121–130 of 353 posts
We already have enough land to power the entire US with solar. The future is renewables not pushing the can down the road with Nuclear, ignoring all of its negative externalities. Bill Gates doesn’t need government to build solar either.
Can the united states procure enough gallium, cadmium, selenium, indium, and whatever else to build enough solar panels ?
We already have enough land to power the entire US with solar. The future is renewables not pushing the can down the road with Nuclear, ignoring all of its negative externalities. Bill Gates doesn’t need government to build solar either.
Yes, obviously he should be focusing on battery research, not fusion or improved fission.
Solar panels + batteries will do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that's fortunately increasingly an option we can take, but the world would sure suck less if we weren't dealing with the compounded effects of 50-70 years of the sort of nuclear skepticism expressed in your comment upthread. But still, even if we're going to aggressively build out renewables there's still room for a lot more nuclear in the energy mix. There's use-cases for it where solar, wind etc. isn't a subst…
Are you willing to live next door to a nuclear plant? People don't experience coal related problems unless they live in areas that are heavily polluted. Sure it impacts them and everyone else but it's perceived less harmful.
Most of the people in my friend group actually live next to one. Zero issues, and it's an old communist party-built one.
Coal isn't without it's drawbacks[0], no matter how much it's praised but the fallout[1] (no pun intended) from nuclear disasters has much longer and farther-reaching implications, which we have no way to really recover from - still to this day.
As others have pointed out, the disasters have caused a bit of uneasiness with the public and it's understandable, when the general consensus in modern-day society is, "It's not my problem, so I don't care."
If we treated it as a "human problem" and not "x" society's problem, we'd probably get a lot further; of course, this assumes that people believe the environment is in serious danger but, alas, there are people who do not. (Did these same people exist during the CFC/Ozone-hole problem?)
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi...
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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 reaso…
> Utility scale renewables are less labor-intensive than coal or nuclear over the full life cycle It's hard to marshal evidence for or against this claim, since as you say, the newest renewable technologies are in the earliest stages of their life cycles. It's also hard to defend or refute claims about the cost of renewables at scale, since they're currently such a small fraction of energy production. Are we looking…
With present technology geothermal is going to be a niche source. Hydroelectric generation is not, but most of its potential in developed countries is already tapped. When I speak of large scale renewable growth I mean utility-scale photovoltaics and wind.
Neither solar panels nor batteries for stationary energy storage require rare minerals. Lithium ion batteries that maximize energy density, like those in cars and portable electronic devices, usually contain the comparatively rare element cobalt, but this is not required if lower energy density is acceptable. Batteries that stay in one place don't need maximum energy density and can eliminate cobalt. Lithium itself is not rare; lithium iron phosphate is a perfectly fine battery chemistry for stationary applications and requires no rare minerals.
My estimates of labor intensity for renewables do not include storage or overproduction (to diminish reliance on storage). The numbers I've provided are for incremental nearer-term goals achievable without storage, like "displace the 28% of American electricity that comes from coal with renewables." Storage is immature and I'd be piling speculation on top of speculation if I tried to estimate how much storage and/or overproduction a zero-fossil energy system needs, and how much labor that will require. Note that a zero-fossil energy system built on nuclear foundations will need to deal with these questions too eventually; the difference between peak and average demand for electricity means that nuclear reactors too would need to be overbuilt or coupled with storage to take the place of fossil peakers.
I think that nuclear power is quite safe enough, certainly safer than continued fossil combustion. I don't have any grudge against nuclear apart from the high costs and unpredictable schedules that have attended attempts to build new units. 15 years ago I thought it was obvious that building even the cheapest solar farms was a more expensive way to generate electricity than building an average nuclear reactor. But the numbers changed, and I changed my mind along with them.
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It’s puzzling how 50 years later, with much better technology, we can’t build plants on the scale of what was built in the 60s. The US navy uses nuclear reactors for their aircraft carriers and they don’t seem to have the same problems getting them built and installed that commercial power operators do now. I wonder what makes the difference, I tried googling but couldn’t find a good comparison. Perhaps it is just no…
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See for example
https://fluormarinepropulsion.com/
https://www.bechtel.com/services/defense-nuclear-security/us...
https://www.bwxt.com/what-we-do/naval-nuclear-propulsion
Welcome to the military-industrial complex
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that's fortunately increasingly an option we can take, but the world would sure suck less if we weren't dealing with the compounded effects of 50-70 years of the sort of nuclear skepticism expressed in your comment upthread. But still, even if we're going to aggressively build out renewables there's still room for a lot more nuclear in the energy mix. There's use-cases for it where solar, wind etc. isn't a subst…
Are you willing to live next door to a nuclear plant? People don't experience coal related problems unless they live in areas that are heavily polluted. Sure it impacts them and everyone else but it's perceived less harmful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pro nuclear in principle (it sure beats fossils), but I do get the feeling that the era we are in is not right for such big monolithic infrastructure projects. The costs tend to balloon and the private companies behind them have difficulties in delivering and meeting the stringent quality standards that nuclear requires (for good reasons). See for example the utter failure that has been Olkiluoto 3[1] or the rece…
It’s puzzling how 50 years later, with much better technology, we can’t build plants on the scale of what was built in the 60s. The US navy uses nuclear reactors for their aircraft carriers and they don’t seem to have the same problems getting them built and installed that commercial power operators do now. I wonder what makes the difference, I tried googling but couldn’t find a good comparison. Perhaps it is just no…
I know, that's a whole pile of variables; but variables should be reduced when it comes to nuclear energy, IMO.
That said, I greatly favor nuclear over, you know, burning stuff, and I'd like to see it succeed alongside renewables.