Here’s the thing about nuclear… a few years ago you could say the same thing about Japan. Where’s France burying their waste?
Oh nevermind, several articles on that problem, right at the top even.
I am not saying nuclear isn’t part of a solution, but I don’t think we have a solution to nuclear power yet so let’s not stick all our eggs in that one basket.
I think that my fear about nuclear is that the tech could be obsolete within a decade.
If this were a 4x game, I’d be putting all my nuclear research towards fusion.
Nuclear power would have been a very solid choice in the last 2,3,4 decades. It has large issues, but they are minuscule in comparison to the titanic issue that is global warming.
These days though the cost of renewables has gone down so far that it is a better choice than nuclear power in most cases. It’s not known nearly widely enough, but the amount of solar power you can buy for a dollar has been increasing exponentially for the last 50 years, with no signs of slowing down. Because of this exponential growth in efficiency, solar’s position in the power mix has radically shifted over the last few decades. Even as short as 10 or 15 years ago, solar was a prohibitively expensive option for hippies, while nuclear was the correct option for hard headed realists. Today though that is completely flipped, and in something like 25% of markets solar is literally the cheapest form of power that you can install (or at least tied for that honor). And that’s only going to grow as solar continues to improve and production efficiencies continue to scale up. Wind has had similar but less dramatic improvements in efficiency, and is currently supplying my computer at bargain basement prices. :)
There are next gen nuclear ideas that are promising, but those are a decade or more out from production, i.e. way too late to make a difference one way or another.
You can’t posit solar and wind as an option, no matter how cheap they get, without solving storage.
I love my solar panels but they only work, economically speaking, because it’s grid tied and I have a grandfathered exchange rate with the local power company.
The impact on the ocean has been fuck all so far, though maybe down the line it could have some outward impact we haven’t discovered yet.
Sure you can detect radiation in California from Fukushima, but that’s strictly trace amounts and only discoverable because it’s a unique isotope. You get more radiation eating a banana, over 7 times actually (if I didn’t screw up my radiation measurement conversion)
Nuclear scares me to be honest but global warming scares me more.
I think global warming is pretty critical too; I’m just not convinced nuclear is the solution so much as just something handy we know how to build, still not something we know what to do with long-term though.
There’s lots of activity in this area. We shouldn’t settle just yet, but at the same time I’m not saying we should tear anything down or not bolster what we have. I think there are better options on the horizon, ones that will get more support, financial and populace.
Nuclear power plants in the US aren’t going to be hit with gigantic tsunamis.
Fission power makes wonderful theoretical sense, especially with the new reactor designs, but you have to remember that the plants will be operated by US power companies and regulated by US government agencies. Not so nice, now, eh? And there’s still no place to put the damn waste due to Nevada NIMBYism.
Fortunately renewables now make economic sense, and unlike the enormous up-front capital cost plus regulatory nightmares associated with fission, wind and solar can be introduced in small relatively inexpensive increments. They should be much more widely deployed as soon as the current administration shuffles off to hell.
Of course if we ever cared about the problem we would have invested some noticeable amount of money in fusion. And yet we never do. Lockheed-Martin’'s magic reactor seems not to have gone anywhere yet, and no one else seems close to solving the engineering problems either. For the last 50 years, this should have been our absolute top government research priority.
You can mitigate and nearly eliminate the need for for batteries with better HVDC lines. HVDC has gotten really good in recent history and wind and sun are anti-correlated on both the time and distance axis.
Then instead of building batteries you use all the exiting natural gas infrastructure as peaking plants that just come on very occasionally for short bursts.
Barriers to building HVDC lines are almost entirely political, plenty of markets have cheap power and don’t want their prices to go UP, and plenty of states with expensive power don’t want their expensive but-taxable-and-providing in-state-jobs power generation to move to another state. It’s a terrible situation but not a problem of physics!
Storing radioactive material vs the loss of a livable planet seems like an easy choice to me.
We detonated nukes non-stop for decades and the end result was… there are some places in the desert you don’t want to build a house. Also a few islands are smaller than they used to be.
And it gave us the name of a very important article of swimwear.
There’s work being done on removing carbon from the air and turning it into gas. It’s energy intensive, but if it’s done with green energy it should be a good way to sequester carbon and stockpile energy.
Theoretically.
The Guardian ran a story about Earth Overshoot day in late July, but I’m really surprised that a multinational bank came out with a warning on it:
I don’t think anyone says we should stick all of our eggs in one basket. Basically, you need something for baseline power to augment the renewables, since the renewables that work best and most broadly (solar and wind) are not 24/7 reliable producers. It’s solar, wind, plus something. Right now what largely the exists for something, for most people, are conventional fuel-burning power plants, where even the cleanest ones have a big carbon footprint.
But it isn’t a baseline power solution. I ran my house in Phoenix for ten years on a 10.5 kWh solar panel array on my roof. It worked largely because 1) it was Phoenix, so sun, and 2) the conventional grid was there for me to draw power at night. I also had a grandfathered exchange agreement with APS. On a net basis I paid about $120 per year to APS for what they supplied me, and that fee was mostly the monthly admin service charge. So arguably I could have been 100% self-sufficient if I’d had a partner on the other side of the world to exchange power with during respective off-production periods. Of course that’s not going to happen with solar.
Without the conventional grid, I’d have needed a storage solution, which basically isn’t commercially available. Even if they solve storage, I keep wondering what the working lifespan of the batteries will be, and what I would do with them when they were no longer working. I mean, they’re toxic waste, too.
So if there’s going to be a conventional grid, we’re going to be storing some kind of waste product in any case: either spent nuclear fuel or carbon. And with nuclear, at least we don’t have to learn how to trap the waste to store it. Which is a bigger problem? I don’t know, but it isn’t obvious to me that it’s nuclear.
I think we should do whatever is needed to get off of fossil fuels ASAP. While I am not big fan of nuclear, I am willing to accept it if it will get us to a carbon emissions free state sooner than without it. Our country needs a marshal plan for green energy.
I would make all green energy production tax free within one degree of separation. Any money spent on developing / building / installing green energy is non-taxable. Employees of those companies pay no income tax.
If a power company buys green energy production, they pay no tax on the cost of building the stuff, nor do they pay any tax on the income generated from green power.
If as an consumer or another company, the power I buy, if it comes from a green energy source, then that cost is tax deductible.
Do that for a decade or more, and see what happens.
We should do something similar with electric vehicles and the infrastructure to support them.
I think that tax regime is an invitation for abuse by the wealthy and corporations. I’d rather see the state subsidize green infrastructure development and power production with direct payment than via a complicated and hard-to-administer tax scheme. Better yet, the state should build and operate some infrastructure directly.
There are basically three things that have to change: Power production, transportation, and diet/food production. Of course it’s a global problem but there’s no political ability or mechanism to act globally.
We’re talking about power production, but transportation is as big a problem.
Replacing all the cars in the US with electric cars is roughly a $20trillion problem. The government could offer a program to provide (say) $30k toward the replacement of any car with an electric car, with a ten-year period to the program at the end of which internal combustion engine cars are illegal. Over the same period car manufacturers could transition to electric car production. That’s not insurmountable, but there isn’t any political will for it. Of course it would be better in many ways to improve city architecture and public transit so that fewer cars are necessary, but that’s probably much more expensive in the immediate term and even harder to do politically.
Speaking of monstrous creatures of Nunavut, this was an interesting Atlantic article about life not too long ago on a hotter planet. Rain forests and tapirs in the Arctic Circle, a whole continent at our world’s bottom that was habitable. Of course, the waistline of the planet was not habitable. I think human migration to places like Nunavut, Siberia, and Antarctica will be a necessity – so start buying land now!
This picture / map was making the rounds a few weeks ago. When I look at it, I see WW3. I mean, who believes countries like Canada and Russia will willingly absorb the rest of the world’s population?
I almost wonder if it’s too late at this point. By the time politics is back to something where progress can be made, we will have locked in more than three degrees warming.
There are other approaches. A giant sun-screen in orbit, for instance, blocking some fraction of the sun. While emissions requires multiple countries to act, that only requires one…
