Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#651

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 1:11 AM UTC

loeg wrote: post #648

pfdietz wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet. But if you extrapolate out the cost of solar. using the historical experience curve, as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there.

If you extrapolate this trend line far enough, does it reach zero? There's only so much future prediction you can accurately make from historical performance. > as it builds toward tens of TW of installed global capacity it could get there And that's kind of the other problem. How much land is that? Per this perhaps dated 2013 report[0], It takes "3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity o…

There's plenty of land for tens of TW of global capacity. Remember, the Earth is constantly being struck by ~100,000 TW of sunlight.

And no, an experience curve never reaches zero. It's a power law in cumulative production.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#652

Post by samhain » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 2:48 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #243

gruez wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant [...] The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong. Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but som…

Alright sure. Coal is also a terrible idea for energy and we also shouldn't be having coal. Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear. In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in…

If there were proper funding into nuclear plants, why wouldn't there also be some kind of reduction in price as new technologies are improved, like we are seeing with renewables?

What about those molten salt thorium reactors from a few years ago that promised we could basically burn dirt to power our cities for forever?

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#653

Post by samhain » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

peterashford wrote: post #643

I find the view that nuclear is the only clean option very odd when we have countries which are 100% renewable right now. And a number of countries which are very nearly there already. I see people raising issues about batteries but I'm not sure that a lot of the countries doing 100% or nearly so are using batteries at all. That looks like a straw-man to me

I think you'll find that the majority of those countries are 100% "on certain days." Meaning that they still need to be supported by natural gas plants at the renewable site, or by nearby countries who do not have 100% renewable.

Hydro power is the most efficient way of storing the extra energy right now. So people talking about batteries would be talking on a much smaller scale, or don't know what they are talking about.

A large portion of the energy currently consumed is by oil tankers that burn crude directly during transport of goods across the ocean. The benefit is for transportation of the energy and fueling costs. I suspect that we will need to make energy so cheap on land and for cities that it is more cost effective to create burnable fuel for ships than to extract the oil from the ground.

We are currently struggling to get our cities even at parity with renewable, but maybe with the surplus renewable energy on good days, we could convert that energy to some kind of liquid fuel that could eventually be used on these tanker ships and in planes.

The only counter argument that I've seen that seems to make any sense is that we could use up too many resources trying to reach parity with the current energy consumption. Think like we run out of neodymium for all of the electric engines for both our cars and wind turbines, or run out of materials that go into making all of the solar panels. If that's actually a problem, then it seems like we would need more resource efficient ways to generate more power. So it might take a combination of renewables to power our cities, then a nuclear process heat from maybe one of the next generation reactors to efficiently create the liquid fuel for ships and planes.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#654

Post by nikdaheratik » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

scarygliders wrote: post #128

Can we just get something straight about the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant? Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw... Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP. Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not s…

And yet, very few companies (in the U.S. at least) want to build them. It's because the worst case scenario they're planning for is very bad indeed, so they have to spend all this expense to keep it from happening. Compared to every other renewable energy technology, it is more risky and has a much higher cost to get up and running.

And that's setting aside the other problem which is that many of the countries that are still growing, and will need new, clean sources of power are countries that don't have as much nuclear expertise to begin with. And some of them are countries that the West has tried to actively keep from having nuclear capability.

Better solar, wind, etc., has fewer risks than better nuclear tech in the long run.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#655

Post by nikdaheratik » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:34 AM UTC

Gondolin wrote: post #400

I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that - coal produce radioactive waste too - it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution - the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming. Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely impo…

Again, if nuclear power is such a great idea, why aren't more companies lobbying for it? The reality is that every place in the U.S. that it is economically feasible to build a plant, already has one. There's a nuclear plant in the middle of Kansas and it's barely viable. And that's ignoring the proliferation issue when we try and export any new versions of the tech to other countries that need new energy.

We're better off making solar, wind, etc. viable than pouring tons of money into a single area that we can't safely export to other places in the world.

And electrical energy is still only one part of the problem since we still need to replace the internal combusion enginees, and jet engines or at least find an alternative fuel source. Nuclear power isn't a panacea.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#656

Post by nikdaheratik » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:49 AM UTC

joss82 wrote: post #562

pytester wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point Hinkley Point = 3200 MW Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW That's about 1,100 wind turbines at current tech. GE is working on a 12 MW wind turbine - it would take 270 of them would replace Hinkley point.

3MW is the peak power when the wind is blowing constantly at the maximum speed the wind turbine was designed to operate (and not over, at which point the turbine enters safe mode and stops to prevent damage). Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...

You seem to be leaving out the fact that most nuclear plants have a fair amount of downtime as well in order to refuel. While I don't have UK statistics, in the US it's typically 30-40 days per year when they don't run (so 10% of the time or more). So, you would need more than one source to make up for the nuclear plant's downtime just as you would to make up for areas offshore where the wind isn't blowing at top speed.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#657

Post by nikdaheratik » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

kuzehanka wrote: post #484

aurelwu wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always about cost, if it wasn't about cost we could just build so much PV/Wind + Power to Gas/Liquid Facilities as we need and be done with it. And building new nuclear is way more expensive than projected in your link , (No blame to the authors, 10 years ago they couldn't know that those numbers are not realistic) while Wind/PV are still becoming cheaper every year) they assume ~1,3 Billion per 1 GW nuclear cap…

> It's always about cost As the direness of the climate situation becomes more and more urgent, cost becomes irrelevant. During times of emergency and total war, dollars don't mean anything. If you have the manpower and the raw resources to do something, it gets done. Ignoring the politics and economics of energy production, from a physics standpoint nuclear is a high outlier in terms of energy density per resource s…

That isn't true about war and it certainly isn't true about public utilities. People went to jail all the time for overcharging the government during times of war. Money is a way to measure value and it always matters.

As far as public utilities go, the problem is that people who give them money expect a small but static return on investment. For almost all the 20th century they were a mostly safe place to keep money. That was part of the reason why Enron was one of the few companies where the white collar criminals were actually punished.

One of the major problems is that the people running them don't know how to manage projects that are more risky and the people doing the investing don't know how to account for the uncertainty around fossil fuels, versus intermittent renewables, versus huge nuclear projects. The message from the politicians is always "your money in these projects is safe", and they've made sure to keep that promise even if they've put a different spin on it because the underlying shockwaves would be as bad as government bonds going bad.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#658

Post by vlehto » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 4:36 AM UTC

lispm wrote: post #637

vlehto wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Otherwise you wouldn't know about the effects of climate change. Well actually we don't know. We have maybe a sophisticated guess at best. Knowledge requires data, that by definition cannot be gathered from future. At least not before someone invents a time machine. Even the best forecasts we can make about anything are very poor. Look at a simple things like construction budgets or projected congestion of particula…

> If I don't do that, then I'm not going to give a shit about this phenomena anyhow. I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population. > Heating accounts probably about half of my carbon footprint Heating, travel, transportation, industrial production, production of chemicals, production of concrete/cement ( https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844 ), food p…

>I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population.

Not having kids would help, but suicide would help more.

Many things matter, but big things matter more than small things. Electricity, traffic, industrial production and heating are all big things. All linked to energy production.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#659

Post by lispm » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 7:02 AM UTC

Gondolin wrote: post #638

lispm wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, the drawbacks of nuclear power are nothing compared to the drawback of climate change One Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event in a densely populated country like Germany on a densely populated continent like Europe? Having reactors with molten cores near my home town with a 5 mill people metro area? Japan had massive luck that the wind wasn't blowing in the direction of Tokyo.

Chernobyl: cannot happen. Fukushima: how many deaths? Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo? But sure, let's close the nuclear reactor who killed nobody in Germany, and keep open the coal plants which still accounted for 228TWh in 2018, meaning they killed around 22800 persons per year. And let's only close them in 2038, 30 years later, having wasted 350 Million Tons of CO2 by year and killed hundred…

I said 'scale of an accident'.

> Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?

Millions of people trying to escape...

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#660

Post by lispm » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 7:07 AM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #658

lispm wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I don't do that, then I'm not going to give a shit about this phenomena anyhow. I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population. > Heating accounts probably about half of my carbon footprint Heating, travel, transportation, industrial production, production of chemicals, production of concrete/cement ( https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844 ), food p…

>I fear that any savings in CO2 emissions will be useless, due to an increasing world population. Not having kids would help, but suicide would help more. Many things matter, but big things matter more than small things. Electricity, traffic, industrial production and heating are all big things. All linked to energy production.

> big things matter more than small things

Not if the small things come in large numbers.