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Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

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Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#31

Post by cratermoon »

Manuel_D wrote: post #28
cratermoon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable . More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source tha…

You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016…

Where are the production, commercially viable uranium-from-seawater plants now?

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#33

Post by trident5000 »

freeflight wrote: post #29
trident5000 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue really comes down to that some people think its a waste of energy and some people do not. Im in the do not think its a waste camp. And as mentioned above, the hash rate is not an infinite black hole, it levels off as the price levels off regardless of userbase.

> The issue really comes down to that some people think its a waste of energy and some people do not. That's not the only issue, another is how BC did not really deliver on what it originally promised. Instead, the whole cryptomarket seems to have simply turned a massive speculative market with more manipulation going on than any other financial market. So all these high and noble goals crypto originally started out…

I think twitter announced bitcoin tipping last week and we have nations adopting it as a national currency (both wide scale implementations). I dont know how you can arrive at a "non delivery" conclusion.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#34

Post by jasonlaramburu »

cratermoon wrote: post #31
Manuel_D wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016…

Where are the production, commercially viable uranium-from-seawater plants now?

There are none. Only one or two lab bench scale reactors at universities.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#35

Post by Manuel_D »

cratermoon wrote: post #31
Manuel_D wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016…

Where are the production, commercially viable uranium-from-seawater plants now?

The Pacific Northridge National Laboratory was able to extract uranium from seawater at $200/lb, as per the linked article. This is an order of magnitude greater than the price of conventional extraction, so it makes no sense for commercial providers. But uranium extraction amounts to a negligible fraction of the cost of nuclear power, so even if economies of scale fail to bring the price down this amounts a fraction of a cent increase in the cost per KWh. Not to mention there's at least hundreds of years worth - thousand of years if we use reprocessing - worth of conventionally accessible uranium.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#37

Post by jimbob45 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

I've been a huge crypto skeptic for a while now, but I've actually changed my tune a bit in that I believe there is a purpose for crypto in the backend of our financial system, given how generally insane settlement procedures are today. But long term, proof-of-work is a definite dead end. I'm not sure if Bitcoin will eventually collapse, or of it will find a way to transition to some other proof mechanism before it d…

>I believe there is a purpose for crypto in the backend of our financial system

That seems paradoxical to me. The power of blockchain (to me, okay, I'm no blockchain expert, I'm barely a novice) comes from the number of people publicly using your blockchain because every user added makes it that much more difficult to execute a 51%-style attack on the blockchain.

Stuffing blockchain under the rug by placing it exclusively on the back-end seems like you wouldn't actually be having people use it in a way that wouldn't be just as useful by including a hash on each transaction in your transaction DB. If we're being honest, the people "trading" cryptocurrencies on the current exchanges are antithetical to what crypto is about because they're not actually trading cryptocurrencies - they're trading the rights to the cryptocurrencies owned by the exchange. By centralizing the ownership of the cryptocurrencies to the exchanges instead of using their own wallet, they're again opening the gates further to a 51% attack.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#38

Post by jasonlaramburu »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #20

This argument doesn't make any sense. Electricity is really easy to transmit across the power grid. There is no such thing as an isolated power plant with excess electricity. Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.

Virtually all major utilities in the US also offer renewable energy credits (RECs) for a fee which guarantee a given number of kWhs were produced with 100% renewable energy.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#39

Post by TheDudeMan »

cratermoon wrote: post #22
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #20

This argument doesn't make any sense. Electricity is really easy to transmit across the power grid. There is no such thing as an isolated power plant with excess electricity. Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.

Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable . More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source tha…

In many regions, solar is not a viable option. The other renewables cannot compete in terms of scale. We should have been innovating in fission for the last 40 years, but we weren't. Stupid. Fusion almost seems more likely than large-scale fission growth at this point.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#40

Post by sofixa »

cratermoon wrote: post #22
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #20

This argument doesn't make any sense. Electricity is really easy to transmit across the power grid. There is no such thing as an isolated power plant with excess electricity. Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.

Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable . More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source tha…

Nuclear is stable and doesn't require enormous storage which many localities don't have the capacity, resources or place to build.

Furthermore, full decomissioning and waste storage costs are included for the whole lifecycle, so that argument is moot.

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