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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

#51

Post by bhawks »

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.

Transmission is a major source of logistical and operational complexity for a power grid. Routing energy across long distances and accounting for changing generation and consumption patterns are problems many intelligent people have spent their careers optimizing the various trade offs.

> Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else

There are numbers of locations that would be great sources of geothermal power that have literally no way of transmitting that power. Build a mining operation there, no one would notice or care.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#52

Post by goodpoint »

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…

> how does the nuclear power hype train continue?

1) The conglomerates profiting from nuclear are not the same profiting from renewable energy.

2) Renewables can be very decentralized. Nuclear is the most centralized. This changes the balance of power.

3) A small set of people paid to push for some ideas on the Internet can shift public opinion a lot.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#53

Post by Manuel_D »

manwe150 wrote: post #49
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…

If output is the same, and HVDC is now available, should we actually start building them in the Arctic? Pros: no population centers, lots of cooling, no hurricanes. Cons?

Transmission losses and the cost of building thousands of miles of HVDC. Just build them where there is demand for energy, and save the money that would otherwise be spent on transmission infrastructure. Not to mention the difficult logistics of constructing power plants in the middle of nowhere.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#54

Post by IshKebab »

bhawks wrote: post #51
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.

Transmission is a major source of logistical and operational complexity for a power grid. Routing energy across long distances and accounting for changing generation and consumption patterns are problems many intelligent people have spent their careers optimizing the various trade offs. > Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else There are…

People build aluminium plants and data centres in those places, so yes they would care.

There really isn't any "spare energy" that can be used for guilt-free bitcoin mining.

At least not on an industrial scale. Some countries use resistive electric heating for some domestic heating and you could replace that with mining. That's a small edge case though.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#55

Post by fsckboy »

IshKebab wrote: post #54
bhawks wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission is a major source of logistical and operational complexity for a power grid. Routing energy across long distances and accounting for changing generation and consumption patterns are problems many intelligent people have spent their careers optimizing the various trade offs. > Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else There are…

People build aluminium plants and data centres in those places, so yes they would care. There really isn't any "spare energy" that can be used for guilt-free bitcoin mining. At least not on an industrial scale. Some countries use resistive electric heating for some domestic heating and you could replace that with mining. That's a small edge case though.

another way to arrive at your same conclusion, top down if you will, is to point out that the whole idea behind Proof Of Work is to perform an expensive operation, "wasting" it so to speak, on the mining of that coin. If BTC costs $40K+ to mine, then till you're (collectively) "wasting" that much work to mine it, more miners will be incented to join in.

If you come up with a scheme to make economic dual use of the Work (mine bitcoin and heat houses) then it will no longer cost enough Work and again, more mining will be incented till the price equalizes again.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#56

Post by freeflight »

TheDudeMan wrote: post #36
freeflight wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fission industry has seen literally whole decades of massive boosts.

Are you saying it doesn't still need more?

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Some of the largest economies on this planet have poured massive resources into fission for literally decades. Whatever we might discover/improve, we already did, anything past that seems to have quite diminishing returns.

Particularly compared to other technological fields that didn't even get remotely the same levels of funding and time investment.

Which means there's much more potential there for actually innovative breakthroughs.

Case in point: Grid-scale storage was for the longest time a field that saw barely any attention, it's quite underdeveloped. As the common consensus was that fission will deliver all the electricity we would ever need.

Now we have plenty of renewables, but we lack the storage to fully utilize them. Which means if we get grid-storage right, we have already solved a very big part of the problem.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#57

Post by freeflight »

trident5000 wrote: post #33
freeflight wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

El Salvador adopted BC as an official legal tender, the first and only country to do so. Meanwhile, around the same time, China dropped it wholesale.

El Salvador has 6 million people, China has around 1.4 billion people.

Re: Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

#58

Post by mk81 »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #48
mk81 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy... How nice to ignore inconvenient facts like Europe's skyrocketing energy costs.

Driven mainly by gas costs.

The demand for gas is increasing because the wind isn't blowing as much as they thought it would. You still need the entire fossil generation system as a backup for renewables for when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow. Until there is grid scale electrical energy storage, renewables simply increase the cost of the whole system.
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