411–420 of 464 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't really make sense to talk about land usage that just so happens to be owned by a nuclear plant, or even certain fixed land requirements for a nuclear plant. It only makes sense to talk about the limiting behavior of land usage for various types of power plants.
Solar has hugely larger requirements than nuclear however you look at it, contrary to what was suggested above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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".
That's a completely inaccurate comparison - perpetual motion and faster-than-light violate fundamental physical laws as we understand them. Net-positive power from fusion is fully within the laws of physics – we've got an example in the daytime sky, and trillions in the nighttime sky. The difficulties with fusion come with shrinking it to a scale that humans can build.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's arguing (to paraphrase) "Because we've already incurred such costs we should continue or even expand the policy which caused them." Claiming that hazardous nuclear waste represents a fixed cost no matter how much you generate is simply absurd.
Do you have any data that says the cost (ie. money or security) is materially increased from this point forward given the space to store is truly small.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blurple and magenta LEDs seem to be on their way out last time I looked into growing lights. It is white (or white appearing) LEDs now, which are getting 190+ lumens per watt. The light spectrum is still tuned for plant growth efficiency, but it is a broader spectrum per LED rather than more specific spectrums from specific diodes. It is worth noting too that these newer white LEDs are spectrum efficient enough that…
190+ lm/W is still less than 50% efficiency. I don't understand how a white lamp can be tuned for plant growth efficiency, could you elaborate?
Just because a light appears white doesn't mean the spectrum is evenly distributed though, generally if you graph the color spectrum of these lights green is in a huge dip. If you go to page 13 of this data sheet they show show spectrum graphs. https://cdn.samsung.com/led/file/resource/2020/09/Data_Sheet... All of which appear white in real life. They may be more cool blue white or warmer reddish white, but white nonetheless. Especially with the intensity that they shine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Last time I checked France was a democratic nation. So was Belgium. Both of those have achieve majority nuclear power generation, and France over 70%." 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 to…
Uh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Nucl...
> 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.
This is overly simplistic. Eliminating carbon emissions is not just about generating more clean energy. It's about replacing the energy that fossil fuels currently provide. It's hard to do that with intermittent sources.
> 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.
Perhaps, if we have a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But unless that happens, we'll end up building nuclear power to fulfill off-peak demand. And since nuclear power is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it'll just make the bulk of renewables redundant.
If you have 100 GW of solar solar panels plus nuclear plants generating 100 GW for nighttime use, it's just as cheap to run the nuclear plants 24/7 and ditch the solar panels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 year decommissioning is a very pessimistic assumption. Also most new nuclear plants have operating lifetimes closer to 80 years than 55. You also have to adjust for the overproduction necessary to make intermittent sources a reliable primary provider of electricity. In far north or southern latitudes, angle of inclination is such that solar panels collect ~70-50% less energy than near the equator. This gets worse…
30 year decommissioning is somewhat optimistic average based on current plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFSTOR “For nuclear power plants governed by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, SAFSTOR (SAFe STORage) is one of the options for nuclear decommissioning of a shut down plant. During SAFSTOR the de-fuelled plant is monitored for up to sixty years before complete decontamination and dismantling of…
How did you arrive at these figures? I think you missed a conversion from pounds to tons.
Current global uranium consumption is in the hundreds of millions of pounds annually - hundreds of thousands of tons. And this is without reprocessing. Nuclear power already generates 10% electricity globally. Even if we assume a 200x increase in consumption from 200 million pounds to 20 billion pounds that still only 10 million tons of consumption annual. 100 trillion divided by 10 million is a lot more than 2,500.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stars and fusion nuclear weapons exist. And I'm only half joking. The energy yield of fusion is there and the basic physics are pretty well understood. Progress has been agonizingly slow but steady. We generally understand what needs to be done to get there, but it's a slow and complicated process that will take a long time and several more expensive, large-scale tests like ITER to push it along. The payoff is still…
>barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project The Manhattan project cost about $30 billion in today's dollars, I believe. We have IPOs that raise close to that amount of money these days (e.g. Alibaba). It's half a percent of federal spending in 2020 (admittedly not a normal year). GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation. Your matter of fact claim that there's not enough capital in toda…
This isn't how market cap works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vertical farm in a city fits in economical sense, as their market is there, while farmers have to haul their product to consumers.
I wonder does it actually do make economic sense? Like will the net from selling produce be larger than just renting the same floorspace for some other use? Be it residential, office, shops or manufacturing...
It does not make much sense to grow wheat, but it makes sense to grow spices or other products that are transported from afar and which can be grown local indoors instead. Also, those vertical(and indoor) farms use LEDs, that consume much less energy - not to mention, that plants do not need that much light, than what is needed for humans to feel comfortable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project The Manhattan project cost about $30 billion in today's dollars, I believe. We have IPOs that raise close to that amount of money these days (e.g. Alibaba). It's half a percent of federal spending in 2020 (admittedly not a normal year). GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation. Your matter of fact claim that there's not enough capital in toda…
> GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation. This isn't how market cap works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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".
> But compare it to [perpetual motion or faster-than-light space travel]. That's a completely inaccurate comparison - perpetual motion and faster-than-light violate fundamental physical laws as we understand them. Net-positive power from fusion is fully within the laws of physics – we've got an example in the daytime sky, and trillions in the nighttime sky. The difficulties with fusion come with shrinking it to a sca…
I understand the GP comment as saying "First commercial fusion power station construction will start 2050-2060" is different from "Perpetual motion machine construction will start in 2050-2060" or "FTL spaceship construction will start in 2050-2060" for the very reasons you gave (among others).
You read the GP as saying something different from what you are saying, but I think you are actually both saying the same thing.
