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blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Energy

#81

Post by msandford »

transfire wrote: post #30
cjbenedikt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely! The issue is storage. There are many ways to create energy: solar, wind, water, nuclear (thorium!)...but storage is still unsolved. And Lithium is NOT the answer, not at the scale we need.

The storage problem is almost solved. Batteries/Supercaps with double the capacity, charge rate and lifespan of current Lithium-ions should be on the market soon.

That doesn't even close to solve the problem!

Lithium-ion batteries are still at least $100/kWh (probably more like $300/kWh) and assuming a useful life of 1000 charge/discharge cycles, you're talking between $0.10 and $0.30/kWh just for the STORAGE! That doesn't even take into account the cost of generating the energy to begin with, nor the losses that come with charging and discharging the battery, nor the capital cost on the inverter that absolutely isn't free and definitely doesn't last forever.

Until storage can be had for a few cents per kWh storage is an unsolved problem.

I suspect that it will continue to be an unsolved problem for quite some time. Not because it's impossibly hard, but because getting oil or gas or coal out of the ground is so easy and has such large energy gain (output energy / input energy) that you have to be very clever to beat it.

Re: Energy

#82

Post by sandGorgon »

P.S. I'm not an expert, but this has been in news media in India for a long time.

The reason that China and India are the only countries going after fission is because of a singular element - Thorium. Both India and China have huge reserves of thorium that can be unlocked with molten salt reactors that are unviable anywhere else in the world (including the US, which gave up on this a long time ago[1]). Australia does have large reserves of thorium, but its projected energy needs are dwarfed by India and China's.

China is way ahead than India on this front with more than a billion dollars managed by Jiang Mianheng to conduct research into these new reactors. And which is why India is bending over backwards to sign the India-US Civil Nuclear Energy treaty.

Interestingly, a US company, Thorcon [2], has built a "hackable" MSR - though I dont know if it is any good.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-... [2] http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-to-g...

Re: Energy

#83

Post by mikeash »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #66
mikeash wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Infinite half-life" basically means an isotope is stable. Half life is only one piece of the radioactivity story. Knowing how isotopes decay is also important - alpha, beta decay, spontaneous fission, etc - these differences matter a great deal w.r.t. how to safely handle and store spent fuel. And we don't just "chuck it in a landfill" - here is a good place to start to learn a bit more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

I think you misunderstand my point. I'm saying that modern industry produces a vast amount of poisons with an infinite half life, because they're chemical poisons rather than radioactive poisons. And despite the fact that they last essentially forever, we don't worry about things like deep geological repositories, we just construct reasonably contained landfills and toss the stuff in.

Re: Energy

#84

Post by beat »

DennisP wrote: post #55
beat wrote: post #20

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…

So how small a reactor? And what sort of cost, what sort of setup time, what sort of safety constraints (ie, current reactors are generally water-cooled and need access to large bodies of water)? It's possible to trim the cost of reactors from the billions to the millions, maybe, but how many millions?

Certainly, solar with batteries is a lot more expensive - but to my point, startup cost is low. Latency, or bandwidth? The long-term cost/kwh may be higher for solar, but the short-term startup expense will be much lower, unless you can get the factory-built reactors down into the thousands rather than millions of dollars.

If nuclear is cheaper than solar in a decade or two, but costs ten times as much in the short run, there's a tremendous advantage to solar, battery cost or not. Opportunity cost matters tremendously.

Re: Energy

#85

Post by rwcarlsen »

andy_ppp wrote: post #67
rwcarlsen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also the somewhat wide range is disturbing! The NRC estimates costs for decommissioning a nuclear power plant range from $280-$612 million.

The cost will vary significantly from plant to plant - this range is likely due to plant-to-plant variation - not uncertainty in the cost for any single plant. Do you have a citation/reference for that?

Re: Energy

#86

Post by Mz »

There is actually a lot we could do in terms of promoting passive solar -- i.e. a lifestyle and design-based approach that uses less energy to get the same results. In a finite world, I really wish passive solar got a lot more attention than it does. There are serious costs involved in burning ever more energy. Passive solar brilliantly sidesteps that inconvenient physics-based fact.

Re: Energy

#87

Post by curtis »

andy_ppp wrote: post #58
rwcarlsen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Author... Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!

Sellafield isn't an ordinary nuclear power station. It was part of the UK's nuclear weapons program and contained some of the UK's earliest (maybe the earliest) nuclear reactors.

It's not going to be representative of the decommissioning costs of modern generation II or generation III reactors.

Re: Energy

#88

Post by mikeash »

DanBC wrote: post #63
mikeash wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

How do I answer people who say that kind of thinking is what led to the fucking mess that is Sellafield? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365 Behind schedule and over budget is totally normal of UK big projects. But still, £58bn is a lot of money to fix something that's not a big problem.

Much of that high cost is because the waste is treated so delicately, while equally deadly non-nuclear waste is treated with much less care.

I imagine there have been a lot of places in your country (as with any industrialized country) that have been horribly contaminated with non-nuclear pollution, then cleaned up. While these events can certainly be used as an argument for taking more care, they're almost never used as an argument to give up on the whole idea of industry.

Nuclear waste is bad, but it doesn't seem to be on the level of "we must lock this up so securely that God Himself cannot access it" as people seem to try for.

Re: Energy

#89

Post by andy_ppp »

rwcarlsen wrote: post #85
andy_ppp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the somewhat wide range is disturbing! The NRC estimates costs for decommissioning a nuclear power plant range from $280-$612 million.

The cost will vary significantly from plant to plant - this range is likely due to plant-to-plant variation - not uncertainty in the cost for any single plant. Do you have a citation/reference for that?

Yeah, sure, it's linked above which is why I didn't reference it:

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html

Cost does seem quite high right?

Re: Energy

#90

Post by jjtheblunt »

falsestprophet wrote: post #29

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.

Not meant to be snarky, but why does Mr Altman assume folks care what he's confident about regarding things outside his expertise in software and startups? I genuinely wonder.
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