote:
| 10 years ago was Fukushima. Which caused a reversal in nuclear
| production.
|
| The 10-30 years before that (1980-2000) most of the
| environmentalists were campaigning against nuclear. Especially
| in light of Chernobyl and three mile.
|
| The difference now is there's significant efforts into smrs
| (even if little think it's about thorium, it isn't), which
| means that nuclear could become scalable. If that happens, then
| it is a game changer because it's the only real downside of the
| technology.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| It is the last death throes of an industry coupled with some
| tech minded people thinking it's controversial and cool, even
| though the tech in reality is old and boring. The "silver
| bullet" to fix climate change, much like we saw with all manner
| of things last year with Covid.
|
| The one chance to revive nuclear power in the west through
| Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Hinkley Point C, Flammanville and
| Olkiluoto 3 failed miserably with several of the major players
| now bankrupt.
|
| China keeps dipping it's toes in nuclear to keep the option
| open but no real commitment, and this announcement of 150
| reactors is no real change to the long term plans either.
|
| _In 2019, China had a new target of 200 GWe of nuclear
| generating capacity by 2035, which is 7.7% out of predicted
| total electricity generating capacity of 2600 GWe._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
|
| So with about 50 GWe from 50 reactors today adding another 150
| gives you the same goal of about 200 GWe.
| samsolomon wrote:
| FWIW, Vogtle 3 is on track to come online next year.
|
| https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/overcoming-delays-hot-
| func...
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| In case of China, after Fukushima they decided to suspend
| generation 2 reactors and only build generation 3 reactors. But
| that didn't go smoothly and there were lots of delays. By the
| time generation 3 was ready, the trade war hit and a bunch of
| Chinese nuclear companies got blacklisted by the US. So they
| had to ditch foreign IP (French designs) and create their own
| IP (Hualong One) which also took time.
|
| These 150 reactors we see today are the end of a long pipeline.
|
| David Fishman is an expert on this topic. Thread:
| https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/12939610958922792...
| account4mypc wrote:
| i think people are more desperate for change (and imo, rightly
| so)
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| A better Soviet Union is still a Soviet Union. Totalitarian
| success is not human environmental friendly.
| robomartin wrote:
| I have been saying this for quite some time: The future vision of
| an all-electric ground transportation system is between
| impossible and untenable without a massive scale-up in nuclear
| energy generation in places like the US.
|
| Years ago, as I was trying to understand the reality of electric
| vehicles, among other things, I put together a model that
| simulates a fleet of 300 million electric vehicles charging
| across our various time zones. The model accounts for various
| percentages of vehicles slow charging overnight (typical at-home
| charging scenario) and the balance fast-charging. The model uses
| Tesla charging data (rate of charge, energy requirements, miles
| per kWh, etc.).
|
| The result indicated we need 900 to 1400 GW in order to support a
| full transition to electric charging.
|
| This is IN ADDTION TO what we produce today, which is in the
| order of 1200 GW. In other words, we need to ADD capacity, we
| can't magic-wand our way into this reality. In essence, we have
| to produce the effective energy provided today by gasoline and
| diesel. By this I mean, once you account for efficiency, the
| bottom line is gasoline/diesel are used to move a certain mass of
| vehicles a certain distance in a certain time every day. Whatever
| is required to do the same with electrics, that's what we need.
| This is new energy, we can't pull it out of the existing
| infrastructure.
|
| And, speaking of infrastructure, it is important that this is, in
| many ways more about _power_ than energy.
|
| Why?
|
| Because it takes power to charge N cars simultaneously in a given
| geographic region. Even if everyone slow-charges, the time period
| is finite, say, 8 hours max. This still translates to a
| requirement for power. The energy is what fills the bucket. Power
| is how fast you fill it. With so many vehicles plugged in at the
| same time, you need power over a reasonable period of time. Our
| grid cannot currently handle such a step change in power
| transportation. To put it simply: We need larger pipes.
|
| This could also mean we need far more than the 900 to 1400 GW I
| think we do. That is because you have to deliver power, not
| energy over 24 hours.
|
| Solar?
|
| No. Not really. It can help, but, at scale, at the scale we need,
| I think I can very easily make the argument that if the goal is
| to have clean energy, solar at this scale is far from clean. I
| can't even imagine the billions of batteries we would need. And
| then, every N years, you have to deal with recycling or disposing
| of them.
|
| This isn't a simple problem at all. Yet nuclear is, in my
| opinion, the ONLY technology that can actually deliver on a
| future vision of an all-electric transportation system.
|
| Here's the problem: I don't know about Europe. In the US, in the
| time it would take us to build a single nuclear reactor (30
| years?), China will likely build 300 of them, if not more. The
| efficiency and focus with which they execute on the obvious plan
| to achieve economic and technical superiority across the board is
| nothing less than awe-inspiring. While our politicians burn clock
| cycles with stupid power games and nonsense, China wakes up every
| day and puts one foot in front of the other. The only way to
| think of this is that they deserve the success they have achieved
| through hard work, focus and perhaps the most impressive
| national-scale entrepreneurial drive in the history of humanity.
|
| I work with Chinese companies (as suppliers in the context of
| manufacturing) every day. The difference between us and them is
| absolutely unimaginable to anyone who isn't in this business. All
| I can say is that, if people in the West don't wake up and start
| voting for politicians who actually know what they fuck they are
| doing, the story of what's ahead isn't a good one. Notice that I
| am not identifying any specific party. In fact, a good starting
| point would be to fire almost everyone in government and bring in
| new blood with a new mandate.
|
| I better stop here. I get too worked-up about this stuff. It
| pains me to see so many hard-working people suffer because the
| people in command of the ship are constantly engaged in power
| games and bullshit and ignore the fact that the boat is filling
| with water and will eventually sink.
| thehappypm wrote:
| How do you feel about offshore wind? It seems like a potent
| power source, each one can produce several MW of power. If we
| need 1TWh we need a few hundred thousand turbines.
| robomartin wrote:
| > If we need 1TWh we need a few hundred thousand turbines.
|
| I think the problem is that once you start analyzing the
| issue at scale the only solution that could be real today
| would be a widely distributed nuclear power generation system
| across the entire country. If we use a 1 GW reactor as the
| baseline, that means over a thousand power plants need to be
| built. While the distribution would not be uniform, for sake
| of easy numbers we can make this assumption and divide by 50
| states. That means we need 20 new 1 GW class nuclear power
| plants per state. California might need 50, while Montana
| might be able to do with 5. Don't know, I did not model it to
| that level of detail.
|
| The point is the scale of the requirement is absolutely
| massive. Almost unimaginable. And so, we have people in
| politics talking about no more internal combustion engines in
| 25 years and everyone conveniently ignores the physics that
| makes this absolutely impossible unless we start doing
| serious work immediately.
|
| Solar sounds interesting on paper until you live the reality
| of solar. My 13 kW array is grossly inadequate for charging
| electric vehicles because the energy capacity I need has to
| be in excess of what we are using to run the home. We do a
| shit job of building efficient homes, so things like cooling
| your home in the heat of Southern California can easily run 5
| kW for much of the day. The fantasy of a 13 kW array is that
| it is a 13 kW array. Well, it isn't. My peaks are around 8 kW
| on average. I reach 10 kW during a very narrow window of time
| in the year, the rest of the time this is what it looks like
| (actual data):
|
| https://i.imgur.com/LTMNDO1.png
|
| So, if you have two electric vehicles, an air conditioning
| system pulling 5 kW and other normal things in a normal home,
| well, this system is not adequate. I would have to probably
| install a 35 kW system to service all of it.
|
| How many people are going go install 30+ kW systems on their
| homes to join the electric vehicle revolution? Even better:
| Most roofs simply don't have that much room. Add to this the
| fact that solar viability diminishes as you move north and
| you quickly realize solar isn't a magic-wand solution.
|
| And, of course, now comes the problem of only having energy
| available while the sun is up. Which means you probably want
| a massive battery bank to store it and use it to charge your
| vehicles at night. AC to DC power conversion is in the order
| of 80% efficient. Charging, depending on technology, is about
| the same. So, you go from solar to charging and probably
| store about 65% of the energy you collect. Then you have to
| charge your vehicle at night. You have to convert it one more
| time. This means another 20% to 30% efficiency hit. In other
| words, the store-and-forward model is likely in the 50% range
| for energy (panel output to energy level in the car).
|
| Physics is really heartless about this stuff. Most of the
| people (and politicians) pushing this stuff never bother to
| do any math, and, if they do, they conveniently ignore it.
|
| To answer the obvious question: No, I am not going to upsize
| my system to 35 kW. That would be ridiculous and, in Los
| Angeles County, the building permit and regulatory issues
| you'd run into to put such a system on a home that more
| typically ends-up with a 7 kW system would be insane beyond
| description.
|
| EDIT: One of the reasons for which my array peaks out at 8 kW
| is that the Los Angeles County Building and Permit department
| would not allow me to tilt the array to the optimal angle
| (about 34 degrees if I remember correctly). The array was
| built with the approved tilt angle of ten degrees. This is
| due to what I am going to call arcane regional planning rules
| and other issues. They also made me install --no bullshit--
| 64000 lbs of concrete footings and design the array and
| structure for 200 mile per hour winds. The entire experience
| was beyond surreal and ridiculous. Want to talk about "clean"
| energy? Care to guess the CO2 contribution of making 64,000
| lbs of concrete, which should include all the processes
| required to procure the raw materials, transport to the
| plant, make the concrete, mix it, load it into massive
| trucks, deliver and install it? I haven't done the math, but
| I would not be surprised if it exceeds the environmental
| benefit of having "clean energy" at home. Live and learn.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| You shouldn't be installing a 30KW system, but it's
| entirely reasonable for utilities to deploy 30KW of
| utility-scale solar on your behalf. According to 2021Q1
| numbers that's $23-26K of capital investment. Plus I
| imagine with some logistical effort the utilities can
| deliver it to wherever your car is parked during the day,
| rather than bothering with a second set of batteries. Not
| sure why we're comparing utility-scale nuclear to artisanal
| home solar power.
| nuclearwast wrote:
| That is beyond crazy. I am at loss for words.
| olau wrote:
| Actually people have analyzed the issue at scale and
| concluded it's doable with renewables. It's not that
| difficult to find these studies, if you actually care to
| look for them.
|
| Whether you believe those studies or not is immaterial,
| though, because the economics of renewables are going to
| win in the end. Ten years ago you could have reasonable
| discussions about whether that was the case or not, but the
| trends did continue. The other day I saw a forecast of 0.04
| USD/kWh for offshore wind within a few years.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I have solar too, but I don't really expect it to meet 100%
| of my needs. I'm just contributing to the grid being
| greener. I don't even have batteries -- I just sell green
| energy to the grid which means the natural gas power plant
| can run a big cooler.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > They also made me install --no bullshit-- 64000 lbs of
| concrete footings and design the array and structure for
| 200 mile per hour winds.
|
| Wait, what? Can you elaborate on why this was necessary?
| Thank you also for the useful data.
| robomartin wrote:
| The system is built on what they call a ground-mount
| structure. In other words, it isn't on our roof. The
| entire thing is supported by eight columns. The county
| decided we needed over a cubic yard of concrete under
| each column. By the time we did the math and the
| realities of digging holes (hint: contractors don't use
| Solidworks to dig holes), the average footing worked out
| to about 8000 lbs of concrete.
|
| Once the plan checker got his mind set to these
| dimensions it was over. There was no way to convince him
| to apply any kind of logic to it. He quoted stuff like
| the 200 mile per our wind rating (also ridiculous) we had
| to certify the structure for. I even hired a nationwide
| civil engineering firm to try to apply pressure for a
| change. No. he would not allow us to proceed unless we
| went with his requirements.
|
| It went beyond that, they issued insane fire rating
| requirements for the entire thing. My guess is that the
| project went $50K over budget because of these guys.
| Which means it will never pay for itself...ever. I would
| have done a million times better if I burned half the
| cash and put the rest on Bitcoin (which, at the time,
| would have felt like burning it).
|
| So, it is a beautiful system but it was a complete waste
| of time and money. It made me wonder about the overall
| realities of solar in practice. If I knew then what I
| know now I would have _never_ moved one finger to install
| solar.
|
| BTW, I have neighbors with solar regrets for different
| reasons. One has to wonder.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 200 mile per hour wind is basically the world record for
| wind speed..
| gurumeditations wrote:
| The US and Europe's problem is that the major economic
| interests have become too powerful and entrenched. China's
| government makes their economic interests kneel down before
| them, which has resulted in the greatest societal
| transformation in history. We in the West have weak pathetic
| governments happy to argue over which corrupt interest should
| get tens or hundreds of billions in loaned tax dollars to do
| nothing much this year, rather than destroy these corrupt power
| centers and transform society. Doesn't help when society has
| been conditioned to resist any central planning. Frankly the
| only reason the West is wealthy is because Europe and then the
| US were able to take advantage of huge historical
| transformations (industrial revolution, WW2, natural resource
| discovery) to get where we are. Though you could argue China
| mostly took advantage of one that hurt us
| (offshoring/globalization). The question is whether they'll be
| able to consciously guide their society into prosperity in the
| future.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Haha, now imagine being in Germany. Shutting down nuclear power
| plants and also coal now. The stupidity there is on another
| level.
| cinntaile wrote:
| All this without blackouts. Imagine that.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Well yeah, they fire up the coal and gas plants at night or
| when it's cloudy. No blackouts.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Read what the GP wrote. Either way, their usage of fossil
| fuels is going down. Could it have gone down more? Yes,
| but we don't live in that universe.
| [deleted]
| VintageCool wrote:
| The mix of sources for electricity in Germany in H1 2021 was
| like 41% renewables, 26% coal, 17% natural gas, and 12%
| nuclear.
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
| energy-c...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Yes, and if nuclear's share had remained where it used to
| be they could have got rid of coal almost completely by
| now, for instance. Instead, coal is still a major source
| and gas has actually increased.
|
| IIRC, Germany emits almost twice as much per capita as
| France...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If it makes you feel better, EVs and reneweables are a pretty
| great match and are much more efficient than what we currently
| use.
|
| Of course, China seems to be doing both of those better than
| the US too, since they're not captured by fossil fuel
| interests.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > I have been saying this for quite some time: The future
| vision of an all-electric ground transportation system is
| between impossible and untenable without a massive scale-up in
| nuclear energy generation in places like the US.
|
| But this is simply wrong. One can easily imagine a 100%
| renewable system of that kind. At current costs in the US it
| would likely be cheaper than a nuclear solution.
| robomartin wrote:
| > But this is simply wrong. One can easily imagine a 100%
| renewable system of that kind. At current costs in the US it
| would likely be cheaper than a nuclear solution.
|
| Sorry my friend, in order to make assertions like that one
| has to take the time to do some of the math. I have. The gap
| between what people are imagining and reality is quite large.
|
| Assuming a 1000 GW requirement, in other words, we need that
| much power and we do not currently have it...so we have to
| build it:
|
| Using 325 W panels, considering their cost, cost of
| installation, wiring, structure costs, permits and battery
| (without them the whole thing is kind of pointless), the
| total cost of the system is in the order of $40 trillion
| dollars.
|
| A 1.1 GW nuclear power plant costs about $9 billion. We would
| need 910 of them. That total cost comes out to $8.2 trillion.
|
| In other words, nuclear is about 1/5 the cost of the
| equivalent solar system.
|
| However, the story does not end there. This is still very
| much hand-wavy until we look at other numbers.
|
| For example, how long would it take to build these systems?
|
| Assuming it takes 10 days to install a solar a 10 kW system,
| and we manage to install 10,000 solar systems at a time
| (simultaneously) across the entire nation. In other words,
| every ten days 10,000 new systems come online. Well, we need
| one billion systems, which means this will take 2740 years.
| Imagine that: We bring online 365000 systems PER YEAR and it
| still takes nearly 3000 years. Check my math please.
|
| Nuclear? If we had a mandate to start building nuclear plants
| tomorrow and we took the time to setup a the process and
| controls to achieve a run rate of 1 year per plant...and we
| build one plant per state per year...that means 50 per year.
| Which translates into 1000 plants in 20 years. If I am off by
| 100%, this means we do it in 40 years.
|
| To me nuclear --with commitment and a no-bullshit united
| effort to execute-- seems like the only viable solution.
|
| There's more...
|
| How many cells would be needed for the aforementioned solar
| solution. Assuming approximately 1200 cells per battery pack
| (Tesla 2170's), this means we need nearly 3.5 trillion cells.
| I am not even going to get into what this might translate
| into in terms of minerals, mining, transportation, CO2
| generation, environmental damage, etc. I don't even know how
| long it might take to make 3.5 trillion cells and how much
| energy it might take to make them. These are numbers I need
| to research and put into the model at some future point.
| Right now, given what I've looked at, the whole thing seems
| entirely ludicrous on first inspection.
|
| Even better, the above calculation for solar assume 100%
| efficiency. In other words, a 10 kW solar array that actually
| produces 10 kW 24/7, which is ridiculous. It also assumes
| inverters and energy conversion equipment that is 100%
| efficient...which is equally ridiculous.
|
| What I am trying to convey, going back to your comment, is
| that we can imagine anything at all and it can sound
| fantastic. Until we take the time to do the math there is no
| way to know if reality and these imaginary solutions actually
| align in any way.
|
| I don't think I am wrong at all. I could be off by some
| amount, sure, yet I think the difference still dwarfs solar
| by far. If we want electric ground transportation, I think
| the only path forward is a massive commitment to nuclear.
|
| Speaking of utopia: It would be fantastic to see the worlds
| nuclear arsenals being converted to nuclear energy
| generation. From destroying humanity to improving life all
| over the planet. Not sure that kind of leadership exists
| anywhere.
| robomartin wrote:
| BTW, without batteries the same solar system would cost
| about ten trillion. However, because you would be subject
| to the realities of solar power generation [0], the actual
| system would probably have to be at least three times
| larger...which brings us back to the 30 to 40 trillion
| range.
|
| [0] Real 13 kW system daily output
|
| https://i.imgur.com/LTMNDO1.png
| fooker wrote:
| >One can easily imagine a 100% renewable system of that kind.
|
| Yeah, we have been doing too much imagining and too little
| execution.
| nicoburns wrote:
| If the political will was there to build better public
| transport and reduce the need for car journeys then that could
| dramatically reduce energy usage requirements for
| transportation.
| robomartin wrote:
| Our cities are not designed for European style public
| transportation. I don't know why people keep saying this.
| Public transportation at scale in most US cities would be a
| nightmare. Los Angeles is a good example of this. People work
| 50 miles from where they work. They shop 10 or 20 miles away.
| Etc. Nobody is going to walk five miles to go to a bus or
| train station. That would be silly. And then, what do I do
| when I need to take my three German Shepherds to the kennel,
| or the vet? Or when the family wants to go kayaking at the
| lake?
|
| Private vehicles are not going away. Self driving vehicles
| might alleviate some of this, but we are likely decades away
| from that reality.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Our cities are not designed for European style public
| transportation
|
| So redesign the cities. Obviously this won't happen
| overnight. But we're likely talking about decades-long
| timescales for any of these solutions.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Our cities are not designed for European style public
| transportation.
|
| They were, before we bulldozed them to make way for
| highways and parking lots. Some still are. (Hello from
| Philadelphia!)
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| > Our cities are not designed for European style public
| transportation. I don't know why people keep saying this.
| Public transportation at scale in most US cities would be a
| nightmare.
|
| Counter-point: In spite of car-centric development, every
| city, suburb, and rural area has good public transportation
| that runs twice a day and only services minors. It's
| possible, we just don't fund it.
|
| > Los Angeles is a good example of this. People work 50
| miles from where they work. They shop 10 or 20 miles away.
| Etc. Nobody is going to walk five miles to go to a bus or
| train station. That would be silly. And then, what do I do
| when I need to take my three German Shepherds to the
| kennel, or the vet? Or when the family wants to go kayaking
| at the lake?
|
| This is why we must also focus on land-use change (i.e.
| densification), as it strongly correlates with how well
| public transportation infrastructure scales.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Many EU cities were designed for the car too and made the
| switch successfully.
| novok wrote:
| > our politicians burn clock cycles with stupid power games and
| nonsense
|
| If you actually look into local chinese politics you see a lot
| of stupidity, nonsense and power games there too. A combination
| of factors makes this less apparent to the typical chinese or
| american observer although, in different ways.
| robomartin wrote:
| And yet they manage to move forward. If you timeline any
| major Chinese city going back 50 years and see what has been
| achieved during that time, well, it's hard to argue with
| results.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I do understand there's a lot wrong with
| Chinese politics, their system of government, human rights,
| etc. There is no perfect society anywhere on this planet. Not
| justifying any of it, just stating the obvious.
|
| However, when you look at a place like the US, you have to
| slap your forehead and ask what we are thinking. The "we"
| being voters, of course. We hand over the reigns to people
| who would be ambulance chasers and used car salesmen and
| expect good results? That's not even fair, ambulance chasers
| and used car salesmen are probably better than the people in
| politics.
|
| I don't want to sound partisan, because I am not. You look at
| people like AOC, Schummer, McConnel, Trump, Clinton, Obama,
| Bush, etc., etc., etc., and you really have to ask: Are these
| folks truly a representation of the best this nation can
| offer. I would be shocked if anyone intelligent though any of
| them (and the rest) are. Garbage-in, garbage-out. Simple as
| that.
|
| Simple example: Go back N elections. Say, n=15, that's 60
| years. Dig-up videos and speeches. If you can hold back your
| projectile vomiting, watch a few. They have been promising
| solutions to healthcare, education and myriad other topics
| for decades and decades. I can understand that things aren't
| as simple as they might seem from behind this keyboard.
| That's a given. But, 60 years and we are still saying things
| are broken? What the hell have these people done in 60 years?
|
| Simple: In a conspiracy-theory world, if you keep these
| issues alive you can use and reuse them election after
| election to divide the population into groups on on either
| side of the issues and get votes. If you actually fix
| problems you have to work hard for other things to get done.
| It is far easier to make promises and then drop people on
| their heads after you get elected. I know this is a cynical
| view, but the proof is in the pudding as they say. The fact
| that, decades later, we are still saying that everything
| every politician always runs on is broken means these people
| are not doing their job.
|
| If you think about this from the perspective of any other
| profession it becomes obvious. The difference is that outside
| politics these kinds of negative results get you fired.
|
| Getting back on topic. We need to become rabid supporters and
| exceptional builders of nuclear power or we need to forget
| about the utopia of a fully electric transportation system.
| shlurpy wrote:
| The sixty year old promises failed or were rolled back
| because of the 40 year old ratcheting towards neoliberalism
| removed the ability for government to conceive of
| meaningful action, as a bipartisan consensus with no
| alternatives.
|
| How would we build 150 reactors today? We would get
| together "industry leaders" to consult, who would suggest
| half of that be some non-nuclear nonsense to line their
| pockets, then we would provide incentives to companies
| written by those companies with loopholes, would take that
| money and make half assed attempts that allow them to keep
| the largest portion of taxpayer money possible with the
| least effort, and then abandon their efforts to shell
| companies embroiled in lawsuits.
|
| Little would get done at the cost of massive amounts of
| public money flowing into private hands. This is by design,
| and its the only thing politics is aligned to do. When it
| works out in some area, it's fluke for the system and
| fortune in a sea of failure for the people of the nation.
| vkou wrote:
| > I have been saying this for quite some time: The future
| vision of an all-electric ground transportation system is
| between impossible and untenable without a massive scale-up in
| nuclear energy generation in places like the US.
|
| Through the 20th century, the US doubled its electricity
| production ~every 20 years.
|
| What makes you say doubling its electricity production is
| impossible over the next ~20?
| armada651 wrote:
| > Through the 20th century, the US doubled its electricity
| production ~every 20 years.
|
| The US has done that using fossil fuels though.
|
| > What makes you say doubling its electricity production is
| impossible over the next ~20?
|
| Whether the US can do the same thing with net zero emissions
| is the big question.
| vkou wrote:
| > The US has done that using fossil fuels though.
|
| In that time period, non-hydro renewables were an order of
| magnitude more expensive than fossil fuels. They aren't
| anymore.
|
| > Whether the US can do the same thing with net zero
| emissions is the big question.
|
| Actually, even if it does so by building new coal plants,
| it would be done with net-negative emissions, because
| utility energy generation is more carbon-efficient than a
| tiny ICE burning gasoline (Which also requires a mountain
| of energy, and, uh, doing other ethically questionable
| things[0], to extract and refine.)
|
| The problem to solve is not that of energy generation. We
| know how to build power plants. We haven't built as many in
| recent years, because electricity demand has temporarily
| peaked.
|
| The problem to solve is figuring out the politics of
| getting electric vehicle infrastructure rolled out across
| the country[1]. Because it concerns land use, there's a lot
| of stakeholders that need to be on board for this.
| Fortunately, there are market pressures (people buying EVs,
| demand for charging infrastructure) that are pushing on
| this.
|
| [0] Prior to the fracking boom, your taxes paid for
| imperial adventures in the Middle East, the primary purpose
| of which was oil security.
|
| [1] Actually, I think the problem to solve is getting
| people out of cars and into scooters, mopeds, bicycles,
| buses, and trains, but that's neither here nor there.
| robomartin wrote:
| > What makes you say doubling its electricity production is
| impossible over the next ~20?
|
| Easy: It takes us decades to build anything of any
| significance any more. A nuclear power plant could take 30
| years, maybe 50 at this rate. We need over a thousand of
| them.
|
| In addition to this, the cost to build anything in the US is
| so high, I am not sure we have the financial means to build
| 1400 GW in energy generation capacity and the massive
| infrastructure upgrades this would require in order to be
| useful.
|
| The famed California High Speed train is the perfect (and
| saddest) example of just how incompetent we have become. It
| was promised at a price tag of about ten billion dollars. It
| was going to bring forth an era of amazing energy-efficient
| transportation up and down the State. We are at about a
| HUNDRED billion today. We have only built TEN miles. Which
| are NOT OPERATING. And, if we did have a running train on
| these ten miles, I believe the top speed would be limited to
| somewhere around 50 MILES PER HOUR.
|
| Yeah. No. I think a massive shift in leadership, national
| focus and philosophy has to occur before we can even dream of
| a future where our 300 million vehicles are electric.
|
| What's going to happen is that --and I hate to put it this
| way-- those in the upper-middle class and above might be able
| to migrate to electrics while everyone else is stuck with
| gasoline powered vehicles at $10 per gallon. In other words,
| the poor get shafted once again. Brilliant.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I only follow the California High Speed project from a
| distance and not in detail, but it was my understanding
| that the plan called for a route through a 2000 m (6000 ft)
| high mountain range.
|
| Most actual high speed lines in the world try to avoid such
| terrain as much as possible. The ones that actually need to
| cross comparable mountains (like the Alps) take decades to
| build (so called Basis Tunnels, in Switzerland and Austria)
| and the cost is staggering.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. And I
| think that actually is the primary motivation. They need lots of
| power and they need to stop killing their citizens with smog from
| coal (as well as our planet).
|
| I think it will cost them financially though. This won't come
| cheap. Half a trillion for about 1200 GW of capacity is a lot and
| not necessarily the best value for money. However, they have
| about that amount of coal to replace as well. The issue with wind
| and solar is that we're only adding in the order of a few hundred
| GW per year. China needs an order of magnitude more just to get
| rid of coal.
|
| The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind
| turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this
| investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in
| production capacity would do the trick. Not trivial; and China is
| already going as fast as it can with this. But also not
| impossible. It's going to be a close race.
|
| China might simply be betting on multiple horses here; which is
| the smart thing to do. I don't think they are picking winners
| here; just losers. Which would be coal. It needs to go, hence the
| need to fix 1000+ GW of power demand while also accounting for
| continued economic growth. They aren't ready to commit to that at
| COP 26 just yet. But the timing of this announcement is no
| coincidence either.
|
| Another horse in the race would be fusion. Apparently there is
| some serious money flowing into some companies now. Helion just
| did a 500M series E: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-
| energy-will-use-500.... That may or may not work but it's kind of
| a really big deal if that hits commercial viability this decade
| rather than in 2050. And as the US has less of a coal problem at
| this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this
| decade), nuclear is less urgent as a solution. And unlike
| nuclear, fusion actually might have a shot at being cost
| competitive with other renewables. Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh.
| That's the right level of ambition here.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Given how dependable and safe nuclear is combined with the
| reduction in carbon it is well worth it. This move is much more
| sensible than expanding wind and solar on the same scale, and
| also much more predictable.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of
| ambition here.
|
| Does Helion have a demonstrator plant or a pilot? Or even a
| prototype? All I see is ... nothing.
|
| It is impossible for them to be in commercial operation in nine
| years even if they did have a working demonstrator. NIMBYism,
| fear of H-bombs, and the slow speed of regulation guarantee it.
| tim333 wrote:
| An optimistic take is they may be keeping a bit quiet on the
| details to avoid competition? Some results "first private
| fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees
| Celsius" from their Trenta prototype and Altman says "...they
| and their team have built a generator that produces
| electricity. Helion has a clear path to net electricity by
| 2024..."
|
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210622005366/en/Hel.
| ..
| moffkalast wrote:
| They're a company that's showed nothing so far and claims to
| know how to do something that's apparently eluded a dozen
| other fusion power projects with quite literally 1000 times
| more funding. The likes of ITER and Wendelstein, or the NIF.
|
| Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in
| the field of energy innovation is basically chump change.
|
| I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not
| be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.
| threeseed wrote:
| They've shown nothing to you.
|
| That doesn't mean investors haven't seen prototypes.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If they had something substantial it would make sense to
| patent it, instead of keeping it hidden and the potential
| for it to be stolen as an option. Either the principle
| their reactor will work on isn't conceptually done yet or
| they're being seriously irresponsible with their
| achievements.
| myownpetard wrote:
| I think it's a reasonable assumption that US fusion
| companies would have the same patent policy as SpaceX.
|
| Elon is quoted in HBR, "We have essentially no patents.
| Our primary long-term competition is China. If we
| published patents, it would be farcical, because the
| Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Or even the US government. Good luck to SpaceX asking the
| government to enforce its patents against... the
| government itself!
| justicezyx wrote:
| Relatively tiny budget is not a sign of weakness. The
| history is teemed with well-founded ventures beaten by much
| less funded ones.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| ITER is commonly cited as the most expensive science
| project of all time. I just don't believe a start up is
| on the forefront of research that even everyone involved
| with ITER is behind.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| ITER is committed to a certain large scale design.
|
| Helion is trying to do something very different and much
| smaller.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well I sure hope that ends up being the case, but
| unfortunately history is also teeming with startups
| promising the world, getting funding and then collapsing
| while getting nothing done.
| gpm wrote:
| They have built several prototypes, but none of the size
| necessary for useful energy production. Their prototype
| planned for 2024 is apparently also just supposed to be
| useful He3 production, but not useful energy production
| (though they do want it to produce more energy than it
| consumes).
|
| They also have the local mayor and governor saying good
| things about them, and given that they're aiming for
| aneutronic fusion I wouldn't expect regulation to be a huge
| hurtle, it's a very safe scheme with very minimal waste.
|
| (Just based on googling them a lot yesterday, and mostly from
| comments on /r/fusion)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| They have serious funding, so they have more than nothing.
| Given the investors don't seem to be naive idiots, I'd say
| they are making a calculated bet and there might be more to
| this than wishful thinking.
|
| You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be
| right.
| rewq4321 wrote:
| > The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind
| turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this
| investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in
| production capacity would do the trick.
|
| This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support
| seasonal and week-to-week weather changes. Even the new iron-
| air tech is still very expensive - $300 million for enough
| capacity to power 50,000 homes for just one day.[0] By my rough
| calculations that's 28 trillion dollars to buy enough batteries
| for all homes in China, assuming 600 million homes, and 7 days
| of capacity.
|
| But that's quite optimistic, because it's not that hard to get
| more than a week of unfavourable weather, and you don't want
| your country to shut down every time that happens.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-
| batt...
| andi999 wrote:
| Things get cheaper if you order for a trillion.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| This logic only works if the production capacity is
| available.
|
| If you have to rebuild your entire supply chain to handle
| that kind of demand you're prices will start to go back up
| again.
| ben_w wrote:
| For China (and quite a lot of other places, including the
| UK) the alternative to building a battery supply chain is
| to build a supply chain for something else, not to keep
| the existing and increasingly pointless coal-based supply
| chains.
|
| (That "something else" can be nuclear).
| ben_w wrote:
| 28 _trillion_? A 3000 km long by 1m^2 cross section solid
| aluminium conductor would only cost 22-ish billion, and that
| lets you put the PV in Gobi desert with minimal losses.
|
| But overproduction and diversity of the _type_ of renewable
| is probably even cheaper.
| spfzero wrote:
| I think if you install 28 trillion dollars worth of batteries
| you're going to have a waste problem that will dwarf storing
| the waste from fission plants.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great._
|
| China is set to build 43 new coal plants in 2021, and they have
| a big power supply problem. So shutting any plants down is not
| happening anytime soon.
|
| https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Excuse my ignorance, but where did you get the 500 billion
| price tag? And why do you say it's expensive? It's rather
| cheap.
|
| People keep saying how solar is the cheapest capacity to
| install, at 1 dollar per Watt. 1200 GW would be 1.2 trillions,
| and only offering around 240GW "constant" production, whereas
| nuclear is half the price to build but more like 1000 GW
| constant production
| driest wrote:
| Not OP, but you're wrong about cost. Nuclear is more than
| twice as expensive as photovoltaics [1], so it's not cheap at
| all. And that doesn't include dealing with risks like
| proliferation and extremely hazardous waste for hundreds of
| years.
|
| the half trillion comment came from the original article,
| that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion.
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generati
| on....
| zdragnar wrote:
| Reading that link, levelized solar plus battery storage is
| twice the cost of nuclear. It is cheap to generate the
| electricity, but _only_ when backed by natural gas or
| hydro.
| spullara wrote:
| Well, nuclear is twice as expensive in the US. China's
| economics might be a lot different.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| For one thing, they can strong arm suppliers to give them
| the best price. On the other hand, regional corruption
| might also raise the price up.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most
| of it will be gone by the middle of this decade),
|
| Am I reading that right that the US has less then 4 years of
| coal output ?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| That pollution is to make the stuff you buy in Walmart. As long
| as you as a consumer do not demand a label such as "made with
| green energy" and prefer those products, the polluting
| manufacturers will prevail.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| That's definitely part of it. But the flip side of that is
| that as the U.S. tightens emissions, production outsources
| elsewhere, possibly where emissions standards and many other
| environmental standards are much lower, which could lead to
| an overall net harm.
|
| Thus if you have 3 countries, it may be worse for just one of
| the countries to pass environmental constraints on the
| production of tradeables. Either all three countries do it,
| or none do it, or you don't trade at all with those that
| don't do it.
|
| Why people don't take these arguments to their logical
| conclusion is beyond me.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| A label would help. It transfers the responsibility to the
| consumer.
|
| If you have a dozen of regular eggs, a dozen of cage-free
| eggs, and a dozen of pasture-raised eggs... If you pick the
| regular choice you know you are contributing to less humane
| conditions for chickens. Now it is your choice.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| To a point - if you're going to have labeling you'll
| already need some kind of regulation and enforcement.
| Seems to me like if you're going to set that up, you
| could just turn the knobs a little farther and make the
| 'bad' choices cost 20% more than the 'good', for example.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Adding a tariff to goods has three drawbacks
|
| 1. very easy to cheat. E.g. during Trump's tariffs on
| China, there was mass cheating as goods were imported
| into Vietnam, relabelled as made in Vietnam, and exported
| to the U.S. When there is big money at stake, the
| incentive to cheat goes way up. Trying to audit every
| exporter's Asian supply chain in search of Chinese inputs
| is tough.
|
| 2. Imposing a country-wide tariff does not incentivize
| any producer to adopt more efficient processes. Imagine
| if the EU decided the US gas taxes were too low, and so
| they slapped a tariff on American cars. Would that
| incentivize Americans to use less gas? Would it make
| Americans favor an increase in gas taxes?
|
| 3. They lead to retaliatory tariffs by the other side.
| There's no such thing as pure one way punishment, no
| matter how justified you think you are. The other side
| will punish you by the same amount, if they can, in order
| to punish what they view as _your_ bad behavior in trying
| to punish _them_.
|
| Now I'm a big fan of trade reductions, but that's because
| it's part of my personal war on globalism. But make sure
| you are signing up for the same mass trade restrictions -
| e.g. blanket bans on certain products coming from all of
| East Asia - because that's what this is. Don't think you
| can wage a war against CO2 without also waging a war
| against globalism. International conferences are fun, but
| they have no teeth and don't get the job done.
| belorn wrote:
| The cost picture is complex. Using nuclear they can build the
| plants next to the industry centers, replacing existing coal
| plans. They don't need to build batteries to address the
| intermittency of renewables. In addition 150 power plants being
| built at the same time might gain some benefit of scale, and
| might attract other countries to follow suit.
|
| We need to compare the cost to what other countries are doing
| to achieve similar goals. Countries like Germany is planning to
| create green hydrogen in order to replace the current natural
| gas plants, and we don't know the price tag for that. Europe is
| currently also seeing the consequences of relying on natural
| gas and energy trading, with record high energy costs for the
| end consumer, despite building a lot of solar and wind farms.
| The high demand for natural gas is also creating additional
| problems for industries that depend on that limited resource,
| like agriculture. With uranium there isn't many other
| industries that compete for that resource.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Nuclear follows a learning curve too.
|
| The reason why it got so expensive is because we fell down the
| curve. Intentionally. So that we could fill our atmosphere with
| CO2 while we waited 40 years for wind and solar to become
| viable. The mind boggles.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Do you mean we lowered the scale of nuclear after accidents,
| thus increased cost/Kw generated?
| tuatoru wrote:
| China absolutely does need to replace its coal-powered
| electricity plants.
|
| But it also needs a great deal more electricity, for a few
| reasons.
|
| Away from the coast and the mega cities, there is still a lot
| of energy poverty.
|
| If China is going to replace coal in iron smelting and
| steelmaking, it needs to electrolyze a lot of hydrogen.
|
| It also needs electrolyzed hydrogen to replace fossil methane
| for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for wintertime peak
| electricity plants (and possibly for engines for ocean-going
| ships, if it can't use nuclear for them).
|
| If it's going to capture the carbon from its cement plants, it
| needs power to do that.
|
| Electrolyzed hydrogen and captured CO2 will have to be the new
| feedstocks for many industrial chemicals and plastics.
|
| I don't think it's either-or with nuclear and wind/PV, it's not
| hedging bets, it's whatever works locally, ASAP and AMAP.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I think you answered your own question: energy policy is a
| multi-layered approach. There's no one silver-bullet, at least
| this century. It will take a lot of small steps. This is one of
| those instances where authoritarian governments can move
| faster.
|
| Although that is a LOT of nuclear waste they will be creating.
| Hopefully the also advance waste storage technology in
| parallel.
| gambiting wrote:
| The thing about nuclear waste is that even a lot of it is not
| a lot in absolute terms.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-
| spent-...
|
| "In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons
| of used fuel since the 1950s--and all of it could fit on a
| single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
| jjoonathan wrote:
| ...and that's from generating 20% of the US's energy the
| whole time.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, especially when compared
| to trillions and trillions (quadrillions?) of tons of CO2
| and particulate pollution of coal and oil burning.
|
| OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored
| that way. But that concentrated football field can be used
| for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires
| a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage,
| exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure,
| terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a
| billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has
| to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000
| years?). Now it seems much bigger.
| [deleted]
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Yes a loaded headline. It could have read "China pivots to
| carbon clean nuclear power".
| moffkalast wrote:
| What would the world be like without the media scaremongering
| every headline eh?
|
| Shame we'll never find out.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| It is a pity that nuclear power is such an emotive subject.
| Nuclear energy has killed a _lot_ less people than dams or
| coal mines (possibly even if you include the 2 nuclear
| bombs dropped on Japan, I haven 't done the sums).
| noja wrote:
| The forever cost of a failed nuclear plant is a heavy
| burden.
| coolspot wrote:
| Also, reactors are necessary to make weapon-grade isotopes.
| bsedlm wrote:
| sometimes I think that this is a much bigger reason for nuclear
| electricity than anybody would ever publicly admit. to the
| point that if you remove all apperances (politics, marketing,
| etc) this is THE biggest drive behind the push to nuclear
| jjk166 wrote:
| Not really, while yes any nuclear reactor could in theory be
| used to produce weapons grade material, in practice designs
| optimized for plutonium breeding are radically different from
| power generating plants. Further, you don't need nuclear
| reactors for weapons material production, you can just enrich
| uranium. In fact, enriching uranium in sufficient quantity
| for reactors actually requires significantly larger and more
| expensive set ups than would be needed for weapons
| production. There might be some small states that want to
| disguise their weapons programs as peaceful power generation
| programs, but for countries like China and the US which are
| already well known to possess such weapons, there's really no
| incentive.
| erentz wrote:
| 10 countries with nuclear weapons. 2 of which don't have
| nuclear power.
|
| 35 countries with nuclear power. 27 of which don't have nuclear
| weapons.
| [deleted]
| cletus wrote:
| Good for China. I hope it works out for them. China seems
| politically stable and already has nuclear weapons so there's
| really no additional risk here. I'm happy to sit back and learn
| from their mistakes.
|
| I'm honestly surprised at the rose-coloured glasses many on HN
| view nuclear with.
|
| Like even if the US was all-nuclear, the change in global
| emissions wouldn't be that high because the US accounts for <20%
| of global emissions and probably only a quarter of that is from
| power generation.
|
| But here's another factor: if the US wasn't a consumer of fossil
| fuels, the only thing that changes is it becomes cheaper for
| everyone else and that probably increases consumption to the
| point where the emissions are near net-neutral.
|
| And for that we have a bunch of reactors with terrible failure
| modes and unanswered questions about long-term reprocessing
| and/or storage of enrichment byproducts, the same for waste and
| we'd need to trust governments and corporations to manage it all.
|
| The resistance to wearing a piece of fabric on your face while
| out in public by a significant portion of the population should
| tell you everything you need to know here: no amount of altruism
| will solve climate change. Economics will.
|
| My bet is the long term future here is solar not nuclear. That's
| a deep topic. Those pointing out that sometimes it's night aren't
| factoring in expected improvements in energy storage tech nor
| thinking long term enough. You put the collectors in space and
| eventually run transmission lines to the ground. And no, I'm not
| kidding. If you feel like going down this rabbit hole, look up
| orbital rings.
| 93po wrote:
| If people lose their minds at tiny specs of satellites used for
| musknet then imagine the outcry at this idea
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| that's fine, our new trillion+ infrastructure bill will enable
| the government to extend 25mbps broadband to a dozen rural
| schools, repave approximately four miles of roads, six miles of
| new sidewalks, and another lease on life for Califorinia HSR so
| they can finally bring rail to Turlock
|
| bridges are out, that would have required another two trillion
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 20 years ago I thought we are on the verge of cracking the fusion
| process and are about to get very cheap energy.
|
| 20 years later we still use not so efficient fision technology.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In what sense are you using the word "efficient" here, and why
| does that sense matter?
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Uranium race
|
| Are you sure it's not a "Plutonium race?"
|
| China is the nation with the fastest growing nuclear arsenal
| today.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| China should reduce their stockpile to 1/3rd of US's.
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| Previous discussion, 5 days ago (20 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29094422
| eunos wrote:
| With all the renewed interest in Nuclear, do we have enough
| uranium reserve if say US, China, EU and India decided to go big
| on nuclear ?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nuclear reactor manufacturing is not a simple thing to ramp up
| quickly.
|
| China is buying reactors from the US, France, Russia, and they
| have their own designs. They need to reserve pretty much all
| manufacturing capacity that exists and add more.
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| apparently China chose to lead the future.
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