291–300 of 632 posts
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What's depressing is that you'd need ten of these giant power plants to power Bitcoin mining. And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
You'll need three times more to power all the standby devices in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to powering down their tv/console when they stop using it. People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is charged.
Edit: Found one myself: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
Interestingly gold mining also uses more electricity than Bitcoin mining and that doesn't even include the associated costs of pollution, cleanups etc. Gold also isn't a network that can transfer value. On the other hand some of it is used in industrial applications.
Good job Finland. I respect the opinions of the environmentalists and agree with most of what they say, but until we have something more reliable that can put out power 24/7 year round, we need more new, modern nuclear plants.
Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.
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Electrification goes beyond cars. Think of how much fuel they need for heat in Finland. Electrification means replacing that fuel with electricity. And many reactors are able to modulate their output, either by absorbing neutrons to slow the chain reaction, or by letting steam bypass the turbines. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-flexi...
We (Finland) are probably not going to move towards electric heating to any significant degree. Currently direct (resistive) electric is already the most common means of heating in single-family homes and other low-density residential buildings. Heat pumps are fortunately becoming popular especially in new development, and with them a significant reduction of electricity use compared to direct electric. For condos an…
Its operating cost will necessarily be quite a bit more than solar, but it works in the Arctic winter, 24x7, and provides cogen heat.
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Bitcoin's energy use can't balloon arbitrarily large. It's tightly constrained by the miner reward, which is getting cut in half every four years (the non fee part, which is currently less than 2% of the total reward). Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost en…
> It's tightly constrained by the miner reward reward in a currency for which you buy the energy. This takes into account the current btc/eur price in finland, if that's where you buy the energy, and that's not guaranteed to halve either.
But bitcoin is currently about a $1 trillion asset class, and growth of it's price has been slowly logarithmically for years. Most bullish cases suggest an eventual value of $10 trillion (in line with gold) to $100 trillion (in line with global bond market). But it's likely going to take decades (with several halving cycles) to get there.
Unless you're suggesting that it's likely to balloon in value even more and/or fast than that, I don't see mining ever becoming the biggest problem we have to deal with. Especially since bitcoin holders don't see PoW mining as a liability, but as a mission critical feature of the system.
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They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not. China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans. Russia has reactor building capabilitie…
This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but nobody knows how many of those will actually ever be built or operated. There is anyway not fuel for that many, at present. It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually…
What do you mean there isn't enough fuel? Not enough pellets/pebbles? Well ofcourse.. there is only 2 operational reactors right now... not enough uranium? Yeah no. There is way more than enough uranium to fuel their projected fleet and it's not like they are building it tomorrow, it's probably going to take until around 2050 to complete.
China has a track record of saying they will do something and then actually doing it, I'm inclined to believe they will make good on that number.
I get that people don't like China but lets be serious, no-one else is actually as serious about nuclear power as them right now.
I'm pro-nuclear, but having been following this for a long time and it's not exactly a model that's leading the way. Especially as I'm in the UK, and we decided to build a copy of it (Hinckley Point) even after all the flaws become known.
We're doing it a lot better though. Progress has been good.
Now we should figure out where to build third! It should go even better.
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At the very least we should stop shutting down current nuclear power plants. Any newly built renewable generation should be used to retire fossil fuel plants first , and once those are gone then we can consider retiring (current) nuclear.
they have an EOL for a reason...
Yes there are unremplacable parts in a nuclear reactor, but if it's measured to be safe to continue, then there is no reason to respect the initial EOL.
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By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shoul…
Right. But remember, not all forms of green energy generation are equal. Wind and solar need some dispatchable source as a backup. Hydro works, if you have it. But it's geographically limited. Gas is the typical backup source, but that emits carbon. Nuclear, as it stands, is the only solution to decarbonizing the energy grid for much of the world. Until some breakthrough in energy storage transpires, or fusion become…
Storage cost is falling much faster, even, than solar and wind generation. The only question today is whether to put a euro into solar or wind now, or into storage that will be much cheaper next year. Thus far, in most places, the former is still favored. More carbon tax can help move the choice the other way.
As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve also as storage. That their round-trip efficiency is less than, say, hydro or batteries matters little where they rarely need to be used for that.