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

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

#391

Post by labawi »

pfdietz wrote: post #250
labawi wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model doesn't support methane generation. Hydrogen is cool, but we should also be investing in efficient methane production. AFAICT it's not too hard to make and has immense advantages - existing transport, storage and use infrastructure and market as a heavily traded good. We can use it for most of our energy or carbon needs with today's technology and existing machines with no or easy modifications. Hydrogen ca…

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?

CO₂.

Biogas is mostly better than fossil, but we should generate methane from H₂O + CO₂ + energy. It would be useful and quick way to achieve energy storage and decarbonization.

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

#392

Post by zingplex »

skitout wrote: post #348
tertiary wrote: post #30

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also…

"Nuclear is amazing"... but much much more expensive than wind and solar https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

If humanity is going to survive the next few decades with a quality of life even remotely resembling what we have now, we'll need to stop looking at the pocket book for a short while.

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

#393

Post by sanderjd »

pwinnski wrote: post #257
sanderjd wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big problem I have with things like "the green new deal" is that they are buzzwords onto which many different policies can be mapped. I think to lots of people it implies no nuclear, and to some others it doesn't. Both are "right" because the buzzword has no implicit meaning.

I'm not sure how that can be true, given that it's a written proposal[0]. Not many have read it, and certainly both opponents and proponents have made up things that are or are not in it, but it's not just a buzzword. https://docsend.com/view/8gxh826

Its existence as a buzzword predates that proposal, and thus inevitably the proposal is not the final word on how the term is defined.

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

#394

Post by tonyarkles »

whiddershins wrote: post #183
throwaway8451 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intermittency of renewables is less of a problem if one rids oneself of the medieval seeming idea of energy self-sufficiency. Energy does not have to be produced where it is needed. We can transfer it already. The grid would need upgrades but we can definitely transfer large amounts of energy over long distances. Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra…

The more we do this, the more susceptible the grid will be to massive outages. I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some way in principle where it could be architected so this isn’t so, but it just seems empirically that the more interconnected the more we see unexpected and enormous outages.

I feel like a broken record saying this, but every time the topic of renewables comes up, I feel like the pro-renewable camp completely forgets us.

I'm in Saskatchewan. For a good chunk of the year, everything is frozen. We currently heat our homes with natural gas but require electricity to run the furnaces. Power outages are a very big deal, and in the winter are generally correlated with terrible weather (big snowstorms and deep cold tend to have a negative effect on our infrastructure).

The province itself is quite flat as well. Ignoring the part where reservoirs freeze over for at least 5 months of the year, pumped hydro (which seems to be our best current energy storage approach) isn't going to work very well with no significant hills to pump the water over. We absolutely require continuously reliable electricity to, at a minimum, keep the water pipes in our homes from freezing. A 24h outage in the middle of winter is going to, at a minimum, cause significant widespread property damage; past around the 72h mark, there's probably going to be significant death as well.

On top of all of the other reasons why I like nuclear, that is the reason why locally-generated nuclear is at the top of my list of "ways we should produce electricity around here".

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

#395

Post by arcticbull »

pvaldes wrote: post #294
arcticbull wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, one is the kind of waste you can drop a few oil drums of into Yucca Mountain and never have to worry about it again. On the other hand wind requires huge quantities of rare earth metals mined in open-air hellscapes in the far western reaches of China -- devastating the environment [1, 2]. So, why is it all mined in China you might ask, knowing rare earths are distributed all over the world? Specifically becau…

I wonder why they needed to borrow 1500 millions of euro just to make urgently a concrete tomb to enclose this kind of waste when we could just dump a few oil drums somewhere instead. Or just, ehem... dump it illegally in the sea for free.

Uh what? One's a disaster site, which needs expensive remediation. One's steady state generation of waste in a well-run reactor.

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

#396

Post by jackcviers3 »

dang wrote: post #277
jackcviers3 wrote: post #148

In light if how the U.S. is handling the pandemic, your concern is extremely valid.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24747057 .

The parent comment talked about political policy in the future putting lives at risk with regards to proper decommissioning of nuclear reactors. The administration's current policies towards the covid crisis are an example of the type of possible political irresponsibility the parent comment mentioned. I don't see this comment as a flame war or tangential. It's fine to remove it, of course, next time I'll add more substance to the comment. Hope you are having a good day, and thanks for the hard work on moderating this site.

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

#397

Post by HappyDreamer »

LinuxBender wrote: post #388
HappyDreamer wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [solar panels] creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses. Sounds misleading to me. A quick websearch and I found that currently they seem to be 10 x better than oil and coal etc: > Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found th…

It seems you don't like solar panels? I never said that. I'm saying that based on AOC's 100% plan, pretty much everything is off the table, meaning that the plan needs to be revised. I plan to have 30kw of solar panels in my next home and a large collection of LifePo4 batteries that also have a dependency on strip mining. I also plan to do some of my own mining (drilling, blasting) for zinc and silver.

Sorry I misinterpreted. How interesting with mining zinc and silver -- is that possibly related to the solar panels you'll add? I never met anyone who mines zinc and silver

LiFePO4 -- that's lithium iron phosphate batteries, then, zinc and silver makes me confused. One can use zinc and silver instead?

30 kw sounds nice -- I think my oven uses about 3 kw, and I guess then that 30 kw is more than enough for your whole house :-) which I suppose is the idea, obviously.

What do your neighbors think about your plans to mine zink and silver?

Or maybe your nearest neighbors are far away? (Or maybe you'll drill & blast far away from where you and any neighbors live?)

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