251–260 of 466 posts
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That’s all well and good if you reach stability below a level that is sustainable. We aren’t going to be anywhere near that from an environmental point of view.
And whybdo you believe that? We will never surpass 12 billion by most estimates. Where is the sustainability point?
I am going to need some help on this one as my knowledge on physics is limited: What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale? I desperately want nuclear fusion to work because nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone. It's also 500% more important…
> nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone I assume by "energy crisis" you mean "how do we continue to generate energy while drastically decreasing climate effects"? Because if we're not worried about climate there's no looming energy crisis. There's plenty of oil, gas, and coal out there still. And…
Maybe one of them will work out. Do you want to bet the planet on that?
> Plus, carbon capture for fossil fuel electrical generation is possible, just expensive, and not all fossil fuels are equally bad for the climate, so possibly carbon capture + cleaner fossils could be part of the future, too?
Again, maybe.
Yes, there are a bunch of other things that might work out. But fusion is the possibility that's closest to proven. Surely it's worth trying? If it turns out we figure out a storage mechanism that's good enough to make solar viable (say), great. But let's not abandon one of our most promising approaches until we're sure.
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Given the opposition from our left to nuclear and painting any nuclear proponent as a right-wing science denier trying to defund renewable energy I’m not sure what we can do. Michael Schellenberger has been pilloried by our left despite the decades he put into different approaches before arriving at his nuclear advocacy (and perhaps also deeming for a lot of the climate change doom and gloom as alarmists for the 12 y…
Viewing this in terms of left-right politics rather than in terms of hard data is one of the primary reasons that nuclear fails again and again as it is tried in the West. The problem isn't politics, the problem is construction logistics. Nobody knows how to build large projects effectively anymore, whether it's the Big Dig or something super complicated like miles of piping with precision welds and specialized concr…
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>This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is at best many decades away. So while I think fusion energy has the potential to transform energy generation, and by extent everything about our life, it's wrong to assume renewables aren't probably…
Important distinction here: nobody actually cares or wants power that is baseload. In some cases it can actually be a bad thing. The property you really want is “dispatchable”. There when you want it. Not when you don’t.
That doesn't make sense. At all hours of the day there is some demand on the grid:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
If you only have to store for the fluctuations vs. having to store all night you end up with massively less storage.
Electric cars won't do it either. There are less than 300 million registered vehicles in the US and a car battery holds about 100 kWh. That's 30 billion kWh and overnight demand may be as high as 5 billion kWh/night. You'd need an extremely high compliance rate to pull that off.
But seasonal productivity fluctuations are the bigger issue with solar and wind. You might get way more power in July than you need and way less in January -- wind is also seasonal, but the peak month varies by region. You're not going to store months and months worth of electricity in cars and even grid storage facilities would become cost-prohibitive, and you can't reset a nuclear reactor on a weekly basis, but one or two starts a year might be achievable if you design for it. Currently that's not legal:
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nu...
I thought Lawrence Livermore laboratory does some cutting edge experiments on fusion and I read articles about how they are hoping to get some breakthrough. Is this new thing supposed to actually help take the tech forward or achieve something we havent achieved so far?
> […] prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy […]
From Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p6jrlbUOuuOCHnhR9fcsvnQJl4d... "Most of the power (~100 MW on ITER) released in SOL flows in an extremely narrow channel ~1 mm" wow
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I'm also a fusion power fanboy but >nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is a…
I would like to see some models on how solar power could work in northern cities, or honestly any city. The NYC metro area has over 23 million residents and there is essentially zero space for a solar farm. In the winter it's cloudy almost all day and there are only 9 hours of sunlight. Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro…
Generally, low latitude places want more solar + batteries, high latitude ones want more wind + hydrogen. When optimizing with these four, plus nuclear, with the costs at that site, nuclear typically optimizes to 0%.