7 ms·

If a "clean energy" philanthropist really wanted to steer the world away from fossil fuels, they would lobby for the replacement of coal and oil with nuclear.

If a "clean energy" philanthropist really wanted to steer the world away from fossil fuels, they would lobby for the replacement of coal and oil with nuclear. It is impossible to meet rising global energy needs without either a: nuclear energy as a wedge, b: divine advancements in renewable tech and cost, or c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. I dream of a post-energy-scarcity-star-trek future pretty often, but the fact is that barring some revolutionary technological advancement, nuclear is the only long term hope we have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies. "Green" tech it ain't either: refining rare earths is environmentally disastrous and even recycling the waste can be quite hazardous, such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities. If we want to be serious about renewable energy and the long road it will take to get there, we will have to get over our fears of Chernobyl and Homer Simpson running the power plant

melling 11y ago
So they should create a billion dollar lobby? Don't we want cheap, clean, renewable energy? Then there would be no need to lobby for anything. The market will do the rest.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Markets have proven exceptionally unreliable at fully pricing energy. Much our present problem results from under-pricing of fossil fuels due to: 1. Negative pollution externalities. 2. Far more significant: failing to account for replacement costs of consumed resources. Fossil fuels are accumulated biofuels. We're consuming them at about 5 million times the rate of their initial creation, and at rates exceeding substantively most or all present net primary production. Enjoy the windfall. It won't last.
  - melling 11y ago
    1. Yes, I am fully aware that the complete cost of fossil fuels is not captured. 2. We have hundreds of years of coal, for example. Many people are willing to use it all then worry about it then. Surely we'll have developed better energy technology long before then. 200 years ago we society didn't even have electricity. Anyway, my point is to not fight the system but accelerate clean energy development so that it wins in the current market. Solar prices have plummeted in the past 5 years, for example. What will it take to decrease the price further so that more people want it on their roofs, for instance?
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Globally, coal reserve-to-consumption ratios are about 110. That is, with zero growth in usage, there's about a century of reserve. Given modest exponential growth, that falls. At 2% global energy consumption increase, rate of use doubles every 35 years. The 10 year average for coal is closer to 3%, though in 2015 it had fallen to 0.4%. http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/coal-review-by-energy-type/coal-reserves.html http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...
- cossatot 11y ago
  I don't understand why this isn't "the market". It's a fund by private individuals and institutions (granted with enough clout to get gov'ts to fund as well) that will be investing in new technologies. From the website[0]: >Together we will focus on early stage companies that have the potential of an energy future that produces near zero carbon emissions and provides everyone with affordable, reliable energy. We will invest based on a few core investment principles... Which then goes on to list what they are looking for when they invest in companies. Maybe you're thinking that 'the market' should/would/does exist such that when you get electricity to your house, you can either purchase it from the clean energy plant or the dirty energy plant? The problem is that this market doesn't really exist yet, because the technology and infrastructure need more development. [0]: http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html
henrikschroder 11y ago
The problem with nuclear is the enormous up-front costs of constructing, even if we could somehow get rid of all the red tape involved. There's some experiments on small-scale fission plants, but there's no market, no buyers, no deployments. Meanwhile, solar power has a market, has deployments, and is on a path of incremental changes that will take the cost of solar below coal. And once you're below coal, the market will automatically make the switch without any lobbying whatsoever. I fully agree that we need to keep all existing nuclear as long as possible though, but I'm not so sure it's something it makes sense to invest in.
- petra 11y ago
  Moltex is claiming they have a design for a nuclear reactor with capital costs cheaper than coal: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A7XF4_1gu1AJ:www.moltexenergy.com/thessr/lowcostnuclearenergy/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=il http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A7XF4_1...
  - henrikschroder 11y ago
    Yeah, that perfectly fits what I said: > There's some experiments on small-scale fission plants, but there's no market, no buyers, no deployments.
    - petra 11y ago
      Sure we're far from commercialization , it's a slow business. But it may be cheaper than solar+storage. And china may be a market - they are throwing serious money at it , and maybe not the only one. And it may be more scalable, maybe. And let's not forget - solar is tiny. If you wanted to replace the energy infrastructure with solar - it would take decades , it would require a massive share of the world steel supply ,and it would be a huge building project, and the EROI would not be so big. So it might be too early to say who will win the race.
cm2187 11y ago
The only problem with nuclear energy is the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk, which even as a supporter of nuclear energy I find unacceptable. Human nature being what it is, nuclear plants are bound to be run sooner or later by idiot, careless people. Uranium-based nuclear energy is not idiot-proof. I have great hopes on Thorium. I am by no mean a specialist but I understand it has all the benefits of uranium for civil nuclear energy except that it uses a design of nuclear reactors that can be stopped in seconds, and rely a lot less on high pressure (i.e. subject to blowing up) pipes. But it will take huge investments to develop the whole supply chain and all the associated technologies. It would make sense for a country or a group of countries who would want to develop a new nuclear park to team up and just bite the bullet. China would be a good candidate. But also the vast majority of the nuclear power plants in Europe and the US are more than 30y old. Might make sense to just do it, go clean, safe and stop writing checks to our "friends" in the middle east...
- ekun 11y ago
  There is nothing about thorium that makes it able to be stopped immediately or run at much less pressure. There are reactor concepts that run at lower pressure and have passive safety when shutdown, but they could use thorium or uranium just the same. Thorium reactors have to be part of a closed nuclear fuel cycle meaning you have breeder reactors combined with fuel reprocessing. No nation seriously does this right now because when you reprocess you can easily separate bomb materials (although India is allegedly moving towards a closed thorium cycle). Reprocessing involves nasty chemicals that are super radioactive too which is another step where things can go very wrong. Also, thorium can't even run a reactor by itself. It has to be used as a feed material to breed Uranium-233 by absorbing neutrons and decaying, so at the end of the day you are still using uranium to produce power. The only advantage of thorium is that it doesn't produce as many actinides which are the really long-lived radioactive waste products. So after thousands of year the radiotoxicity of your waste is less with thorium than uranium. I'm pro nuclear. I like thorium, but it would realistically require a nation to step up and invest trillions of dollars in the infrastructure and licensing only to have things rolling along decades later. Although, it would provide energy for a few centuries if done well.
  - 11y ago
dredmorbius 11y ago
Gates is supporting nuclear initiatives, including backing specific ventures, such as the TerraPower "Nuclear Candle" in situ sealed breeder design that "burns up" current spent nuclear fuel (plus a breeder initiator of uranium). More generally, though nuclear faces considerable obstacles, among the most serious are designing a high-risk, high-complexity system for a very-long-term deployment. How long do you expect nuclear to be human's primary fuel source, and how do you plan to deal with non-technical challenges. Modern technical society is about 200-250 years old -- most sources date the start of the Industrial Revolution to about 1800. Virtually all our present institutions, companies, science and understand, etc., have emerged or substantially evolved during this time (though of course many trace back further). Running nuclear power at global scale from here until Doomsday means planning at the level of centuries, if not millennia or even millions of years. That's timescales exceeding the oldest people, companies, governments, schools, religions, languages, even basic systems of morality and ethics. Provisioning global-scale nuclear power would require on the order of 15,000 plants operating simultaneously. Unavoidable metal embrittlement limits these to a practical life of about 40 years. That means commissioning and decommissioning plants at the rate of one per day, and both processes are themselves 20-40 year endeavours. That occurring through political and economic crises, wars, natural disasters, political and moral revolutions, and more. Things which are somewhat difficult to engineer around. Even trace amounts of some nuclear contaminants are exceptionally poisonous, and at the proposed scale of operation, risks of release are decidedly non-negligible. Present human experience is limited to about 400-500 reactor cores, and there have been at least 4 major core integrity breaches, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Substantial fault in all accident cases devolves to human and management practices, again, exceptionaly difficult to engineer around. With 30 times that many reactors operating from now until Doomsday, what acceptible accident rate are you targeting? We're at about 1:50 reactor years. Are you going to bump that up 10 - 100 fold? At 1 per 100 reactor-years, we're looking at 150 core meltdowns pere century. At 1:1000, 15. You'd need to exceed 1:10,000 to limit yourself to 1.5 failures per century, and again, that through political strife, economic crisis, mob and mafia involvement, corruption, war, and natural disaster. Forever. Renewable energy systems based on solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric sources have far more benign failure rates. And I say that despite the fact that the worst power plant disasters are included in that list. China's Banqiao Dam failed in 1975 (itself a story of engineering, design, management, communications, and meterological factors) killing 171,000. Despite that, the region is now home to over 7 million people. The long term effects of such failures is relatively minimal, compared to the nondiscretionary multi-century wildlife refuges now surrounding the former Chernobyl and Fukushima sites, as well as smaller-factor radiation problems at locations such as Hanford, Washington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced. Nuclear power is just one of numerous cases of pleading for exceptions from the Gods of Complexity. The real challenge (and one Gates also acknowledges, though generally privately) is of accepting the limits of humans' footprint on this little, and rare, and lonely planet of ours.
legulere 11y ago
Costs are actually the problem of nuclear power, not of renewables - at least in the west. The costs of nuclear power are rising significantly while renewables are dropping in price. The feed in tariff for newly installed photovoltaics in Germany today is lower than the feed in tariff Hinkley Point C will get when it will get when it's finished in 2023 + delay. Additionally the feed in tariff for Hinkley point C will get inflation adjusted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
- samstave 11y ago
  What would be the feasibility of the following: Make nuclear energy a global resource that all nations MUST buy into based on their % of consumption. build the appropriate plants, and if the US uses 25% of that power, it pays 25% of the bill. Make it protected by some joint/independent body/military in a de-nationalized territory. Make it illegal to profit off of it.
  - allendoerfer 11y ago
    To answer your question: The feasibility would be zero. Nuclear power is something you do not give away once you are part of the club.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  How ironic the fuel once trumpeted to be "too cheap to meter" soon to be replaced with renewables, which will truly end up as too cheap to meter.
gohrt 11y ago
> such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities. This is a social problem, not a tech problem. There's no reason to have any "surrounding communities" -- the lead recycling can be performed in isolated factories.
graycat 11y ago
>c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth. CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased. Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want. Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just make the clean water or gasoline when the sun shines and store that. Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
graycat 11y ago
>c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth. CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased. Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want. Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just smelt aluminum, the clean water, or gasoline when the sun shines and store that. Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.
ralphsimone 11y ago
Gotta love the nuclear supporters in renewable energy discussions. My response is always the same: I'm totally with ya as long as the nuclear reactor is in your backyard.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
Great username you have :) I disagree with your stance on nuclear - in the sense that nuclear is one way to partially replace coal/oil, however a much better combination is solar + nuclear + energy efficiency in transportation + reduction of global footprint of manufactured goods (energy in industry). How to reduce "consumerism"? Well, you need a revolution. Or, you need to tax sales heavily. Neither are easy.
- ethbro 11y ago
  > How to reduce "consumerism"? Well, you need a revolution. Or, you need to tax sales heavily. Neither are easy. Ubiquitous virtual reality and the porting of previously matter-intensive goods and desires into trivially replicated code.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  A carbon tax would work too to reduce "consumerism", and the politcal support for that seems to be snowballing (many jurisdictions already have various behind the scenes mechanisms that do the same thing in a slightly obscure way, because the word "tax" freaks people out)
nikdaheratik 11y ago
I think the idea that we have to bet everyone's future on a single tech is extremely shortsighted. In fact, the bet on coal power plants is kind of what got us into this mess in the first place. And the advancements in renewables look like they are doable, just not as fast as we'd like. More nuclear would be good, but limiting research and development to just fission or only solar is a false choice. As we've learned from applying developments in microchips to cutting wafers for photovoltaics, developments in one area of tech can often be used to improve other areas.

melling 11y ago

So they should create a billion dollar lobby? Don't we want cheap, clean, renewable energy? Then there would be no need to lobby for anything. The market will do the rest.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Markets have proven exceptionally unreliable at fully pricing energy. Much our present problem results from under-pricing of fossil fuels due to: 1. Negative pollution externalities. 2. Far more significant: failing to account for replacement costs of consumed resources. Fossil fuels are accumulated biofuels. We're consuming them at about 5 million times the rate of their initial creation, and at rates exceeding substantively most or all present net primary production. Enjoy the windfall. It won't last.
- melling 11y ago
  1. Yes, I am fully aware that the complete cost of fossil fuels is not captured. 2. We have hundreds of years of coal, for example. Many people are willing to use it all then worry about it then. Surely we'll have developed better energy technology long before then. 200 years ago we society didn't even have electricity. Anyway, my point is to not fight the system but accelerate clean energy development so that it wins in the current market. Solar prices have plummeted in the past 5 years, for example. What will it take to decrease the price further so that more people want it on their roofs, for instance?
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Globally, coal reserve-to-consumption ratios are about 110. That is, with zero growth in usage, there's about a century of reserve. Given modest exponential growth, that falls. At 2% global energy consumption increase, rate of use doubles every 35 years. The 10 year average for coal is closer to 3%, though in 2015 it had fallen to 0.4%. http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/coal-review-by-energy-type/coal-reserves.html http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...
cossatot 11y ago
I don't understand why this isn't "the market". It's a fund by private individuals and institutions (granted with enough clout to get gov'ts to fund as well) that will be investing in new technologies. From the website[0]: >Together we will focus on early stage companies that have the potential of an energy future that produces near zero carbon emissions and provides everyone with affordable, reliable energy. We will invest based on a few core investment principles... Which then goes on to list what they are looking for when they invest in companies. Maybe you're thinking that 'the market' should/would/does exist such that when you get electricity to your house, you can either purchase it from the clean energy plant or the dirty energy plant? The problem is that this market doesn't really exist yet, because the technology and infrastructure need more development. [0]: http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html

henrikschroder 11y ago

The problem with nuclear is the enormous up-front costs of constructing, even if we could somehow get rid of all the red tape involved. There's some experiments on small-scale fission plants, but there's no market, no buyers, no deployments. Meanwhile, solar power has a market, has deployments, and is on a path of incremental changes that will take the cost of solar below coal. And once you're below coal, the market will automatically make the switch without any lobbying whatsoever. I fully agree that we need to keep all existing nuclear as long as possible though, but I'm not so sure it's something it makes sense to invest in.

petra 11y ago
Moltex is claiming they have a design for a nuclear reactor with capital costs cheaper than coal: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A7XF4_1gu1AJ:www.moltexenergy.com/thessr/lowcostnuclearenergy/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=il http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A7XF4_1...
- henrikschroder 11y ago
  Yeah, that perfectly fits what I said: > There's some experiments on small-scale fission plants, but there's no market, no buyers, no deployments.
  - petra 11y ago
    Sure we're far from commercialization , it's a slow business. But it may be cheaper than solar+storage. And china may be a market - they are throwing serious money at it , and maybe not the only one. And it may be more scalable, maybe. And let's not forget - solar is tiny. If you wanted to replace the energy infrastructure with solar - it would take decades , it would require a massive share of the world steel supply ,and it would be a huge building project, and the EROI would not be so big. So it might be too early to say who will win the race.

cm2187 11y ago

The only problem with nuclear energy is the Chernobyl / Fukushima risk, which even as a supporter of nuclear energy I find unacceptable. Human nature being what it is, nuclear plants are bound to be run sooner or later by idiot, careless people. Uranium-based nuclear energy is not idiot-proof. I have great hopes on Thorium. I am by no mean a specialist but I understand it has all the benefits of uranium for civil nuclear energy except that it uses a design of nuclear reactors that can be stopped in seconds, and rely a lot less on high pressure (i.e. subject to blowing up) pipes. But it will take huge investments to develop the whole supply chain and all the associated technologies. It would make sense for a country or a group of countries who would want to develop a new nuclear park to team up and just bite the bullet. China would be a good candidate. But also the vast majority of the nuclear power plants in Europe and the US are more than 30y old. Might make sense to just do it, go clean, safe and stop writing checks to our "friends" in the middle east...

ekun 11y ago
There is nothing about thorium that makes it able to be stopped immediately or run at much less pressure. There are reactor concepts that run at lower pressure and have passive safety when shutdown, but they could use thorium or uranium just the same. Thorium reactors have to be part of a closed nuclear fuel cycle meaning you have breeder reactors combined with fuel reprocessing. No nation seriously does this right now because when you reprocess you can easily separate bomb materials (although India is allegedly moving towards a closed thorium cycle). Reprocessing involves nasty chemicals that are super radioactive too which is another step where things can go very wrong. Also, thorium can't even run a reactor by itself. It has to be used as a feed material to breed Uranium-233 by absorbing neutrons and decaying, so at the end of the day you are still using uranium to produce power. The only advantage of thorium is that it doesn't produce as many actinides which are the really long-lived radioactive waste products. So after thousands of year the radiotoxicity of your waste is less with thorium than uranium. I'm pro nuclear. I like thorium, but it would realistically require a nation to step up and invest trillions of dollars in the infrastructure and licensing only to have things rolling along decades later. Although, it would provide energy for a few centuries if done well.
- 11y ago

dredmorbius 11y ago

Gates is supporting nuclear initiatives, including backing specific ventures, such as the TerraPower "Nuclear Candle" in situ sealed breeder design that "burns up" current spent nuclear fuel (plus a breeder initiator of uranium). More generally, though nuclear faces considerable obstacles, among the most serious are designing a high-risk, high-complexity system for a very-long-term deployment. How long do you expect nuclear to be human's primary fuel source, and how do you plan to deal with non-technical challenges. Modern technical society is about 200-250 years old -- most sources date the start of the Industrial Revolution to about 1800. Virtually all our present institutions, companies, science and understand, etc., have emerged or substantially evolved during this time (though of course many trace back further). Running nuclear power at global scale from here until Doomsday means planning at the level of centuries, if not millennia or even millions of years. That's timescales exceeding the oldest people, companies, governments, schools, religions, languages, even basic systems of morality and ethics. Provisioning global-scale nuclear power would require on the order of 15,000 plants operating simultaneously. Unavoidable metal embrittlement limits these to a practical life of about 40 years. That means commissioning and decommissioning plants at the rate of one per day, and both processes are themselves 20-40 year endeavours. That occurring through political and economic crises, wars, natural disasters, political and moral revolutions, and more. Things which are somewhat difficult to engineer around. Even trace amounts of some nuclear contaminants are exceptionally poisonous, and at the proposed scale of operation, risks of release are decidedly non-negligible. Present human experience is limited to about 400-500 reactor cores, and there have been at least 4 major core integrity breaches, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Substantial fault in all accident cases devolves to human and management practices, again, exceptionaly difficult to engineer around. With 30 times that many reactors operating from now until Doomsday, what acceptible accident rate are you targeting? We're at about 1:50 reactor years. Are you going to bump that up 10 - 100 fold? At 1 per 100 reactor-years, we're looking at 150 core meltdowns pere century. At 1:1000, 15. You'd need to exceed 1:10,000 to limit yourself to 1.5 failures per century, and again, that through political strife, economic crisis, mob and mafia involvement, corruption, war, and natural disaster. Forever. Renewable energy systems based on solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric sources have far more benign failure rates. And I say that despite the fact that the worst power plant disasters are included in that list. China's Banqiao Dam failed in 1975 (itself a story of engineering, design, management, communications, and meterological factors) killing 171,000. Despite that, the region is now home to over 7 million people. The long term effects of such failures is relatively minimal, compared to the nondiscretionary multi-century wildlife refuges now surrounding the former Chernobyl and Fukushima sites, as well as smaller-factor radiation problems at locations such as Hanford, Washington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced. Nuclear power is just one of numerous cases of pleading for exceptions from the Gods of Complexity. The real challenge (and one Gates also acknowledges, though generally privately) is of accepting the limits of humans' footprint on this little, and rare, and lonely planet of ours.

legulere 11y ago

Costs are actually the problem of nuclear power, not of renewables - at least in the west. The costs of nuclear power are rising significantly while renewables are dropping in price. The feed in tariff for newly installed photovoltaics in Germany today is lower than the feed in tariff Hinkley Point C will get when it will get when it's finished in 2023 + delay. Additionally the feed in tariff for Hinkley point C will get inflation adjusted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

samstave 11y ago
What would be the feasibility of the following: Make nuclear energy a global resource that all nations MUST buy into based on their % of consumption. build the appropriate plants, and if the US uses 25% of that power, it pays 25% of the bill. Make it protected by some joint/independent body/military in a de-nationalized territory. Make it illegal to profit off of it.
- allendoerfer 11y ago
  To answer your question: The feasibility would be zero. Nuclear power is something you do not give away once you are part of the club.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
How ironic the fuel once trumpeted to be "too cheap to meter" soon to be replaced with renewables, which will truly end up as too cheap to meter.

gohrt 11y ago

> such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities. This is a social problem, not a tech problem. There's no reason to have any "surrounding communities" -- the lead recycling can be performed in isolated factories.

graycat 11y ago

>c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth. CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased. Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want. Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just make the clean water or gasoline when the sun shines and store that. Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

graycat 11y ago

>c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth. CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased. Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want. Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just smelt aluminum, the clean water, or gasoline when the sun shines and store that. Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.

ralphsimone 11y ago

Gotta love the nuclear supporters in renewable energy discussions. My response is always the same: I'm totally with ya as long as the nuclear reactor is in your backyard.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

Great username you have :) I disagree with your stance on nuclear - in the sense that nuclear is one way to partially replace coal/oil, however a much better combination is solar + nuclear + energy efficiency in transportation + reduction of global footprint of manufactured goods (energy in industry). How to reduce "consumerism"? Well, you need a revolution. Or, you need to tax sales heavily. Neither are easy.

ethbro 11y ago
> How to reduce "consumerism"? Well, you need a revolution. Or, you need to tax sales heavily. Neither are easy. Ubiquitous virtual reality and the porting of previously matter-intensive goods and desires into trivially replicated code.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
A carbon tax would work too to reduce "consumerism", and the politcal support for that seems to be snowballing (many jurisdictions already have various behind the scenes mechanisms that do the same thing in a slightly obscure way, because the word "tax" freaks people out)

nikdaheratik 11y ago

I think the idea that we have to bet everyone's future on a single tech is extremely shortsighted. In fact, the bet on coal power plants is kind of what got us into this mess in the first place. And the advancements in renewables look like they are doable, just not as fast as we'd like. More nuclear would be good, but limiting research and development to just fission or only solar is a false choice. As we've learned from applying developments in microchips to cutting wafers for photovoltaics, developments in one area of tech can often be used to improve other areas.