Nuclear Power

Give a little charity in interpreting my posts? Have a think about a sensible strategy for where to put vast amounts of solar panels in north Africa that doesn’t involve genocidal or imperialist tendencies.

I can’t imagine much. Even if the difference were substantial, there’s really not a lot of the Earth’s surface you can cover in panels.

Edit: Besides, solar panels absorb a lot of the energy in photons (by design). That energy is not remitted as heat (which is your concern regarding albedo), but turned into electricity, so you’re not actually contributing to any meaningful amount of warming.

or maybe the African cleptocrat authoritarian govts who would be raking in the cash afterwards

Yeah, there’s also security implications of having a ton of Europe’s energy produced in a foreign country. There’s no good or easy answer, or we’d have done it already.

This is a fantastic resource. I’m only part way through this and I’m so happy that it’s online and freely accessible.

He has a great example of trying to illustrate the fallacies of wind power being a panacea (from Ch 4 Page 33: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air | David MacKay)

Let’s be realistic. What fraction of the country can we really imagine
covering with windmills? Maybe 10%? Then we conclude: if we covered
the windiest 10% of the country with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we
would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power
used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day.

Britain’s onshore wind energy resource may be “huge,” but it’s evi-
dently not as huge as our huge consumption. We’ll come to offshore wind
later.

I should emphasize how generous an assumption I’m making. Let’s
compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind
power worldwide. The windmills that would be required to provide the
UK with 20 kWh/d per person amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware
of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the
entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Am I saying that we shouldn’t bother
building wind farms? Not at all. I’m simply trying to convey a helpful
fact, namely that if we want wind power to truly make a difference, the
wind farms must cover a very large area.

It is a really excellent reference. Some of the figures may be a little outdated, but it should all be within an order of magnitude (to my knowledge). And most of the book is order if magnitude estimates. But it’s very useful to actually have some cold hard numbers to refer to, to underscore the scale of the problem (and the solution).

I saw him speak in Edinburgh on this topic, and he was a wonderful communicator of science. I was so very saddened by his death some years ago.

He blogged his final days. It’s a heartbreaking read.

http://itila.blogspot.com/?m=1

Just so you know, the Amazon owes much of its existence to sand blowing over from the Sahara. (But since Brazil is now hell bent on destroying it maybe that won’t be an issue for much longer.) I’m not sure how covering the desert in solar panels would impact that (if at all, honestly no idea.)

Reforestation and returning some percentage of American plains to their native grasslands can be a very effective carbon sink and neither of these involved require untested, speculative new technologies or a sea change in political will.

In terms of carbon offset, how much renewable energy is such a plan equivalent to? I’m sceptical it’s anything close, but I haven’t crunched the numbers. Maybe we can fgure out a rough estimate.

speculative new technologies or a sea change in political will.

I don’t think solar panels are speculative. And mass reforestation is just as big a political sell. All of this is hard.

Edit: My speculative plan would be a giant orbital soletta to obscure some fraction of the sun’s light upon the Earth. It is speculative for sure, but has the advantages of being simple and able to be done by a single country rather than a coordinated world.

For speculative tech I’m referring more to the current nascent carbon sequestration projects. Solar even on a ginormous scale still requires battery tech that’s not quite there yet.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting only reforestation is enough to mitigate climate change, just that it’s another tool in the box to use. There’s no magic bullet here and I think we’re going to “need all the things.” Reforestation though is often overlooked as one of those things.

And while you are correct that too will take political will it’s probably less a lift than a transformative nuclear power program (don’t get me wrong, would be great for that to happen but the chances for it seem rather remote.)

Scientific paper that does some number crunching:

Something that I haven’t seen mentioned here is the different power of solar plants. The cost of solar energy is rapidly decreasing, but this is only true for one kind of solar energy – the photovoltaic kind ie. the one where you have solar panels that absorb light energy and turn it into electricity. The problem is that even though this is getting very cheap, it cannot be stored efficiently – battery technology is simply not advanced enough.

On the other hand you have different approaches to solar, such as molten salt plants. These consist of mirrors, all of which direct the sunlight towards a central tower. The tower contains a mineral that melts in the heat, effectively storing the energy of the sun for a few hours. This technology, however, is not going down in price, unlike the photovoltaic kind.

The best solution for storage, if you have it, is probably pumping water up a hill as a means of storage. This may have some environmental impacts, but it’s probably the best storage technique we currently have for solar energy, though again it’s very area dependent (obviously).

Pump storage is certainly the most cost effective, and right now is order of magnitude larger than all the battery storage in the country. But again it very limited since you only do it place that have exist hydrofaciliites. The NIMBY lobby against building more dams in this countries is only slightly smaller than anti-nuke lobby.

Google’s so helpful… Saw me reading about battery storage, and provided this interesting article.

The forum quoting software omits the hyphen, the title is “Coal-Killing Long-Duration Energy Storage For Vermont” which has a drastically different meaning lol!

Nuclear boosting is flailing. The only sustainable solution to climate change is to reduce our energy consumption. That won’t happen until prices rise, which is already happening as fossil fuels pass peak extraction. At some point–not in time to mitigate climate change–nuclear will be cost effective because energy will be expensive enough to justify it. Maybe then we’ll build more plants.

The United States already produces 1/3 of the world’s nuclear power–more than any other country–and we’ve built one new plant in the last two decades. Boost all you want. Make all the noise you can. A fission revolution isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It’s not a matter of being for or against it–it just won’t happen. And nuclear won’t ever work to provide energy for transportation, which is about 30% of our total energy consumption. Climate activists who reject nuclear as a solution aren’t idiots.

Yes instead you’re going to rely on… fusion. Or going back to the Dark Ages in the next decade.

Also I love how you say making nuclear power isn’t politically viable, but you think everyone using less energy and jacking energy costs through the roof so no one can use it is?

Well since this is obviously never going to happen, ever, i guess we’re fucked.

Like, seriously, this is literally never going to happen, and to suggest that it is “the only solution” is incredibly dumb.

The human population is going up. The third world is going to become industrialized.

There’s no way you are ever going to reduce our energy consumption. It goes up over time, always.

Your take here is bad, and illogical.

“Nuclear power isn’t politically viable, but lowering everyone’s standard of living world-wide is.”

Ah, you think I’m being proscriptive, when I’m actually just being descriptive. What’s your actual plan for increasing nuclear? How do we actually get there beyond writing forum posts ridiculing climate activists as non-nuclear weenies? To replace fossil fuels, we’ve have to quintuple our current nuclear capacity, that is build 400 new reactors, which is about as many reactors as currently exist worldwide. The cost for a project like that would be trillions of dollars and would take decades. It took France 20 years to build up to its current capacity, which is about half of what the United States produces with nuclear.

My favorite part of the discussion so far:

image

:D

The primary problem that nuclear has right now is that it is expensive and getting more so, while its renewable competitors are cheaper and getting more so. There’s a ton of data and complexity and viewpoints on this, but this the general trend of the last 10 years is something like this article:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J

The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.

Over the past decade, the WNISR estimates levelized costs - which compare the total lifetime cost of building and running a plant to lifetime output - for utility-scale solar have dropped by 88% and for wind by 69%.

For nuclear, they have increased by 23%, it said.

And that is the immediate reason why we aren’t building more nuclear plants: they are the more expensive option to generate power. Again, the numbers get complex very rapidly, but you can build a new watt of solar/wind power for 25%-50% of the cost of a new watt of nuclear power, and your investment will start paying off in 1 year rather than in 10+ years. It’s difficult to argue with price and development timelines like that, especially as the solar/wind numbers keep improving.

Caveats:

  • 20, 30, or 40 years ago nuclear was the clearly superior carbon-free choice
  • the balance may shift again if new designs radically change the numbers and trend lines. If we had any sort of sane energy policy we would be investing 2+ orders of magnitude more money into energy research and basically giving scientists and engineers a blank check with which to pursue their research and new designs.

It took France 10 years to build 80 new reactors… In the freaking 70s. From announcement of the Messmer plan in 74, to 1985… bam. 80 new reactors.

Somehow we got worse at building them? Now it’s impossible? We’ve somehow regressed to a pre 1970s state?

Our country is so much richer than France. And we have half a century of additional technical and industrial know-how.

The idea that this is anything other than trivial from the perspective of “can we do this?” is nonsensical.

Of course we could do it, if we wanted.