It is hard to take peoples arguments of cost seriously when governments around the world are printing fiat at alarming rates. Covid has proven that where there is a will the money can be found.
Activists who embrace nuclear power
311–320 of 598 posts
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#312According to the Department of Energy, nuclear energy creates minimal waste, has a small land footprint, and is cleaner for the air. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-cle... Interestingly: “ All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!”
Cleaner than than the air compared to what? Coal? No shit. How about the cost compared to solar and wind? Oh, don't want to talk about that? I wonder how much nuclear waste solar and wind creates.
Nuclear waste is nuclear fuel
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with radioactive waste is more of a political and emotional problem than a real one. The amount of waste is rather small and it's not like it will irradiate you from a kilometre away :-). It can be stored in safe containers and buried in stable geological sites or even stored temporarily for many years in storage houses and maybe later re-used in types of reactors that will be able to recycle the spent fuel…
The issue for me is not quantity but time. 1000-10,000 (or even much longer) years for decay is an incredible amount of time for the human race. Written language only appeared ~5500 years ago. Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?
Nuclear waste occurs naturally well before humans created it, I think we will manage
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desert solar is certainly going to be part of the story, but I can’t imagine that we can feasibly power the whole country with desert solar alone, and I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. Consider even the overhead of dealing…
> I don’t think residential solar will be a significant contributor because you lose the efficiencies of scale afforded by acres and acres of collocated, homogeneous, ground-level panels for construction, maintenance, and operation. But what you lost in scale you gain in: - Lack of distribution costs. Roof-top solar (esp. when combined with storage) can be consumed at the point of generation. - Distribution of mainte…
> Lack of distribution costs
What are the "distribution costs"? Presumably any cost besides the cost of infrastructure to connect to the grid are negligible, and you have to pay the infrastructure cost anyway (or rather, if you pay to over provision on production and storage such that you can be truly off-grid, then you're going to be paying far more than the infrastructure costs).
> Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.
I doubt it. First of all, making plans based on some unknown innovation seems, uh, unwise to put it nicely. Secondly, it's very unlikely that such an innovation would reduce the cost of rooftop solar but not farmed solar. Thirdly, such an innovation seems very unlikely since we already have ubiquitous tasks that every home needs (electrical, plumbing, roofing, dry-wall) for which we still hire professionals--the ubiquity hasn't manifested an innovation that lowers the technical barrier enough that we all do these things ourselves.
Moreover, economies of scale work in the other direction. It's much cheaper to maintain a single 1MW solar farm than it is to maintain 50 20KW rooftop installations.
However, we don't need to speculate about tradeoffs. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., rooftop solar costs 2-3 times as much as farmed solar, so it seems the economies of scale dwarf any advantages rooftop solar might convey.
> Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.
If I'm understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany correctly, solar only accounts for 8.2% of German electrical capacity and of that 14% comes from rooftop solar. So something like 1% of Germany's capacity comes from rooftop solar?
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#315Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…
>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…
> In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements.
No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.
We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plotted on a map of, say, the United States it would be a barely visible dot in a massive sea of land-that-isn't-devoted-to-solar-power. The Earth is very big, and when you get outside the areas where people congregate there's a lot of wide open spaces.
This says that US electricity consumption was 3.9 trillion killowatt-hours in 2019:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
39 quadrillion watt hours divided by (36524) gives us average power consumption in watts.
Let's say a pretty good solar panel gets 100 watts per square meter, then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time. If we divide average power consumption by 30 watts per meter and divide by 1,000,000 to convert to square kilometers, we get:
Prelude> (((3.9 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / (36524)) / 30) / (1000 1000) 14840.182648401827
So, about 15,000 square kilometers of solar panels would satisfy current US electrical needs. Let's double that to be conservative, that's 30,000 square kilometers. Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. It's slightly more than 10% of the land area of Nevada. Definitely big, but attainable. Compared to the land we use for farming, it's barely anything (and it can be done in places that we don't farm). And in practice it would be spread out, not just in one place. And it also assumes we get 100% of our power from solar, which we wouldn't.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#316It is hard to take peoples arguments of cost seriously when governments around the world are printing fiat at alarming rates. Covid has proven that where there is a will the money can be found.
As it happens, macroeconomics and microeconomics are different, like chemistry amd physics are different.* The printing presses are not running in order for governments to buy more stuff.
That printing could be good or bad, but any argument based on “run printing presses as a way of raising money” doesn’t address any of the issues. Nobody has advocated that in decades (the odd Zimbabwean despot aside).
* I’m not claiming economics is anywhere near as scientific as chemistry or physics, heavy trappings of math notwithstanding.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think I’m saying it’s an either or? Wind and solar are an important part of the energy mix. But if you truly care about minimizing the impact our energy use has on the world around us, you have to take a mix of all of it. Wind and solar alone will never rid us of fossil fuels on their own. Nuclear has lots of important properties that make it a much better overall true replacement for our fossil fuel depen…
We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. Germany, 2010: Coal+Oil+Gas 55% Nuclear 25% Wind+Solar+Hydro 13% Germany, 2020: Coal+Oil+Gas 36% Nuclear 12% Wind+Solar+Hydro 41% Source: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Carbon dioxide emissions from consumption of energy
Germany: 847.6 million Mt (2017 est.)
France: 341.2 million Mt (2017 est.)
Germany: 57% from non-co2 sources France: 69% (50% from nuclear, 19% wind/solar/hydro)
https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/germany.france/e...
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. Wind power can share land with other uses. There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.
>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. No I didn't. A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled a…
> No I didn't.
Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it.
Rare earth magnets are used in some wind turbines, but alternatives exist there. That does change the cost calculations a touch, but not enough to invalidate the viability of a renewables + storage solution.
> I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact.
People have done the math. Land availability is not a bottleneck on this.
> I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect.
Because I didn't.
The big picture environmental imperative is to decarbonize as fast as possible. Nuclear is not competitive vs that goal due to the very high capital costs, garbage ROI, and very long time scales compared to renewables. This is the cold hard dollars math that you see regardless of politics, as the same economics are showing up in authoritarian states.
If nuclear was the slam dunk you're assuming, China would just do it. And originally that was looking like the outcome of their "build everything then decarbonize after building the economy" long term energy strategy. But now they're pulling back from their original scale goals for nuclear. Even though they're building more plants than anyone now, they've consistently reduced the number in the long term plan, to the extent that they likely won't be starting projects that aren't already in motion.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation for which part? That solar and wind have huge land-use requirements compared to nuclear (and even other generation sources)? That we need to increase production of solar and wind collectors by several orders of magnitude to fully replace fossil fuel generated power, and by extension need to increase mineral extraction (rare-earth or otherwise) to build them? That every single collector we build today will ne…
Those doesn't look like facts at all but your opinions but feel free to prove otherwise. Let's start with a simple one: >solar and wind have huge land-use requirements compared to nuclear Can you build nuclear in the oceans, safely, like offshore wind turbines? Or on hillsides and in desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town (and get people to work there without disrupting the local ecology with local housi…
>Can you build nuclear in the oceans, safely, like offshore wind turbines? Or on hillsides and in desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town (and get people to work there without disrupting the local ecology with local housing etc.) using only land no one wants? Land is not something we have unlimited amounts of and in many places it is only better if it is somewhere else or smaller than what is there now.
I don't know how you can say that it is merely an opinion and not fact that, land-use requirements of solar and wind are high.
Also, every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity. That includes areas that are deemed 'undesirable' to human life, like deserts and oceans and hillsides. And by the way, those are not the only regions that are used for wind and solar farms. You only need to look at how wind and solar are being deployed today to see that all kinds of tracks of land are allocated for wind and solar farms, and we will have to scale that by several orders of magnitude in order to make a dent in getting rid of fossil fuels.
>Not according to you or a talking head but to the people who have to live close to it.
I lived within 10 km of a nuclear plant all my life, as did millions in my city.
>No, one of the big ones is that the rich countries who have polluted for decades wants everyone to now live up to their rules today which is not going to happen. So before anything else all of us that live in the richest parts of the world have to pay for everyone who doesn't to get environmentally friendly electricity.
I don't understand what that has to do with anything.
Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power
#320Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…
Completely disagree with this assessment. Storage is the key problem. There are no easy solutions and you need scalable capacity that can quickly spin up in the mean time. Otherwise you’ll have to build some sort of crazy world wide energy internet that won’t be finished in time to beat climate change.