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Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

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Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#51

Post by philipkglass »

arduanika wrote: post #20
hristov wrote: post #12

Bad idea. We have plenty of much cheaper sources of green energy. And lets face it nuclear is far from green. Offshore wind energy is so successful that it is now negatively affecting solar as well as nuclear and fossil fuels. Furthermore, the greatest current innovation vis-a-vis energy is energy saving which is much cheaper than building new reactors. I should add that there is such an energy glut in the world nowa…

> much cheaper sources of green energy When people stop bragging about how many more jobs green energy creates than fossil fuels, I'll start believing that renewables are cheaper at scale . > What we need now is a good storage solution Collocate the new nuclear plants with facilities that (at high energy cost) recapture carbon into dense fuels.

When people stop bragging about how many more jobs green energy creates than fossil fuels, I'll start believing that renewables are cheaper at scale.

These braggarts haven't calculated the labor intensity per MWh (construction + operation) over the full life cycle of utility scale wind and solar facilities. Utility scale renewables are less labor-intensive than coal or nuclear over the full life cycle. The only reason that renewable boosters can tout jobs vs. coal right now is because coal is shrinking and renewables are still growing robustly.

I suspect that natural gas burned in a combined cycle plant may be more labor-thrifty than anything else, but 1) it's not a low-carbon electricity source like nuclear or renewables and 2) it has been harder for me to calculate how much labor is required for fuel extraction; the calculation is easier with coal since quite a few coal burning plants have dedicated mines.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218366 for a labor-intensity comparison of legacy coal and utility scale PV that I worked out previously.

In fairness, I have seen advocates for coal and nuclear brag about the bountiful wages distributed (costs incurred for electrical ratepayers) by their preferred generating technologies, too.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#52

Post by chiefalchemist »

noobermin wrote: post #30

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…

A couple+ years ago I had a one+ hour (casual) conversation with someone (important) who does fusion research (in the Princeton, NJ area). I'll spare us all the details, but his take was simple: fusion is within reach but we need more money.

Nearly everything I've read since leads me to believe he was honest and accurate. Mind you, I was just a guy with a cocktail in one hand and a shameless will to ask questions in the other. China seems to be making strides, yes.

Perhaps, being a fusion insider, you have some updates on the State of Fusion?

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#54

Post by yellowapple »

jkravitz61 wrote: post #26
jjoonathan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy is spurned by many (most?) self-styled environmentalists. That alone could win it favor in this administration. If Republicans could be persuaded to "own" it and Democrats could be persuaded to go along with it, we might just wind up doing something good for the planet. That's probably optimistic, but there's a lot more hope in that idea than in fighting a pitched battle about solar panels, China, and…

Nuclear has such a terrible reputation, and rightfully,people will always have legitimate complaints about it. We can never fully guarantee that a plant is free from the potential of catastrophe, not to mention we still don’t have a great solution to nuclear waste other than bury it in a mountain. It’s definitely a lot better than slowly suffocating ourselves by injecting hydrocarbons into the air, but we really need…

Pretty much every other viable source of power - renewable or otherwise - is just as bad once you factor in all the externalities. Solar panel manufacturing ain't exactly pollution free. Nuclear would give us more time to solve those problems in an economical and scalable way.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#55

Post by chiefalchemist »

abootstrapper wrote: post #35

Ya know, I feel like renewables are the future, but we’re kinda running out of runway here. I think a nuclear + renewables strategy is a great way to get us past fossil fuels quickly. Once we’re over fossil fuels we can tackle replacing nuclear with something better.

At this point it's fairly obvious that the continued use of fossil fuels will lead us to danger than fission. Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable. We'' just have to figure out how to deal with the fission devil until we get fusion. Hopefully, fusion isn't too far off.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#56

Post by est31 »

noobermin wrote: post #30

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…

I'm one of those fission sceptics. The main problems I have with fission isn't technological issues, it's human issues.

E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced to move back into their homes, without giving them an option to get compensated instead. Furthermore, engineers pointed out that there were issues with the way Fukushima was built but their concerns were discarded. Human issue again. Fission plants should be built with the greatest care possible and be designed for major natural disasters.

As for advancements in the field: they might have happened but many reactors are still kept running even though their design is outdated. The greatest advances in drawers don't help if you still have ticking time bombs and one of them go off. Another human issue.

Or the entire thing with dumping waste into the oceans, like on the coasts of Somalia, harming the health in the region and destroying the jobs of the fishermen. Another human problem.

Engineers, in general, are very smart people. They can foresee a great deal of things. But they need to be listened to, and it's too easy to operate a nuclear plant without listening to safety concerns of engineers.

What we've got right now is people harming the health of locals and discarding concerns by engineers, and lying to locals and politicians about this, claiming that the engineers didn't have any concerns. Which is a big problem, and a very human one. And if there's a catastrophy, the government bails them out (what about a mandatory 100 billion coverage insurance for nuclear plants??), and treats locals like shit again. No thanks.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#57

Post by smsm42 »

aiyodev wrote: post #13

Gates is worth ~$100B. The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year. This is like asking someone with a 4 Gbps connection to transfer some files and offering to burn a single mini CD to help them.

To give you a data point, current shutdown that just ended was a fight about 5 billions. Budget is big - even discretionary one - which is only one that needs to be considered when we talk about spending priorities, since non-discretionary one is pretty much fixed - but it also has a lot of items inside. And if we talk about priorities for specific items, 100bn is nothing to sneeze at. Whole Department of Energy budget is is about 30bn - so it's definitely on the same scale.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#58

Post by TomMckenny »

abootstrapper wrote: post #35

Ya know, I feel like renewables are the future, but we’re kinda running out of runway here. I think a nuclear + renewables strategy is a great way to get us past fossil fuels quickly. Once we’re over fossil fuels we can tackle replacing nuclear with something better.

Aside from urgency, it's also likely that wind, solar and hydro, even if deployed maximally, might not be able to meet the total peak demand every where. Renewable are obviously superior but for that gaps, we will need fission anyway.

Fission plants have a finite lifespan anyway so if fusion or space laser or whatever appear, openings will be appearing constantly.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#59

Post by pjc50 »

Three serious problems with nuclear, globally:

- too slow. Break ground now and you'll be producing energy by 2030.

- political instability. Hands up who supports the switch of Iran and Saudi Arabia to nuclear? It would reduce a lot of carbon emissions. Let's not overlook Ukraine either: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurenuclear-plants-i...

- budget instability: Wylfa has stopped https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hitachi-job... and Hinckley Point C is hanging on by an expensive thread. It is also at risk of inconvenience from Brexit, given that the UK is leaving Euratom and is likely to experience "no deal" chaos for personnell and equipment from EDF.

Is the US really able to build nuclear plants with the occasional total budget shutdown for 3 months?

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#60

Post by dotancohen »

noobermin wrote: post #30

I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…

Considering that fossil fuels damage both humans and the environment orders of magnitude worse than fission, to what do you attribute the public's non-negative attitude towards it?
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