471–480 of 598 posts
Go heavy nuclear and invest in fusion. The later will lead to clean abundant energy and eventually a reduction in resource scarcity. What is the economics of air? That's the economics we want.
Luckily we already have a working fusion reactor. It's 92M miles away, but it's a big one. All that is required are some solar panels and wind turbines to harness its power.
techies... lol.
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Luckily we already have a working fusion reactor. It's 92M miles away, but it's a big one. All that is required are some solar panels and wind turbines to harness its power.
I'm down for a Dyson Swarm.
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Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. > How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms s…
> Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. You miss the part where nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. You don't just dig ore out of the ground and put it into a reactor. You need to enrich the fuel which means that much more…
It's purely a political problem.
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>Being pro nuclear isn't "nuclear vs renewables" it is "nuclear + renewables vs fossil fuels". Since nuclear competes with renewables for subsidies it is kind of a competition. Propaganda is dictates by market realities. We likely wouldn't be seeing this much pro nuclear stuff pushed to the front of hacker news if nuclear didn't require subsidies and hence favorable public opinion to survive in the face of cheaper gr…
The reason that we see this much articles being posted on hacker news is that we are still using fossil fuels and there is no active plans to stop it. Everyone* agree that climate change is happening. Everyone agree that burning fossil fuel for power is bad. And then there is a void for what to do next. Can we all agree that we should stop subsidize existing fossil fuel infrastructure? No more paying oil power plants…
Yes, but that's not what this article is about.
>Can we also all agree to stop expanding capacity for more fossil fuels?
Yes, but that's not what this article is about.
>Can we then also agree to stop repairing and extending the lifetime of existing power plants that uses fossil fuels?
Yes, but that's not what this article is about.
This article is a fluff human interest story about an "environmental activist" who suddenly "saw the light" and realized that nuclear power can generate "energy at all hours unlike solar" (their words).
I'm sure the New Yorker journalist is not unaware that solar and wind are a lot cheaper than nuclear power even accounting for variability but it's barely hinted at in the article. It doesn't serve their agenda.
One thing that is mentioned is the "onerousness" of safety regulations piled on after Fukushima.
If you think this article wasn't explicitly written on behalf of the nuclear industry trying to garner some green points I've got a coal fired plant scheduled to break ground in 2024 to sell you.
If you're wondering why they'd spend money campaigning for this, well, it's because they desperately need taxpayer money to stay viable.
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> Meanwhile, a 300W solar panel weighs ~40 pounds, and even if it has massive mounting structures that weigh twice as much as the panel itself, that's 5-10W/kg. Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%. I also don't think looking at mass-- and primarily concrete-- is the best way to measure resource usage. > A nuclear powerplant has a lifetime of 40-60 years. Solar panels have warranties of 25 years, but ofte…
> Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%. Which puts solar and nuclear on completely the same scale... If you don't think mass is a good way to compare, and you're concerned about resources, please suggest the metric that will somehow make nuclear look good. Because that concrete is not very recyclable. So the 95% recyclability of solar panels is making them look a looooot better than nuclear once we move b…
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I don't understand why people are screaming at each other to do the math, or referring to others who have hypothetically done the math, or accusing each other of lying, or claiming that solar panels are made out of rare earth elements (!!), instead of just doing the math themselves here in the comments. It's almost as if they're more interested in being vicious to one another than in finding out the truth. World mark…
The problem with "shut up and calculate" is that sometimes you forget to take things into account. People objecting on grounds of land use elsewhere in this thread have been worried about the size of the infrastructure and mines supporting the manufacture of the solar panels. I have no idea what the ingredients of a solar panel are, or how to calculate W/m^2 after taking area for manufacture into account, but it's pl…
Lacking a correct understanding of even the most basic facts of the situation, we cannot hope to reason about the consequences of possible courses of action.
As you can see above and elsethread, I've spent some time and effort to try to figure out some of the basic facts of the situation. I'm certainly no expert — for example, I only found out this year that solar panels include screen-printed silver paste, which accounts for on the order of 10% of the cost of photovoltaic modules and on the order of 10% of global silver production — and so I'd appreciate some help.
Articles 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…
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There isn't remotely enough storage available to make renewables at all feasible for decarbonization. To put this in perspective 8 Gigawatt hours is just under one minute of storage for the United States' alone. This is why pointing to the the raw generation costs of intermittent sources is misleading. Generating another 500 MW of solar energy doesn't actually represent any decarbonization if that energy is produced…
Apparently you haven't done the math on this, but I did: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html Summary of conclusions: It seems likely that known concentrated lithium deposits will not be sufficient to permit the transition to solar over the next decade or two, but there is plenty of lithium in seawater and other, less-concentrated deposits to permit such a transition. New extraction technologies wil…
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.0c02181
Then there are entire classes of flow batteries that have not been industrialized yet, that have a lot of potential too.
We're using lithium batteries on the grid because we need the high specific energy for EVs, and now that we have an industry it's easy to dual purpose them. But we could also start using those same factories to rolling entire other chemistries that use the same form factor.