I wonder what environmental impact truly large-scale solar energy will have. In that it is moving energy away from where it would usually fall on the ground/plants, thus reducing heat, less rising air, less photosynthesis etc. Perhaps additionally aid global cooling? Though that energy will mostly end up as heat anyway.
(Of course it's far better for the environment than present coal/petrol/gas/wood, and their energy initially came from the sun anyway, but it will still have some environmental impact.)
Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few tho…
> Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer?
That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.
This is fantastic. Nuclear fission suffers from a hindenberg-type PR problem, where incidents from early design mistakes and poor choices color the opinions of people even though modern reactor designs are safe, efficient, and essentially clean other than small amounts of waste.
The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from "infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get more worried?
Who says I'm not worried about all the "bad" things(tm)? To be honest I'm just asking the question that while we can all say "isn't it great how safe nuclear is" we still haven't 100% figured out the waste issue. Fusion... well I'll believe it when it's powering my DeLorean.
I'm not saying you're not worried, or trying to pull one of those "but this is worse, so you must only worry about it!" things. I'm just saying that you don't need to "solve" the problem, as demonstrated by how we deal with other toxic waste. Yeah, chucking it in a landfill and calling it good isn't ideal, but it's not terrible if your landfill is reasonably well designed. Nuclear waste is a problem, but not a big one, and not big enough that the continued use of nuclear power should be gated on some sort of definitive solution.
I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up. Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up. Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require…
Gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors take a long time. Ycombinator is investing in factory-produced reactors that fit in a truck. There are quite a few other companies working on small factory-produced reactors.
Solar with batteries is a lot more expensive than solar alone. Solar is doing well right now with natural gas backup, but a lot of us would like to avoid fossil entirely. Solar with nuclear backup might be a great combination, assuming demand correlates reasonably well with daylight hours.
I worked on renewable energy projects a few years back, and while the idea of a large disruptive technology development sounds awesome, the reality is that there are already a plethora of renewable energy turbines and designs that would greatly improve the world... But the engineers and inventors running around with these ideas have no idea how to go from a small scale proof of concept into a fully built out manufact…
Surely there's a country hungry for energy somewhere without all the red tape?
Much of the waste problem can be solved by using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel. This isn't currently done, but there's no big technical reason it couldn't be. For what remains after that, well, there's nothing particularly wrong with sticking it in some extremely sturdy armored containers, sticking the containers in a shed, surrounding the shed with a razor-wire fence, and stationing a couple of guards a…
It's not paranoia, it's a real issue with that waste. We have no working waste solution as of today. We have no working long term storage solution as of today. We have not priced the cost of long term storage/plant decomissioning etc at the full cost into the price of nuclear power - that is for most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dealing-with-ass...
What's wrong with copying the solution used for all the other toxic waste modern industry produces?
We have no working long term solution for storing arsenic, but people mostly seem fine with "just dispose of it in a way where it doesn't leech into the groundwater" and not the crazy restrictions everyone wants to put on nuclear waste storage.
Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few tho…
Power plants fund their own decommissioning [1]. And they also (in a way) already pay for disposal - a 1 mill per kWh fee on all energy generated payed to the federal govermnent in exchange for the feds taking responsibility for disposal [2]. This fee has been paid for decades - the industry has no problem supporting that level of disposal cost (and could even afford a higher fee if necessary). There has been an enor…
I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK:
The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy (i.e. terrestrial atomic generation and energy from sun’s fusion). It's silly to describe solar as atomic energy from sun’s fusion as a distinct category from carbon-based energy, because of course carbon-based energy was formed by capturing solar energy from the sun's fusion.
There's certainly a lot less latency from atomic reaction to harvested energy though :D
I wonder what environmental impact truly large-scale solar energy will have. In that it is moving energy away from where it would usually fall on the ground/plants, thus reducing heat, less rising air, less photosynthesis etc. Perhaps additionally aid global cooling? Though that energy will mostly end up as heat anyway. (Of course it's far better for the environment than present coal/petrol/gas/wood, and their energy…
My impression was that the vast majority of sunlight Earth receives is wasted, and that solar panels just gobble up the waste (so long as they're built in, say, deserts or other places where they're not blocking out a whole lot of flora/fauna).
Wind and hydroelectric, on the other hand, could very well have significant environmental impacts if deployed on a sufficiently-large scale, despite being technically "clean" energy (aside from the non-clean energy and materials used in their construction).