In response to all the nuclear power discussion in this thread, see thorium molten salt. We have had the technology since Oak Ridge in the 70s. We ignored it because the existing refinement infrastructure is conveniently "dual use" for nuclear weapons. It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to rep…
> E.g. how do you reach the necessary temps in a blast furnace without melting your heating element?
Induction heating? As long as some ferromagnetic material has a higher melting temperature than what you want to melt, this seems solvable.
Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.
Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.
It’s also funny how it was the environmental activists who were the ones who were powerful/influential enough to be “entirely responsible” for killing nuclear energy as opposed to be the poor old fossil fuel industry.
> Seriously though sometimes the cure is much worse than just handling the issues one at a time as we transition to a beautiful warm catastrophe/boon. This is a disgusting attitude. I'm sure you'll be safe in Alberta while Bangladesh drowns. Your ancestors benefitted from the industrial revolution, and now you want to reap all the benefits of climate change?
I don't live in Alberta you insensitive clod, and while I said those things somewhat tongue in cheek, you can choose to be disgusted or learn to stop worrying and love the change.
And that’s it? Just sink or swim, don’t even try to mitigate anything? That’s such a wild attitude.
And yet CO2 per capita is much lower in Germany than in the US. So Germany must also be doing something right.
Not for electricity production. Europeeans tend to have less disposable income and be less consumerist, smaller and better heated/insulated houses, less cars per household, &c.
> Not for electricity production.
A quick Google search suggests ~350g CO2 per KWh in Germany vs. ~400g in the US. Looks plausible to me. Germany uses coal but also has a very substantial share of renewables. Another quick search also shows that 60% of electricity in the US is from fossil fuels. The rest is nuclear and renewables in about equal amounts.
Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mi…
This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is? In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep hea…
Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmission infrastructure, rather than that cost being shared, which is insane.
Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mi…
You can build wind to compensate some of this. And of course a ton of short term storage. And then you build a bunch of cheap, inefficient gas peaker plants for the two weeks a year where neither are enough. At the moment it looks like that will be a lot cheaper than nuclear. But if nuclear gets cheaper, that’s also a great option!
Good points, all. But you'd still need to overbuild solar by quite a bit in order to make a reasonable amount in winter, in many areas.
In response to all the nuclear power discussion in this thread, see thorium molten salt. We have had the technology since Oak Ridge in the 70s. We ignored it because the existing refinement infrastructure is conveniently "dual use" for nuclear weapons. It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to rep…
> E.g. how do you reach the necessary temps in a blast furnace without melting your heating element? Induction heating? As long as some ferromagnetic material has a higher melting temperature than what you want to melt, this seems solvable.
Thanks, good point. It looks like induction furnaces are already in wide use, though they have some tradeoffs.
I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip…
How would AI be beneficial in your opinion?
I'm pretty confident AI will be at least as helpful here as a blockchain will be.
In response to all the nuclear power discussion in this thread, see thorium molten salt. We have had the technology since Oak Ridge in the 70s. We ignored it because the existing refinement infrastructure is conveniently "dual use" for nuclear weapons. It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to rep…
Another correction here, we have had functioning MSR since the 50s and thorium MSR since the 60s.
I find the more recent ones more fun because a) it's a shifting target, so you can find something new and b) you get to make people feel old! Let's see... the release of the film The Day After Tomorrow is closer to 'We begin bombing in five minutes' than it is to today.