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To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

nytimes.com

651–660 of 666 posts

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#651
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any such decrease in property value is precisely because of the irrational fear of nuclear power. > So, may be your intention is good but not realistic as the Hinkley Point C plant for 30+ billion pound in england shows. Government should not fund or provide any guarantees to such projects; we should tax carbon and let people decide what to do (in which case, we wouldn't even need to argue which is cheaper and we can…

The costs of solar are decreasing over time. And solar is more decentralized, so you're not stuck with huge government boondoggles, corruption, and corporate overlords.

Source for corruption in private electricity firms? I don't think it's particularly high.

Who are corporate overlords?

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#652
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of solar are decreasing over time. And solar is more decentralized, so you're not stuck with huge government boondoggles, corruption, and corporate overlords.

Source for corruption in private electricity firms? I don't think it's particularly high. Who are corporate overlords?

Ever heard of Enron? Also just google for "nuclear corruption" and you'll get a lot of reading material. For example this article http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/nuclear-cor... which has links out to sources including the US DOJ about corruption cases in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the US, and more. It's a huge problem. And the key players would like to keep it all hidden, so your being in the dark about it is no surprise.

Corporate overlords (can't tell if you are trolling, but I'll answer) is just a shorthand for corporate decision makers who prioritize corporate profits over other considerations like consumer benefit, care of the environment, freedom of consumer choice, fair dealing, etc.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#653
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of solar are decreasing over time. And solar is more decentralized, so you're not stuck with huge government boondoggles, corruption, and corporate overlords.

Source for corruption in private electricity firms? I don't think it's particularly high. Who are corporate overlords?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#654
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the: - We could do it for less than $3 Trillion ... - We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors Seems very dubious. The first successful MSRs were built over 60 years ago. The reason none are in commercial use is probably because the costs would work out higher than conventional reactors.

Yeah it's possible he's overstating the case, although he seems to have gone in to quite a bit of detail estimating the costs. But you'll see from some of the comments above those might be distorted. My own very crude back of the envelope, for replacing all worldwide coal generation with AP-1000s (at $7bn a pop) puts the cost somewhere in the $6T range. This is assuming I got the unit conversions correct... As for MS…

My experience with development cost estimates suggests the easy parts are easy and the interesting parts might as well be splatter-paint.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#655
post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that some of the statements there (e.g. estimates of areas needed to provide power from solar energy) are not technology-dependent (ie. are about physical limitations).

MacKay's estimate of areas needed to provide power from solar energy are technology-dependent. See for example: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41.... "If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient p…

Fair point. He says that the 20% estimate is unlikely to be revised upward, but it's "unlikely because you can't get more than 30% using reasonable approaches to PV" and not "unlikely because you can't get more than 30% due to thermodynamics" (I can't find what's _that_ limit quickly).

> MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-affluent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK (...)

Here I'd agree with him: we need to find energy sources that will deal with projected future demands.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#656
post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacKay's estimate of areas needed to provide power from solar energy are technology-dependent. See for example: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41.... "If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient p…

Fair point. He says that the 20% estimate is unlikely to be revised upward, but it's "unlikely because you can't get more than 30% using reasonable approaches to PV" and not "unlikely because you can't get more than 30% due to thermodynamics" (I can't find what's _that_ limit quickly). > MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-affluent pe…

Projected future demands for energy per capita in the UK and other developed countries grow very slowly, or even decline. Primary energy consumption per capita in the UK has actually declined since 2008 when MacKay wrote his book (you'll need to select countries yourself to see the data):

http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Energy-Consumption-per-Capita...

You might think that's just because the UK doesn't do manufacturing any more, but look at manufacturing powerhouses Japan and Germany: they also have seen per-capita declines since 2008.

Ecologists and economists alike seem to have a default assumption that human resource consumption is insatiable; they just have different attitudes about that assumption. I don't know how many years of trends like the one I just linked it will take before they reassess resource satiety.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#657
Im pretty sure, reading the comments below, i will find lots of engineering solutions to make nuclear power saver. And those solutions will be good.

But how to make nuclear power saver, when the economy takes a downturn and middle management at the plant closes both eyes to cheap, not on spec repairs and not-so-excellent replacement solutions for the problems. How do you ensure a constant high-maintenance machine against the corroding forces of the market? State maintenance funds? But this would be unfair to any energetic non-carbon replacement energy source. On the other hand, the rise of solar could lead to a series of Chernobyl by economic neglect. And that is why i am against nuclear- they are able to hold there economic surroundings hostage.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#660
post #417
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is not the only factor if we seriously want to fight global warming. 1. What is the energy ROI? (ie how much energy does it cost to build a station) 2. At what speed can we transition out of fossil fuel? Germany tried to phase out of nuclear. What happened? They raised their part of renewable sources a lot, but that still amounted to only about 15-20% of their national needs. They ended up reopening coal plants…

> (No, uranium is not a fossil resource) Could you elaborate?

First, and mostly irrelevant, is a definition thing: a fossil resource comes from organic decay. Oil and coal mostly come from ancient prehistoric forests. As far as we know, you can't find these outside earth and even the most optimistic projections do not expect oil to last more than one more century (pessimistic projections are surprised it did not stop yesterday. Without shale oil we would be past peak oil.)

It has an important consequence: coal and oil can only be found on a relatively thin layer of the earth, its outer crust. Uranium on the other hand can be found outside the earth (we have found some of the moon for instance and it is a mineral: all planets are expected to have some) and inside the mantle. Actually, the deeper we go, the more we expect to find. It is believed that the heat of earth's center is partly caused by fission reactions.

Second, it is not scarce like oil is. Known reserves may seem small but mineral resources tend to plateau at ~80 years of global consumption as it is usually not profitable to do exploration at a higher pace than that, so the actual reserves are probably much more and likely very extensible as we improve our boring techniques. It is pretty realistic to say we have several centuries of regular uranium for the most common fissile reaction used in power plants.

Third, we have mastered more than one nuclear reaction for energy production. And by that, I mean that we have demonstrated their use on industrial scale: we know how to use plutonium and uranium-238, an isotope of uranium that is 100 times more common than the one we use in regular power plants. Huge plants using these have been built and operated. They are a bit more complicated and expensive, but they work.

With these known and industrialized tech, and only accounting currently known and profitable reserve, you reach an amount of reserve that has to be counted in tens of millennia. And that is not counting reactions that we know work from experimental reactors, or more futuristic prospects like nuclear fusion.

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