8 ms·

"But I could already see major limitations looming ahead: the huge amounts of land needed, the lack of scalable ways to match their inconstant power to society’

by ozborn 8y ago

"But I could already see major limitations looming ahead: the huge amounts of land needed, the lack of scalable ways to match their inconstant power to society’s unremitting thirst for energy." I sometimes wonder if authors of these pro-nuclear articles are paid to astroturf for the nuclear power industry or if they are just unaware of what solar is capable of. The "huge amounts of land" claim is incorrect (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-entire-world-by-harnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/#7a8b60f5d440 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power...) and in reality much of solar power could be deployed on urban hardscapes. The second claim seems to ignore the possibility of batteries and other large scale energy storage, never mind that solar would be complemented by other renewable energy sources. The other problem with the nuclear industry (ignoring all the much talked about safety and waste storage issues) is that it ends up being a centralized power source. Living in a solar unfriendly state with the most profitable energy utility in the country (no rate review in 30+ years) I do not want to see any more centralization and the corresponding corruption. Yeah, I know centralization doesn't imply corruption and abuse of power, but it sure makes it easier.

cagenut 8y ago
arguing the pros and cons of alternatives absent the timeline is false framing. the question is not what can solar and batteries do some day, the question is what can we do to drive emissions to zero by ~2050. solar and batteries alone cannot do that.
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  Yes! There's wind! And pumping water up a mountain as storage. I'm a fan of LFTR reactors and similar new designs, but the writing is on the wall for nuclear power. Alternative energy shot by it. I still think we should invest in Thorium reactors at the state level, but solar/wind energy has won.
  - pyrale 8y ago
    Countries in Europe have saturated their hydro potential, and aside for a few exceptions, it's far from giving enough storage. Examples like Iceland and Norway are nice, but most countries can not use them. On the other hand, e.g. France and Sweden have driven their co2 emissions down without such natural advantages.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Sure. Solar and batteries alone cannot do that. But solar, batteries, wind, thermal, hydro, gas etc all connected via continent wide digital grids definitely can. And it's the option that nicely avoids the NIMBY problem you get with nuclear.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Indeed. There are countries already at 100% zero carbon for electrical generation through the use of solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal: https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=map https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=... There is no reason we cannot rapidly expand on this with additional solar and wind, as well as batteries as the cost drops.
    - acidburnNSA 8y ago
      Notably, check out Ontario (96% low carbon, 36% renewable) and France (91% low carbon, 13% renewable!?) But how!? The answer is nuclear power plants. Don't forget also that electricity is roughly 40% of energy usage for most people, the rest being heating and transportation. Those are very fossil dominated so even though you see green here, there's a huge huge way to go.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        > But how!? The answer is nuclear power plants. Legacy nuclear bridging the gap is an acceptable solution. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, nuclear simply takes too long to build and is too costly (when compared to renewables as low as 2 cents/kwh and deployment times measured in months, not years or up to a decade). China is installing 40-50GW of solar per year; the world in aggregate installs about 100GW annually. The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde in Arizona) has a nameplate capacity just shy of 4GW; assuming you need 16GW of solar to replace such a generator due to 25% capacity factor, that is an install time of just around a year). > Don't forget also that electricity is roughly 40% of energy usage for most people, the rest being heating and transportation. Those are very fossil dominated so even though you see green here, there's a huge huge way to go. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory did a study about a decade ago [1] that ~73% of light vehicles could move over to the electrical grid with existing generation capacity. EVs are a perfect match for intermittent renewables generation, as they can charge when the sun is shining during the day, or charge at night when the wind is blowing. I concede heating has a long way to go with air source heat pumps, insulation, and other energy saving measures. "This initial paper estimates the regional percentages of the energy requirements for the U.S. LDV stock that could be supported by the existing infrastructure, based on the 12 modified North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) regions, as of 2002, and taking into account congestion in regional transmission and distribution systems. For the United States as a whole, 84% of U.S. cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) could be supported by the existing infrastructure, although the local percentages vary by region. Using the light duty vehicle fleet (LDV) classification, that includes cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans, the technical potential is 73%. This has a gasoline displacement potential of 6.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or 52% of the nation’s oil imports. Existing nuclear plants should be kept operational as long as feasible (from a safety perspective), but the writing is on the wall. [1] https://www.ferc.gov/about/com-mem/5-24-07-technical-analy-wellinghoff.pdf https://www.ferc.gov/about/com-mem/5-24-07-technical-analy-w...
- greglindahl 8y ago
  People have been under-predicting what solar and batteries can do for decades... just look at the actual cost and production curves vs predictions. Also, don't forget wind and other storage.
epistasis 8y ago
This company sees the intermittent nature of renewables as a the primary problem, but that's thinking left over from the last century, a century where you couldn't make the demand responsive to the supply. That's going to change; the biggest amounts of home load will be heating/cooling of air for the home and water heating. Both of these will be demand responsive. And as cars electrify, that's another huge amount of load that will be responsive. The only thing left is the business model to pay consumers to charge/heat/cool at the right time. We don't even need that many additional batteries because thermal storage is cheap, and an electric car will store 2-3 days of electricity usage, and most people come nowhere close to needing a full 60 kWh of electric driving every day. Those that do will use it, but those that can be more responsive to when they charge will get paid for it. In the 20th century storage was super expensive, and large precise construction was inexpensive; that's being flipped. In five years, solar plus enough lithium ion storage (or other tech) will be cheaper than the cheapest nuclear. In 10-15, winter levels of sunlight + storage will be cheaper than the cheapest nuclear. They're trying to address the problems of toady, in 20 years. If their development pipeline is 20 years out, they need to anticipate the problems 20 years out, rather than skating to where the puck is now. The problem has changed; there will be niche needs for nuclear power, I'm sure, but unless they can drive down current nuclear costs to be cheaper than wind or solar, there's going to be little need for nuclear at all.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > That's going to change; the biggest amounts of home load will be heating/cooling of air for the home and water heating. Both of these will be demand responsive. You can use time of day pricing to get people to do their laundry at a better time. You can't use it to get people to heat their homes during the day instead of at night. Once people are no longer burning oil for heat, there is going to be a winter month where the average nighttime temperature in the northern half of the country is -4 degrees and that is going to drive high non-responsive demand for electricity at night. In theory you can install enough batteries for this and charge them with solar during the day, but what happens when it's cloudy during the day and cold at night for a straight month?
  - 8y ago
2trill2spill 8y ago
The article you cited said we need 43,000 square miles of solar to power the earth costing 5 trillion dollars, I consider that to be a huge amount of land and money. That would be half the area of Minnesota the state I live in devoted entirely to solar panels. Sure it wouldn't all be in one place but that is still a significant amount of land world wide that have to change land uses. Also isn't that article also assuming that all of the solar panels would be in the Sahara desert? Where solar power is extremely efficient. If we spread these solar panels across the world we would need significantly more because they would located in places much less suitable for solar power.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- burlesona 8y ago
  Considering the US alone uses about 4K SQMI for parking, that really doesn’t seem like too much. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parkin...
  - hazz99 8y ago
    10x the total parking spaces seems pretty damn huge to me, I've seen some big carparks.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      In addition, carparks in the US could be argued to be an ecological and sociological disaster. If you could somehow have cars without carparks (maybe the car folds up, I dunno), it would be one the biggest quality-of-life improvements in my lifetime. Probably about on par with the smartphone for me personally, probably a bigger improvement for people who are very poor.
      - chrisco255 8y ago
        Self-driving cars will alleviate this problem, since the cars will just rent their time out (like Uber/Lyft today) and after they drop you off at your destination they zip off to pick up the next human. Even if you choose to own your own car, the car itself could go back home during the day while you're at work.
arduanika 8y ago
An industry like solar whose main boast seems to be that it creates more jobs than fossil fuels -- while producing less than a tenth of the energy -- is not shovel-ready as a replacement right now, today, when we need it. If you require an order of magnitude more workers per watt, you're not ready to scale. By contrast, as far as I can tell, nuclear requires fewer than fossil fuels. Back during the Great Leap Forward, Mao got really into this idea of the people generating energy & doing metallurgy & manufacturing locally. Hipsters would approve. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a leap backwards. edit: my math was wrong; solar is actually worse than I said. Solar costs over 100 times more workers per watt than fossil fuels. https://www.energy.gov/downloads/us-energy-and-employment-report https://www.energy.gov/downloads/us-energy-and-employment-re... https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home
hindsightbias 8y ago
While Nathan Myhrvold doesn't need to be paid (he's a near billionaire), I do wonder what one has to pay Scientific American for the opinion space advocating their own company. It would seem a little more objective to have an independent scientist write pieces like this.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  It would seem a little more objective to have an independent scientist write pieces like this. Any scientist who knows enough to write an informed piece is going to have an opinion, whether they are hiding it or not.
  - metaphor 8y ago
    The parent never asserted that independent scientists won't have an opinion.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      If you want "more objective" you are asking for less opinionated.
- sjwright 8y ago
  This article isn't about objectivity. It's an opinion piece by someone with an entirely transparent agenda.
namuol 8y ago
Why not both?
nukemandan 8y ago
> I do not want to see any more centralization and the corresponding corruption. Agreed - That is why Small Modular reactors are exciting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
StreamBright 8y ago
>>> The "huge amounts of land" claim is incorrect Matter of definition. Based on facts it is huge in my opinion. >>> The second claim seems to ignore the possibility of batteries and other large scale energy storage, never mind that solar would be complemented by other renewable energy sources. No, it just matches reality. As of today we can not store huge amount of energy this is why you need to charge your phone every day. If battery capacity and energy density was developing the same speed as CPU power we would charge our phones once a year. The best option we have today is called pumped storage hydroelectricity, which is a really invasive way of storing energy and reduces the efficiency greatly. Unless we found a radically different, better way of storing energy solar power can be used only in smaller scale (like Tesla Solar Roof style) and nuclear power is still one of the cleanest and best option for mass production of eneregy. Disclaimer I have graduated in energy engineering
8bitsrule 8y ago
A calculation I saw a couple of decades ago showed that the entire energy being used by the world then could be powered by a solar array 200 miles on a side. I think that figure is on the right order, then break that 40,000 sq. mi. into 100 pieces ... and each is 20 miles on a side. Compare that to the amount of sunlit desert in the world. Simple, obvious, self-explanatory. Of course, the fuel cost of solar is zero. The energy can be created anywhere there's sunlight. Consumed locally. And there's no waste. A threatening vision for the power brokers. They may say anything to have their way.

by ozborn 8y ago

cagenut 8y ago

arguing the pros and cons of alternatives absent the timeline is false framing. the question is not what can solar and batteries do some day, the question is what can we do to drive emissions to zero by ~2050. solar and batteries alone cannot do that.

AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Yes! There's wind! And pumping water up a mountain as storage. I'm a fan of LFTR reactors and similar new designs, but the writing is on the wall for nuclear power. Alternative energy shot by it. I still think we should invest in Thorium reactors at the state level, but solar/wind energy has won.
- pyrale 8y ago
  Countries in Europe have saturated their hydro potential, and aside for a few exceptions, it's far from giving enough storage. Examples like Iceland and Norway are nice, but most countries can not use them. On the other hand, e.g. France and Sweden have driven their co2 emissions down without such natural advantages.
threeseed 8y ago
Sure. Solar and batteries alone cannot do that. But solar, batteries, wind, thermal, hydro, gas etc all connected via continent wide digital grids definitely can. And it's the option that nicely avoids the NIMBY problem you get with nuclear.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Indeed. There are countries already at 100% zero carbon for electrical generation through the use of solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal: https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=map https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=... There is no reason we cannot rapidly expand on this with additional solar and wind, as well as batteries as the cost drops.
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Notably, check out Ontario (96% low carbon, 36% renewable) and France (91% low carbon, 13% renewable!?) But how!? The answer is nuclear power plants. Don't forget also that electricity is roughly 40% of energy usage for most people, the rest being heating and transportation. Those are very fossil dominated so even though you see green here, there's a huge huge way to go.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      > But how!? The answer is nuclear power plants. Legacy nuclear bridging the gap is an acceptable solution. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, nuclear simply takes too long to build and is too costly (when compared to renewables as low as 2 cents/kwh and deployment times measured in months, not years or up to a decade). China is installing 40-50GW of solar per year; the world in aggregate installs about 100GW annually. The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde in Arizona) has a nameplate capacity just shy of 4GW; assuming you need 16GW of solar to replace such a generator due to 25% capacity factor, that is an install time of just around a year). > Don't forget also that electricity is roughly 40% of energy usage for most people, the rest being heating and transportation. Those are very fossil dominated so even though you see green here, there's a huge huge way to go. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory did a study about a decade ago [1] that ~73% of light vehicles could move over to the electrical grid with existing generation capacity. EVs are a perfect match for intermittent renewables generation, as they can charge when the sun is shining during the day, or charge at night when the wind is blowing. I concede heating has a long way to go with air source heat pumps, insulation, and other energy saving measures. "This initial paper estimates the regional percentages of the energy requirements for the U.S. LDV stock that could be supported by the existing infrastructure, based on the 12 modified North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) regions, as of 2002, and taking into account congestion in regional transmission and distribution systems. For the United States as a whole, 84% of U.S. cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) could be supported by the existing infrastructure, although the local percentages vary by region. Using the light duty vehicle fleet (LDV) classification, that includes cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans, the technical potential is 73%. This has a gasoline displacement potential of 6.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or 52% of the nation’s oil imports. Existing nuclear plants should be kept operational as long as feasible (from a safety perspective), but the writing is on the wall. [1] https://www.ferc.gov/about/com-mem/5-24-07-technical-analy-wellinghoff.pdf https://www.ferc.gov/about/com-mem/5-24-07-technical-analy-w...
greglindahl 8y ago
People have been under-predicting what solar and batteries can do for decades... just look at the actual cost and production curves vs predictions. Also, don't forget wind and other storage.

epistasis 8y ago

This company sees the intermittent nature of renewables as a the primary problem, but that's thinking left over from the last century, a century where you couldn't make the demand responsive to the supply. That's going to change; the biggest amounts of home load will be heating/cooling of air for the home and water heating. Both of these will be demand responsive. And as cars electrify, that's another huge amount of load that will be responsive. The only thing left is the business model to pay consumers to charge/heat/cool at the right time. We don't even need that many additional batteries because thermal storage is cheap, and an electric car will store 2-3 days of electricity usage, and most people come nowhere close to needing a full 60 kWh of electric driving every day. Those that do will use it, but those that can be more responsive to when they charge will get paid for it. In the 20th century storage was super expensive, and large precise construction was inexpensive; that's being flipped. In five years, solar plus enough lithium ion storage (or other tech) will be cheaper than the cheapest nuclear. In 10-15, winter levels of sunlight + storage will be cheaper than the cheapest nuclear. They're trying to address the problems of toady, in 20 years. If their development pipeline is 20 years out, they need to anticipate the problems 20 years out, rather than skating to where the puck is now. The problem has changed; there will be niche needs for nuclear power, I'm sure, but unless they can drive down current nuclear costs to be cheaper than wind or solar, there's going to be little need for nuclear at all.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> That's going to change; the biggest amounts of home load will be heating/cooling of air for the home and water heating. Both of these will be demand responsive. You can use time of day pricing to get people to do their laundry at a better time. You can't use it to get people to heat their homes during the day instead of at night. Once people are no longer burning oil for heat, there is going to be a winter month where the average nighttime temperature in the northern half of the country is -4 degrees and that is going to drive high non-responsive demand for electricity at night. In theory you can install enough batteries for this and charge them with solar during the day, but what happens when it's cloudy during the day and cold at night for a straight month?
- 8y ago

2trill2spill 8y ago

The article you cited said we need 43,000 square miles of solar to power the earth costing 5 trillion dollars, I consider that to be a huge amount of land and money. That would be half the area of Minnesota the state I live in devoted entirely to solar panels. Sure it wouldn't all be in one place but that is still a significant amount of land world wide that have to change land uses. Also isn't that article also assuming that all of the solar panels would be in the Sahara desert? Where solar power is extremely efficient. If we spread these solar panels across the world we would need significantly more because they would located in places much less suitable for solar power.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
burlesona 8y ago
Considering the US alone uses about 4K SQMI for parking, that really doesn’t seem like too much. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parkin...
- hazz99 8y ago
  10x the total parking spaces seems pretty damn huge to me, I've seen some big carparks.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    In addition, carparks in the US could be argued to be an ecological and sociological disaster. If you could somehow have cars without carparks (maybe the car folds up, I dunno), it would be one the biggest quality-of-life improvements in my lifetime. Probably about on par with the smartphone for me personally, probably a bigger improvement for people who are very poor.
    - chrisco255 8y ago
      Self-driving cars will alleviate this problem, since the cars will just rent their time out (like Uber/Lyft today) and after they drop you off at your destination they zip off to pick up the next human. Even if you choose to own your own car, the car itself could go back home during the day while you're at work.

arduanika 8y ago

An industry like solar whose main boast seems to be that it creates more jobs than fossil fuels -- while producing less than a tenth of the energy -- is not shovel-ready as a replacement right now, today, when we need it. If you require an order of magnitude more workers per watt, you're not ready to scale. By contrast, as far as I can tell, nuclear requires fewer than fossil fuels. Back during the Great Leap Forward, Mao got really into this idea of the people generating energy & doing metallurgy & manufacturing locally. Hipsters would approve. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a leap backwards. edit: my math was wrong; solar is actually worse than I said. Solar costs over 100 times more workers per watt than fossil fuels. https://www.energy.gov/downloads/us-energy-and-employment-report https://www.energy.gov/downloads/us-energy-and-employment-re... https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home

hindsightbias 8y ago

While Nathan Myhrvold doesn't need to be paid (he's a near billionaire), I do wonder what one has to pay Scientific American for the opinion space advocating their own company. It would seem a little more objective to have an independent scientist write pieces like this.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
It would seem a little more objective to have an independent scientist write pieces like this. Any scientist who knows enough to write an informed piece is going to have an opinion, whether they are hiding it or not.
- metaphor 8y ago
  The parent never asserted that independent scientists won't have an opinion.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    If you want "more objective" you are asking for less opinionated.
sjwright 8y ago
This article isn't about objectivity. It's an opinion piece by someone with an entirely transparent agenda.

namuol 8y ago

Why not both?

nukemandan 8y ago

> I do not want to see any more centralization and the corresponding corruption. Agreed - That is why Small Modular reactors are exciting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

StreamBright 8y ago

>>> The "huge amounts of land" claim is incorrect Matter of definition. Based on facts it is huge in my opinion. >>> The second claim seems to ignore the possibility of batteries and other large scale energy storage, never mind that solar would be complemented by other renewable energy sources. No, it just matches reality. As of today we can not store huge amount of energy this is why you need to charge your phone every day. If battery capacity and energy density was developing the same speed as CPU power we would charge our phones once a year. The best option we have today is called pumped storage hydroelectricity, which is a really invasive way of storing energy and reduces the efficiency greatly. Unless we found a radically different, better way of storing energy solar power can be used only in smaller scale (like Tesla Solar Roof style) and nuclear power is still one of the cleanest and best option for mass production of eneregy. Disclaimer I have graduated in energy engineering

8bitsrule 8y ago

A calculation I saw a couple of decades ago showed that the entire energy being used by the world then could be powered by a solar array 200 miles on a side. I think that figure is on the right order, then break that 40,000 sq. mi. into 100 pieces ... and each is 20 miles on a side. Compare that to the amount of sunlit desert in the world. Simple, obvious, self-explanatory. Of course, the fuel cost of solar is zero. The energy can be created anywhere there's sunlight. Consumed locally. And there's no waste. A threatening vision for the power brokers. They may say anything to have their way.