101–110 of 287 posts
Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual. Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc. Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.…
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"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.
Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual. Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc. Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.…
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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.
"Poisons" is subjective. Practially all the stable bi-products are naturally occuring in nature and many of them have all sorts of uses [1] [2]. The chemical toxicity of spent nuclear fuel (excluding radioactivity issues) is not worse than many other industrial processes in general. Spent nuclear fuel definitely needs to be treated/handled carefully, but what you say is not a "nuclear" problem - rather it is a 21 cen…
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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?
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.
There is a huge infrastructure cost involved in upgrading, building new or knocking down and rebuilding non-passive solar structures. Now, giving tax breaks to new construction that is passive would be great, but it wont put a dent in the energy consumption issue.
I say I agree with you, because I think that saying "cheap energy is the future" would have been 100% as valid a statement in 1965 as it is in 2015. Fifty years and a HUGE series of energy improvements later and we're still chasing the cheap energy dream. Guess what? Oil is cheap. And relative to cutting down wood to heat your house with a fireplace (a la most of human history) current solar is absurdly cheap.
What we need, and Musk knows this better than anyone, is better batteries to store energy when we're not using it more efficiently. Batteries will revolutionize the world, and Sam would do well to pay attention to what Musk is doing.
Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual. Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc. Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.…
The decentralization of production usually leads to a greater cost per unit due to economies of scale. This may not be true for solar, but it certainly is for nuclear, hydro, geothermal and probably wind. There are regions in our planet that don't get many hours of sunlight, how should they produce energy there?
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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 bandwidt…
UPower's design doesn't require a large body of water: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/startup-d...
For setup you deliver it with a truck and bury it. Other modular nuclear designs are a bit bigger but still in the range of small natural gas plants, which are competing quite well.
If Helion works out then fission and solar will both be mostly obsolete. They'd be 50MW plants, retailing power at four cents per kWh, with no significant safety concerns.
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…
That wouldn't work with current nuclear reactors, whose startup / shutdown sequences take hours. Typically, the grid operator runs nuclear plants at nearly 100% 24/7 (so called "baseload") due to this.
I'd be curious how truck-sized reactors work and whether or not you could operate them as load-followers rather than baseload. That would make them extremely attractive for replacing natural gas peakers, especially as more wind / solar get onto the grid.