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> Cheap (and preferably clean) energy This is the difficulty. Right now, the only cheap and clean energy somewhat on the horizon is fusion, which is 50 years

• AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  You're talking about Arizona. Hello, solar...
• atemerev 10y ago
  Nuclear is clean. Cleaner than solar, at least.
  • ch4s3 10y ago
    clarify please. Are you referring to construction, mining, installation, storage, or just trolling?
    • motoboi 10y ago
      Nuclear is very clean. What most people came to hate is the waste, which is surprisingly little (per kW). Also the danger in case of failure, which is massive.
      • nixos 10y ago
        Also, there's literally no way to clean it up in case of accident and you have to keep it out of harms way for thousands of years. Theoretically, we can put CO2 back in the bottle. Practically, we can do it now, just not with enough efficiency and scale to make it worth it.
        • dpark 10y ago
          We have no practical way to clean CO2 from the atmosphere and we don't need catastrophe for it to be a problem. We're poisoning the planet with real carbon dioxide while we fret about the hypothetical risks of hypothetical nuclear waste.
          • nixos 10y ago
            >hypothetical nuclear waste. Chernobyl isn't hypothetical. And neither is Fukushima. And those weren't as bad as they could have been. And we still don't know what to do with all the waste we have.
            • closeparen 10y ago
              We could replace coal with nuclear yesterday if the anti-nuclear activists would stand down. Instead, they have fought to continue a status quo whose death toll we start couting at 25,000 people per year lost to black lung [0]. No serial killer or terrorist could dream of effecting mass casualites as efficiently as the proponents of this viewpoint do when they take action that results in the continued and expanding operation of coal power generation, despite an alternative which is actually viable in every respect but their opposition. Yes, nuclear power has problems. But even if it killed 24,000 people per year, blocking the replacement of coal by nuclear would still be a willful choice to cause the deaths of 1,000 people (it's getting really hard not to say murder). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker's_pneumoconiosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker's_pneumoconiosis
            • adrianN 10y ago
              Of course we know what to do with the "waste": Keep it close, it's precious fuel for breeder reactors.
              • ljf 10y ago
                The waste isn't just the spent fuel though - see my other comments...
                • ageofwant 10y ago
                  The total volume of which would fit in an apartment block. That block could be dropped into the marina trench if you really are that paranoid, total cost a few million dollars. There is no conceivable way of removing even daily worldwide human carbon waste from the atmosphere for that kind of money.
      • ljf 10y ago
        The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc). This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si.. http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si.... I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.
    • atemerev 10y ago
      Solar panels production. Currently, they are mostly produced from scraps of semiconductor industry, and it's already close to capacity. This process is energy inefficient and environmentally unfriendly (silicon tetrachloride is an intermediate stage). Pushing for more silicon solar panels beyond what's possible as semiconductor industry byproduct is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
      • xg15 10y ago
        My impression is that most large-scale clean energy projects go for wind power, indirect solar energy (use sunlight to heat up some medium which then drives turbines or rotors) or bio fuel - with more exotic stuff like geothermic energy where it's applicable. Solar panels seem to be one of the most inefficient clean energy solutions - so are they actually relevant here?
      • philipkglass 10y ago
        Most high purity silicon is now destined for solar PV; PV's "scraps of semiconductor industry" phase was a decade or more ago. http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2007/05/22/Study-Solar-costs-to-drop-dramatically/UPI-46821179855825/?st_rec=46821179855825 http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2007/05/22/... "In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world's polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells." It's true that the intermediates in silicon refining like are quite hazardous, but in a well-run production facility those intermediates don't get released to the biosphere. They affect the toxicity of the end product no more than the intermediate use of acetic anhydride in aspirin production, or the intermediate use of uranium hexafluoride in nuclear fuel rod production. There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
        • CountSessine 10y ago
          There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely. There are some interesting moral gymnastics required there, no? The Chinese lead the world in PV manufacturing right now. Is this PV-revolution necessarily built on dirty manufacturing? Would we still have a PV-revolution if we weren't so accepting of an environmental disaster that takes place in a distant country?
  • __jal 10y ago
    It normally is! But. It has catastrophic failure modes. (Yes, pebble beds. Let's talk about realities, not if-onlys.) Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk. And governments only do it because they have sovereign immunity from those whose interests they're supposedly representing. I firmly believe that any interested parties who want to go nuclear, should, and reap those rewards. If you can't find an insurer, go find wealthy people who believe in your design to indemnify you. Just don't pick my pocket to build it and then poison me.
    • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > Because of those catastrophic failure modes, nobody except governments want to assume the risk. That would be a fine if it was a level playing field. Lots of things have catastrophic failure modes. Dams[1], supertankers[2], chemical plants[3], oil drilling rigs[4], coal mines[5], etc. To say nothing of climate change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benxihu_Colliery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benxihu_Colliery The reason those things have no trouble being built anyway is that they aren't required to carry billions of dollars in insurance coverage to begin with. And maybe they should, but you can't single out nuclear for a requirement to carry that much insurance and then fault it for not being able to satisfy that requirement when its competitors don't.
    • bsder 10y ago
      > Just don't pick my pocket to build it and then poison me. Yet that's exactly what we're doing with coal and petroleum. Let's remove the subsidies for those and then you can get back to me about the cost effectiveness of things like nuclear.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        >Yet that's exactly what we're doing with coal and petroleum. Only coal and petroleum is mined thousands of miles aways from me, and even if e.g. there's an oil spill, it won't kill thousands in hundreds miles radius.
  • legulere 10y ago
    Nuclear is not cheap. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
  • ljf 10y ago
    The waste is not simply the spent nuclear fuel, but much of the machinery and systems around it, plus the discarded items used daily in the management of a plant (clothes etc). This low level nuclear waste while 'only' dangerous for 100 to 500 years, is huge - vastly bigger than the 76000 metric tons of spent fuel: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si.. http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si.... I don't have the tonnage of the low level waste to hand, but it is certainly much larger than the high level waste.
    • ljf 10y ago
      Sorry copied link in correctly: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Site-Storage-of-Nuclear-Waste http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Si... Rough estimate of low level waste is 360000 tons
• legulere 10y ago
  There is no reason to believe fusion will be cheap. It has the same problem of nuclear power plants that building things is expensive.
  • pitaj 10y ago
    Haha what? It doesn't have nearly the same issues. Building a nuke plant is easy, it's the safety measures that make it expensive.