5 ms·

Very good point. Incremental safety measures with an eye to swaying public opinion is pretty pointless as public opinion changes very slowly I imagine and we mu

Very good point. Incremental safety measures with an eye to swaying public opinion is pretty pointless as public opinion changes very slowly I imagine and we must be hitting the law of diminishing returns w.r.t this particular set of tech. On the other hand a pure win would be figuring out how to enlarge the market share of nuclear by persuading those who are already willing but balk at the large up-front costs, the insurance, the regulatory environment, the long planning processes (etc. etc. – basically everything but the tech). If the USA and the EU both made a commitment to doubling the share of nuclear tech in their jurisdictions to combat climate change (and we're going to need loads of cheap juice to power all those EVs) by streamlining the processes and creating an Atoms for Peace mark II umbrella that would make this HNer a happy camper. Don't see it happening unfortunately. Every time this topic comes up I get so disheartened.

epistasis 7y ago
Public opinion won't matter at all until construction itself becomes a reliable process. There are plenty of sites willing to host nuclear, and as our current fleet ages out many sites would welcome replacement reactors to keep the community's economic base going. However it's abundantly clear that the current tech's time has come and gone. The current designs can't be constructed in the US, as it becomes a Mexican standoff between utility, designer, and contractor, each just waiting to sue the others for what they assume will be inevitable and costly delays and construction/design errors. The Rankine cycle for converting heat to electricity is just not super exciting any more, and wind/solar/storage may outcompete thermal electricity generation as an entire class of technologies.
- craftinator 7y ago
  Exciting? Who cares if it is exciting? It's the most dense means of energy production that we have, in terms of cost, square footage, and like, every other positive metric I can think of.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    In terms of cost, we are on the exponential improvement phase of the logistic technology curve for wind/solar/storage. For thermal energy, we are long past that. That's why "exciting" matters. Already wind/solar/storage have beat nuclear on cost, are beating coal, and in many areas solar+storage is beating natural gas for new installs. We don't know how much wind/solar/storage will improve on cost, but we know it will be quite a bit. We know that thermal generation of electricity is optimized to its max. As far as dense energy production, what benefit does that have? If you want to stick a steam turbine on wheels, or a nuclear reactor in a submarine, that would make sense, but I'm not sure how it helps for the grid.
    - lokimedes 7y ago
      At some point it will dawn on us that the resources needed to build solar/wind is defined by the energy density available in these resources. Nuclear is basically invoking a deeper level of reality, one where energy is measured in MeV rather than paltry eV of chemical binding energy. Solar and wind are even less dense. It may be an old Physicist’s ramblings, but we have backed away from Prometheus’ fire way too soon to save ourselves.
      - epistasis 7y ago
        With wind and solar we are capturing leftover energy from the sun's fusion; the internal amount of storage is not relevant. With fossil fuels, we are simply using the stored energy from past fusion. It's likely that we will start creating synthetic fuels from the electricity that comes from wind and solar, if you want a dense storage mechanism for keeping fuel close by for mobile applications or isolated sites. There's nothing magical about nuclear, it's just a heat source. Unfortunately it's difficult to transmit heat long distances.
    - igravious 7y ago
      > As far as dense energy production, what benefit does that have? So that we don't blanket the countryside with wind and solar farms? I would have thought that'd be obvious enough. Also, very few people are really factoring in the environmental costs of repairing and recycling huge turbines and masses of solar pv panels – it's externalities like these (and other externalities besides) that are masking the true cost of renewable tech in the same way that environmental pollution masks the true cost of so-called fossil fuels. Just you wait and see. The Chinese and Russians are forward thinking, increasing the allocation of atoms for peace in their energy mix.
- lokimedes 7y ago
  From what I hear the US can barely maintain its roads, let alone build nuclear power plants, but why the gloom? We did it before, this time it really matters, so let’s put some money into saving the planet and get that x1e6 energy density going.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    Maintaining roads is pretty trivial compared to building more nuclear, and we are very good at that as long as there's money allocated. When money is allocated for nuclear, we are not good at building, just as we are bad at nearly all massive multi-billion dollar builds. We no longer have the project management skills and construction skills we had 50 years ago. If you look back at the pre-Three Mike Island track record for construction, it isn't much better than our current, and fairly disastrous construction record from the past decade. There is a survivor bias when we look around at the currently running and constructed nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, there's a route that requires far more scalable expansion, our current path of wind, water, solar and storage.
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    The US seems to be OK at building wind farms and solar farms.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Screw up 1% of the modules in a solar farm and output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the concrete pours for a nuclear power plant and it's a disaster. The distributed nature of wind and solar makes building them, and training the workforce to build them, easier.

epistasis 7y ago

Public opinion won't matter at all until construction itself becomes a reliable process. There are plenty of sites willing to host nuclear, and as our current fleet ages out many sites would welcome replacement reactors to keep the community's economic base going. However it's abundantly clear that the current tech's time has come and gone. The current designs can't be constructed in the US, as it becomes a Mexican standoff between utility, designer, and contractor, each just waiting to sue the others for what they assume will be inevitable and costly delays and construction/design errors. The Rankine cycle for converting heat to electricity is just not super exciting any more, and wind/solar/storage may outcompete thermal electricity generation as an entire class of technologies.

craftinator 7y ago
Exciting? Who cares if it is exciting? It's the most dense means of energy production that we have, in terms of cost, square footage, and like, every other positive metric I can think of.
- epistasis 7y ago
  In terms of cost, we are on the exponential improvement phase of the logistic technology curve for wind/solar/storage. For thermal energy, we are long past that. That's why "exciting" matters. Already wind/solar/storage have beat nuclear on cost, are beating coal, and in many areas solar+storage is beating natural gas for new installs. We don't know how much wind/solar/storage will improve on cost, but we know it will be quite a bit. We know that thermal generation of electricity is optimized to its max. As far as dense energy production, what benefit does that have? If you want to stick a steam turbine on wheels, or a nuclear reactor in a submarine, that would make sense, but I'm not sure how it helps for the grid.
  - lokimedes 7y ago
    At some point it will dawn on us that the resources needed to build solar/wind is defined by the energy density available in these resources. Nuclear is basically invoking a deeper level of reality, one where energy is measured in MeV rather than paltry eV of chemical binding energy. Solar and wind are even less dense. It may be an old Physicist’s ramblings, but we have backed away from Prometheus’ fire way too soon to save ourselves.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      With wind and solar we are capturing leftover energy from the sun's fusion; the internal amount of storage is not relevant. With fossil fuels, we are simply using the stored energy from past fusion. It's likely that we will start creating synthetic fuels from the electricity that comes from wind and solar, if you want a dense storage mechanism for keeping fuel close by for mobile applications or isolated sites. There's nothing magical about nuclear, it's just a heat source. Unfortunately it's difficult to transmit heat long distances.
  - igravious 7y ago
    > As far as dense energy production, what benefit does that have? So that we don't blanket the countryside with wind and solar farms? I would have thought that'd be obvious enough. Also, very few people are really factoring in the environmental costs of repairing and recycling huge turbines and masses of solar pv panels – it's externalities like these (and other externalities besides) that are masking the true cost of renewable tech in the same way that environmental pollution masks the true cost of so-called fossil fuels. Just you wait and see. The Chinese and Russians are forward thinking, increasing the allocation of atoms for peace in their energy mix.
lokimedes 7y ago
From what I hear the US can barely maintain its roads, let alone build nuclear power plants, but why the gloom? We did it before, this time it really matters, so let’s put some money into saving the planet and get that x1e6 energy density going.
- epistasis 7y ago
  Maintaining roads is pretty trivial compared to building more nuclear, and we are very good at that as long as there's money allocated. When money is allocated for nuclear, we are not good at building, just as we are bad at nearly all massive multi-billion dollar builds. We no longer have the project management skills and construction skills we had 50 years ago. If you look back at the pre-Three Mike Island track record for construction, it isn't much better than our current, and fairly disastrous construction record from the past decade. There is a survivor bias when we look around at the currently running and constructed nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, there's a route that requires far more scalable expansion, our current path of wind, water, solar and storage.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  The US seems to be OK at building wind farms and solar farms.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Screw up 1% of the modules in a solar farm and output is down 1%. Screw up 1% of the concrete pours for a nuclear power plant and it's a disaster. The distributed nature of wind and solar makes building them, and training the workforce to build them, easier.