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We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

thebellows.org

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Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#301

Post by tl »

tertiary wrote: post #61
wutbrodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants? EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a…

I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past? [1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...

AOC can claim any position she wants, but the Green New Deal says (page 7, lines 6-9 as linked in another post) says "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources". That's a clear anti-nuclear stance.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#302

Post by jcims »

pfdietz wrote: post #117
jcims wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that General Fusion design has any benefit here? It’s basically a swirling sphere of molten lead that is injected with a bubble of hydrogen plasma and then a bunch of pistons pump the volume down to collapse the bubble to create fusion conditions. It seems that that the lead might provide neutron shielding and is also the carrier fluid for the excess heat. Who knows if it actually works but the simplicity…

I don't think GF has a realistic chance of making a workable reactor. They've already given up on the acoustic compression scheme, and the slow compression scheme they are now following has a metal post down the middle of the chamber, unshielded from average neutron fluxes that will, at the center, be orders of magnitude higher than in more conventional reactors.

That’s a bummer, I always liked the idea, sort of like collapsing cavitation bubbles. Lots of energy focused on a very small spot. I could never sort out how the plasma injection would work without some kind of physical tube placing it in the center... guess it didn’t lol.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#303

Post by iron0013 »

tl wrote: post #301
tertiary wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past? [1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...

AOC can claim any position she wants, but the Green New Deal says (page 7, lines 6-9 as linked in another post) says "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources". That's a clear anti-nuclear stance.

You don’t think that’s a desirable goal?

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#304

Post by radford-neal »

alkonaut wrote: post #202
radford-neal wrote: post #29

From the article: "No nuclear energy program has ever launched without heavy state intervention — the capital costs are just too high for private entities to take on." I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors . But in this highly-regulated industry, investors can't put money into nuclear plants thinking tha…

> I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors. What about the risk premiums for disasters. Isn't it only economical if states accept the cost? If we wouldn't accept an owner of a nuclear power plant to go bankrupt before cleaning up ,after a Fukushima scale accident they'd be forced to either have an insurance…

Well, that gets into whether or not nuclear plants are actually economic - or whether they only seem so if you don't account for the cost of a possible disaster.

I don't know the answer to this question. But in theory the cost can be captured in an insurance premium. The government could have a role in requiring adequate insurance.

But this is all separate from government actions that destroy legitimate profits, the risk of which may make private financing impossible. (One might think that the risk of government action is just like other possible risks, which investors can account for, but the point is that it's not a risk for the government itself, leading to government financing being preferred.)

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#305

Post by pfdietz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #279
pfdietz wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, the two options were nuclear vs. renewables + storage (batteries and hydrogen). I don't think very large methane storage makes much sense; where does the carbon come from?

> where does the carbon come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas

Biomass is fundamentally limited by the very low efficiency of photosynthesis, so that it requires very large areas. It should probably be limited to providing liquid transportation fuels and feedstock for chemicals.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#306

Post by epistasis »

mulmen wrote: post #263
epistasis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be good to do a bit more work to justify that, then. The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s. And this is a crucial distinction, be…

I’m not making a statement to the validity of DennisP’s comment. Just clarifying the perceived meaning.

Sorry, didn't mean to direct that at you. But since I had been downvoted so much I wanted to at least poke at the general narrative here. I still find it odd is that an unfounded accusation of bias is supported with a link to a clearly biased source, and that's somehow acceptable here.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#307

Post by m0zg »

tertiary wrote: post #61
wutbrodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants? EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a…

I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past? [1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...

Is this a revision with or without cow farts? It cracks me up when people take suggestions of a _bartender_ on this topic seriously.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#308

Post by throwawaysea »

icebraining wrote: post #165
throwawaysea wrote: post #104

Green New Deal isn’t an energy or environmental program. It is a greenwashed policy proposal that includes essentially the entire far left’s agenda - it uses the word “justice” affixed to many different causes and the cause of environmental protection (rebranded as “environmental justice”) and a dose of mental gymnastics to drag in many unrelated policy proposals that are part of either the social justice or socialis…

> the entire far left’s agenda Or as the rest of the world calls it, center's agenda. The actual far-left is pretty critical of the GND: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/03/05/deal-m05.html

The “rest of the world” doesn’t call it the “center’s agenda” in my observation - what are you basing that on? I have noticed there is a tendency on HN to treat Scandinavian countries with small homogeneous populations as “the rest of the world”, ignoring other nations out there as well as the diversity of opinions within Scandinavian countries.

In my view, the far left - as far as those in the center are concerned - is “progressives” in America (and their equivalents elsewhere): those pushing for equity (equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity), those using a victim/oppression narrative as a foundation for every political position, those seeking collectivist society/policy instead of individualist perspectives, etc. There is room for relativism certainly, but characterizing the GND as the “center” is not just without evidence but in conflict with the reality of political cultures around the world.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#309

Post by epistasis »

manfredo wrote: post #284
epistasis wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ERCOT puts their panning pipeline out in the open; I'm relying on an ERCOT expert that said this as a summary of the August 2020 XLS raw data [1]. About 950 MW is as far along to have an interconnection agreement. Grids think of energy sources primarily in terms of power, not in terms of energy, so that's the number that gets reported to ERCOT. Grid ops dispatch W, not Wh. We may never know the exact GWh for these pl…

4 hours of 17 Gigwatts would represent 20% of the ~300 GWh global lithium ion battery production [1]. That's a massive storage plant, and such a plant would represent an order of magnitude increase in battery storage. But consider the fact that the US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. Plans for an economy powered by wind and solar call for anything from 12 hours to 3 weeks of storage depending on how much overp…

It's not a single plant, and it's not all going to be installed in a year; these are the interconnection plans for all sorts of much smaller projects.

We are only at the infancy of lithium ion production, I'm actually surprised that we are at 300GWh. With this very limited capacity, and typical grid storage batteries being warranties for around 15 years, our current production supports a global deployment of 4.5TWh of storage. We are at 9 hours of global storage, and we haven't even really started scaling battery production.

I know you didn't put a label on these numbers, as being big or small, but we are on track to solve this problem with battery storage, it seems!

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#310

Post by dagmx »

m0zg wrote: post #307
tertiary wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past? [1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...

Is this a revision with or without cow farts? It cracks me up when people take suggestions of a _bartender_ on this topic seriously.

She is a Congress woman with a degree in economics. Whether or not she was a bartender is neither a disqualifier for her current position, nor is it a source of shame.

What are your credentials if any to have an opinion on this matter, if you think that being a past bartender disqualifies her position?

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