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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

philipkglass wrote: post #245
krastanov wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skimming the first Google result for amortized cost, nuclear seems cheap: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electri... However, I do not have good enough background to vet the source well. Are they missing something obvious? Also, I was not talking about worker safety, rater about everyone's health, from the miner to the person living near the power plant.

Were you looking at production costs instead of levelized costs? That page notes "A new nuclear power plant, for example, has one of the highest levelized costs, particularly compared to coal and natural gas-fired plants, and its costs are exceeded only by certain renewable plants, such as offshore wind and solar power, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA)." Another issue is that the page is from…

[deleted]

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

#302

Post by jabl »

frenchman99 wrote: post #69

Always the same thing: instead of reducing energy use, humans will find a way to push back problems instead of tackling them head on. Using nuclear energy "because runway is too short" without doing much else is not going to save us. We have to go out of our comfort zone and start pushing for laws that force manufacturers to allow for 20 year repairability of electronical products (some brands already offer 10 years,…

I do agree that to solve all the big environmental problems we're facing, such as climate change, biodiversity loss etc., we're going to have to change the way we live. Merely replacing gasoline powered cars with electric cars isn't going to cut it.

That being said, while improving energy efficiency is good as it makes the challenge of decarbonization easier, when/if we have low-impact electricity generation we could use (lots of) electricity to decarbonize many processes requiring fossil fuels today. Such as production of ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer (today from natural gas), or building heating with heat pumps instead of fuel burning boilers, steel production with hydrogen direct reduction instead of coke, etc.

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

#303

Post by Tsubasachan »

javagram wrote: post #106
zokier wrote: post #84

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…

Well nuclear powerplants were literally a byproduct of nuclear weapons research. America needed a lot of plutonium. The nuclear industry was of vital interest to national defence.

Also those old powerplants were not built with safety in mind. In my country they literally dumped nuclear waste into the sea. Back in the sixties they were cutting corners, something we couldn't do today (I hope).

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

#304

Post by belorn »

joe_the_user wrote: post #212
avar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.

Yes, fossil fuels are an ongoing disaster, one that in the form of global warming has a capacity to possibly make the planet unlivable. But all the disasters of fossil fuels are invisible and thus provoke little reaction in the public - and moreover, fossil fuels have vast vested interests protecting them. We need to come up with an alternative to this. Nuclear in the ideal could be that. But nuclear's track record i…

It would be ideal if we could replace fossil fueled power plants with solar and wind, but it is not currently technically possible and as they provide different forms of services. Fossil fueled power plants generate power based on demand. Solar and wind generate power based on weather.

With current technology we really only have two distinct options. We can use solar and wind when the weather allows for it and then burn coal, gas and oil when it doesn't. The global warming impact is the combined result averaged over the year, and the energy cost is similar to the combined price.

The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming.

In the future we could get more alternatives. Different form of batteries (like reverse hydro) would allow solar and wind to be separated from on-demand fossil fueled power plants, and dynamic energy market could change demand based on supply so that a lower base generation from nuclear and regular hydro would work in combination with wind and solar.

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

#305

Post by captainbland »

gwbas1c wrote: post #222
captainbland wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might just be right that if renewables can't meet current demand, prices go that bit higher to keep usage in line. It's not a given that we must consume as much as we do (or more) forever given the finite nature of the planet and everything.

That really hurts the crowd that lives paycheck to paycheck. Price goes up: someone goes without.

Not as much as it'll hurt the crowd living in locations that are likely to be totally wiped off the map in the event that we fail to mitigate the issue which is still likely.

But independent of this, I'm pro wealth-redistribution at any rate so really I see the solution to the paycheck to paycheck problem in terms of that. Massive investment in switching to green energy should also help by creating good jobs, as well.

The largest bulk of excess emissions doesn't appear to come from individual habits so much as structural industrial practices - things like producing things far overseas and shipping them by oil tanker, electricity production still being heavily reliant on coal, commutes being effectively mandated for many workers as their work doesn't pay them enough to live close to their job - or their job being doable remotely but corporate policy preventing workers from taking advantage of that (to both the benefit of their free time and health as well as the environment). So it seems unfair that working people should be punished for something they have limited power over.

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

#306

Post by captainbland »

frankietwenty9 wrote: post #264
fyfy18 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is electricity prices went up with usage? So you get X kWh per month for one price, then after that it's 1.5x the rate. You could just do this on residential rates only so businesses aren't affected.

why remove the incentive for businesses to optimize their energy usage? They have as much if not more external costs as a residential home.

If anything it is most important to apply this to businesses. Most consumer choice related emissions, as it's often framed, is taken through the proxy of a business that hasn't optimised their energy output to this extent. This is all the more relevant when you consider that consumers often don't have visibility over the practices of the business that they're interacting with, and particularly that of the supply chain further down the line. Like are all these lit up signs really necessary for any businesses to function, do you think? Or are they just trying to stay visible in a sea of neon?

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

#307

Post by Turbots »

est31 wrote: post #56
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 bui…

Do you think it's any different with fossil fuel plants? Regular people get bamboozled by the wealthier ones all the time, nuclear fission plants are not an exception.

We should try to minimize the damage a fission power plant can do, even when badly managed and poor safety concerns.

Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactos (LFTR) have a much safer Thorium cycle instead of Uranium cycle, have less waste in the form of uranium or plutonium, can be made inherently safe with drain tanks that can be mechanically activated (even during loss of power), they operate at higher temperatures and lower pressures (which is much easier to work with and lowers the cost of all the containment vessels/pipes/tanks) and they have both a higher thermal efficiency and burn a much greater percentage of fuel.

Liquid fuels like molten salts will always win over solid fuels like uranium pellets encased in zirkonium... Basically all our fuels are liquid because they mix (petrol, diesel, ...) which solids obviously don't.

The thorium fuel cycle also generates useful byproducts which can be extracted without shutting down the reactor, many of them are very useful in medicine like Stronium, Cesium, Rhodium, Technetium, Iodine and Xenon.

Thorium is already been mined A LOT since its basically one of the components you dig up when digging for other rare earth materials, right now they are just being discarded or stored somewhere, theres like tens of thousands of tons of thorium stored in the US.

More information here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJGB4LHZMs

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

#308

Post by Turbots »

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…

What are your thoughts on the Thorium Fuel cycle and liquid fuel thorium reactors, or molten salt reactors in general?

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

#309

Post by loeg »

C_J_H wrote: post #291
stale2002 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so what you are saying is that you would prefer to live next to a dirty coal power plant that is much more likely to cause you to get cancer or other horrible health effects?

I would say that's a false equivalency because coal operators (until recently) were profitable enterprises whereas nuclear lobbyists are generally concerned not just with public tolerance but public funding.

Coal is/was only profitable because externalities are not priced in.

Everyone knows the externalities of nuclear power and it gets priced in to any discussion of new plants in 2019. The fear (about meltdowns) and concern (about waste) typically outsizes the actual risk substantially.

But most people don't seem to realize that coal far more produces aerosolized radioactive waste, other carcinogens, and as a result, cancer, per watt, than nuclear. Even if you assume every single nuclear plant melts down. Burnt coal is just absymal for public health, but it doesn't get the scary branding that nuclear power does.

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