381–390 of 464 posts
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When I read that timeline, it doesn't sound serious to me. If you're planning to do something in 40 years, then you don't have the faintest clue how to do it now, which means you don't know when you will know how to do it. It could be 5 years or 1,000 or never. You don't know what you don't know.
We have fusion making consistent and significant gains right now.
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The issue as I see it is that pretty much nobody is looking at decarbonizing a grid, money be damned. Unless your power production is run by the government, generation is done by companies looking to make a profit. Solar and wind companies don't mind in the slightest that they're screwing up the business model of nuclear. The fact that their production is intermittent isn't important to them -- it's already accounted…
Introduce carbon taxes and all of a sudden nuclear becomes a lot more viable. Existing plans for renewables are for them to exist in a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplementing them when the conditions are right. Make it so that using fossil fuels for even 20% or 10% of electricity generation is prohibitively expensive, and people will switch to nuclear power. Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So wa…
That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more competitive now. Nobody is building more nuclear right now. True, there's paranoia, but there's also economics.
And I'm not talking about fossil fuels either.
Here's what I expect to happen today with a carbon tax: it'll kill fossil fuels, and give a huge boost to renewables. Nuclear won't benefit nearly as much, because renewables can sell each GW/h cheaper and are much faster and easier to build. We'll get a grid full of solar panels and wind, and probably serious instability. This is because the people that build powerplants don't care about the system as a whole, but about making profit within it.
At that point you can subsidize nuclear, heavily tax renewables, or subsidize storage. My view is that the last one is the long term solution because nuclear won't outcompete renewables long term.
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"First commercial fusion power station will start construction between 2050 and 2060" is mostly guess, but it is an educated guess based on some trends/predictions/achieved work. But compare it to "First commercial perpetum mobile power station will start construction between 2050 and 2060" or "First FTL spaceship will be launched in 2050s".
The educated guess for the last 50 years was 20-30 years away
They may not "feed a city" in a raw caloric/survival sense, but they're certainly consumed in cities and if that continues to be true, they'll be grown somewhere.
The question shouldn't be "can we grow subsistence crops vertically?"
Rather, the question is whether vertical farming can provide any crop more efficiently along any of several axes (and at sufficient scale for us to bother talking about). If something can be usefully grown vertically, netting us realizable gains in terms of cost, land use, freshness, price, carbon, or some other metric, then by all means, why not?
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Not. Nowhere has it done well. It's just too complex with too many interdependent parts. Construction has proved to be beyond the competency of those trying to build plants. And now, it's just too late. The iteration time for nuclear designs is measured in decades, going up against renewable and storage technologies iterating in periods of a few years. Fusion would make fission look dead simple. If fission reactors c…
It was an honest question. I don't know which specific regulations, I've never built one but I have heard those who did lament the cost and trouble in even obtaining a site. From what I can see fission reactors are doing just fine in France and Belgium. I don't know the specific numbers but the French don't seem worse off economically, despite having the greenest grid on the planet. Fission has a number of disadvanta…
They aren't, France has had nuclear for geopolitical reasons, not primarily economic ones. And now that these plants are old, they won't be replaced with new ones (save 1 big project that is already way over budget and won't be price competitive once it is live).
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My guess is that counterintuitively but unsurprisingly, you actually want to use crops that were previously inefficient to grow. Low yields per acre crops are more suitable to indoor vertical farming because of the benefit climate control, and lack of pests provides.
I don’t understand why those would preferentially help low yield crops more than high yield crops. That would be very surprising to me.
If a crop is easy to grow, that means it’s able to handle: 1. Variable sunlight conditions; 2. Variable water conditions; 3. Handle bugs, viruses; and 4. Variable climate conditions.
Low yield crops are problematic because they cannot handle variability. Using an indoor facility is equally expensive if you program the conditions to be variable or to be relatively strict. Additionally, a low yield crop is typically more expensive than a high yield crop.
As such, you would rather program the indoor facility’s conditions to be relatively strict and grow a typically low yield crop, get significantly better yield and compete on price.
Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. In that case, there’s not much sustainable about it. This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only sources of…
Now try planting something there....
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It was a leading question, pretending to claim that regulation was the cause. Nice walkback, though. Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them. Fission has some disadvantages over fusion, but those disadvantages won't make fusion cheaper than fission (the costs of fuel and was…
> Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them. This is a political problem which has nothing to do to with technology or costs themselves. Most infrastructures are aging and in a bad state in France, and the skills and knowledge to build or replace it has long been lost. Add on…
No, nowhere in the world is nuclear power economically competitive. Construction costs are about 3x-4x the cost per kW compared to solar or wind. [0 page 11][1]
> nuclear is doing fine and growing in many countries, including China.
No, net nuclear plants in Asia are not increasing. [0 page 4]
[0] https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.69857...
Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. In that case, there’s not much sustainable about it. This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only sources of…
I mean if I put on my idealist sci fi glasses, I can see a future where we have infinite energy for free, in which case we will see a lot more energy-wasteful endeavours like vertical farms, air conditioning and cryptocurrencies. But we're not there yet, and we won't be there yet for a long time.
Energy production, also with renewables, increases year over year, but keeping right on it is energy consumption.
Examples from my own country. We're building big wind farms in the North Sea. But at the same time, Google and co are building data centers that use up a lot of their capacity already. And another thing happening at the same time is a push to reduce our dependency on natural gas for heating and cooking (because emissions and international politics / dependency on Russia). And the other push is towards electric vehicles. So thirst for electricity only goes up, probably faster than new energy sources can be built (renewable or otherwise).
This trend will continue, wouldn't be surprised if electricity consumption will double in the next decade.