Isn’t nuclear more stable and efficient than solar? Why is it not regarded as a solution
Because Zaporizhzhia is one artillery shell away from irradiating the Dniper River.
Solar energy solves global warming
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Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#32This is great, but also hopelessly naive for a very important reason. Check out this graph from the article:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
Note the trend line intersecting with the x axis in 1980. Now this:
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-sto...
The world was set to do everything we're doing today in the 80s. Except that the powers that be decided to extract every last dollar from fossil fuels, regardless of consequences like global warming. Decades of government subsidies for everything except solar and wind followed, creating a long tail of glacially slow price reductions for renewables. So we accept evolution and reject revolution because we can't see the strings controlling the marionette. I wrote about stuff like heat pumps and carbon capture in long emails to my friends in the 2000s, complete with prices and sources. Then had to wait 20 long years for the world to manifest those ideas in its own time. Which hinged on political close calls like Obama's reelection, which provided a brief safety net for electric car manufacturers among other things, and almost didn't happen. It took almost no time for his successor the former president to impose a 30% tariff on solar panels in 2018 in a last-ditch attempt to block us from cancelling our power bills.
The real challenge we're facing is that the wealthy of the world could have solved this yesterday for a relatively paltry investment but chose not to. The proof of that is in their continued downplaying of such causes as they play hard with rockets, Twitter, etc. This is the tragedy of the commons at scale. Similar to the problem of parents choosing for the good of their children individually but not collectively. In other words, unstoppable without a cultural awakening.
But I applaud the author's efforts.
Edit: just a little "proof" from Naked Gun 2 1/2, released in 1991 when this was already common knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Wk79i1gcg
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unsubsidized nuclear power is unfortunately really expensive everywhere independent from regulation and runs into the same problem from the opposite direction. You don’t save much money when you turn it off but energy demand isn’t constant so nuclear gets even more expensive per kWh the longer it sits idle. Worse you need to take them offline for long periods as in weeks for maintenance, refueling, etc. Locally you c…
Nuclear reactors are cheap. What is expensive is regulatory compliance, and regulatory boards changing the rules while the reactor is being constructed in place. A way around this is to buy a pre-fab reactor that has already made it through regulatory and was fabricated in a factory.
Building the reactor is a small fraction of the total cost. People love to talk about small modular reactors as if that’s the only cost but they still need actual turbines to generate power, electrical equipment, cooling, pumps, complex high pressure plumbing, giant buildings, spent fuel ponds, etc so the reactor’s themselves are not even the full construction cost to get power let alone the actual lifetime cost.
Equipment breaks down so you need to maintain, repair, and eventually replace it. Which is a large reason why you need roughly 500 people per GWh to run the things even without any regulations. You need not raw ore but concentrated u235 in complex and expensive to build fuel rods etc. You need lot’s of land near an abundant water source to cool them which is exactly the kind of places people want to live. Even when it breaks you still need to decommission them.
And that’s ignoring the need for someone to take on the risk of failure. Even when the public isn’t harmed nuclear accidents destroy expensive equipment and are expected to clean up. Accidents on average cost several Billion per GW, you might find cheaper insurance but don’t bet on it without subsidies.
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#34When considering synthetic chemicals made from solar energy, methane is probably one of the last you should consider. Making any type of chemical energy carrier comes with substantial losses, so whenever you can, using electricity directly is better. If you absolutely need a chemical energy carrier, the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest and you avoid all the direct air capture or other…
Failing to understand the enormous amount of methane infrastructure (natural gas) and the utility of reusing it is also a mistake IMO. There's got to be tens of trillions of dollars in deployed methane infrastructure. To suggest that's a weak argument is baffling. Economics are real.
There was just as much sunk cost into coal infrastructure, but that's not an argument against phasing out coal.
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#35When considering synthetic chemicals made from solar energy, methane is probably one of the last you should consider. Making any type of chemical energy carrier comes with substantial losses, so whenever you can, using electricity directly is better. If you absolutely need a chemical energy carrier, the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest and you avoid all the direct air capture or other…
The problem with hydrogen is the storage. Although electrolysis and other methods of generating hydrogen are fairly efficient, the cost to compress it is obscene. Sabatier production of Methane is comparable, however we already have infrastructure to use Methane and storage is a solved problem.
Methanol production requires methane as a synthesis gas so it just adds another step. Plant based methanol has all the same problems as ethanol. Until we are running electrified tractors and equipment we will probably be carbon positive when producing methanol. There are a few processes which are using waste from coal and concrete plants, but they are unlikely to scale enough to make Methane unnecessary.
Currently the best way to store surplus electricity are batteries and pumped hydro.
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#36The nice thing about methane is that it's not too energy dense, so you can sell it to your population like gasoline. You may not want to give the population mini-nukes or vacuum energy generation from EVOs. We don't need to use solar panels though, we already have exceedingly cheap energy generation in the form of nuclear power. We also have inexpensive ways of transmuting the nuclear waste. We don't really have a en…
You have to transport the energy you're generating from nuclear, and the US is a massive country with tons of sprawl. Solar doesn't need a grid. Sure it's not 24/7—besides making better batteries we can use less energy. That's political suicide to mention in this country though so we keep kicking the can down to the next generation. At some point humans will be forced to make do with less, but for now it's all a gravy train.
The key to a better future is to stop letting the boards of ExxonChevronShell completely own energy policy. Their own research surfaced the problem over half a century ago and their immediate reaction was to bury it and fund studies that downplayed it. In other countries it would be called corruption, but we call it lobbying.
I don't know what this "non-technical" environmentalism means, but have you ever stopped to consider that people are capable of opposing nuclear for reasons that aren't technologic? Almost all currently existing nuclear power generation in the US is privatized. Private companies only have a responsibility to the shareholders. Maybe such short-term optimization with something capable of long-term consequences doesn't sit right with people?
Sure enough we have spent 40 years following the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and have yet to build a proper, isolated location in which to store spent nuclear fuel. We store 88,000 metric tons of the stuff on-site at various reactors and the amount is increasing. France, Canada, and the Nordic countries are all further along that process than us despite our head-start. Two US generations have already kicked the can down the road for nuclear waste management, so I'm not sure "removing activists" will let "boards innovate and build".
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#37> In the future, we will still have CO2 credits. But instead of allowing companies to release CO2 into the air… Credits might allow companies to capture co2. The article then goes on to explain that solar + co2 capture results in methane. But isn't this at best co2 neutral? Since nearly all use-cases for methane would release the co2 again and would make the credits' comparison pointless? Besides that, will methane a…
Essentially all current petrochemical processes use methane as the primary feedstock, including my favorite, carbon fiber:
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/carbon-fiber...
You can similarly make diamond from atmospheric CO2 (very energy intensive however), which is a pretty stable material.
Hydrogen itself is very difficult to store and transport, but it's critical for things like making steel without fossil fuels and for ammonia fertilizer production. Currently it's all made via steam reforming of natural gas at the industrial point of use, so if you can make methane from air and water, you don't have to rebuild all that infrastructure.
It's implausible to expect much effect on reducing global warming, however, at best we'll be able to stabilize atmospheric CO2 (assuming we don't run into major natural positive feedbacks from permafrost melt and shallow marine sediment outgassing, anyway). Any such speculation is also predicated on elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, which doesn't seem to be likely for decades at best.
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#38Isn’t nuclear more stable and efficient than solar? Why is it not regarded as a solution
Nuclear power plants seem to take a long time to get right, which means they end up being very expensive.
As an example, consider the new Olkiluoto-3 nuclear plant built in Finland. That reactor was commission just a few months ago, but its build was 12 years behind schedule. The delay to that project saw the original 3 billion Euro price tag more than triple with a final cost closer to 11 billion.
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#39When considering synthetic chemicals made from solar energy, methane is probably one of the last you should consider. Making any type of chemical energy carrier comes with substantial losses, so whenever you can, using electricity directly is better. If you absolutely need a chemical energy carrier, the first one you will look at is hydrogen, because it's the simplest and you avoid all the direct air capture or other…
The problem with hydrogen is the storage. Although electrolysis and other methods of generating hydrogen are fairly efficient, the cost to compress it is obscene. Sabatier production of Methane is comparable, however we already have infrastructure to use Methane and storage is a solved problem. Methanol production requires methane as a synthesis gas so it just adds another step. Plant based methanol has all the same…
For static applications, hydrogen can be easily stored underground. Energy is used to compress it, but that energy can be recovered by running it through an expander (and if the compression/expansion is done in stages to approximate isothermal compression, the round trip efficiency of this can be high.)
Re: Solar energy solves global warming
#40This article assumed carbon capture from the air to form methane will risk depleting CO2 from the atmosphere. This methane is supposed to be used as an energy storage medium. ...wat? The proposed process is extremely wasteful and almost any other carbon source is much more available, nevermind other forms of energy storage. This might be reasonable on Mars, but why would we ever want to convert solar power to Methane…
> Am I missing something Considering reading your comment gave me whiplash after reading the article, one of us is. > extremely wasteful What's the waste? > almost any other carbon source is much more available More available than the air? > on a scale that changes the atmosphere Because we're filling the air ground and water with carbon and nitrous oxide poisons from burning more and more fossil fuels extracted out…
> What's the waste?
Any conversion from electrical to chemical energy is inherently lossy, and Methane would need to be burned later to release the energy. In general the less conversions needed, the better.
> More available than the air?
The air is 0.04% CO2, which in turn is mostly oxygen by weight. The biosphere is a much larger source and is self-recycling.
> WHY of this seems pretty clear to me.
I also got quite jaded and often see this at some attempt to save fossil-burning infrastructure, instead of truly adapting out energy use. For example maximizing use during the day and relying on a much smaller store in batteries, hydropower or heated salts at night. The premise of "energy anytime" might hurt us a lot.