6 ms·

"The proposal opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology." Ugh

spidermango 7y ago
why
cma 7y ago
To disambiguate, it doesn't oppose energy storage technology, "carbon capture and storage" should be read as one thing, relating to carbon capture only.
marricks 7y ago
I'm for nuclear energy as it gets us away from coal the most reliably, but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. Not only that, but we'd actually be willing to share those green solutions around the world.
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  Seems that building nuclear plants takes much too long to have any noticeable effect in the short term, better to take it off the table so that it’s not present as a red-herring.
- umvi 7y ago
  > but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. 2 questions: Don't huge windfarms affect the local climate and wildlife? Afaik we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms. Have we solved the solar storage problem yet? I read something about massive battery plants and/or high speed flywheel energy storage, but as far as I know this is still a problem. I vote we go all in on nuclear just to quickly remove coal, and then slowly phase out nuclear with better, low-impact renewables.
  - avmich 7y ago
    > we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms. Yes, and we should pay (with money) more attention to study that. However we shouldn't/can't stop because of that and wait till we'll know more certainly - in general; some decisions need to be made early, and this question is an example. > Have we solved the solar storage problem yet? We have a variety of ways to store energy, and we're getting better with it with time, so forecasts here are optimistic. This is still a problem, but, again, we may move forward with other parts while we improving on batteries. > I vote we go all in on nuclear I think with nuclear we're uncapping worst case scenarios. This is harder to calculate, so I'm hesitant.
NittLion78 7y ago
I can understand the opposition on a long enough timeline, but to dismiss it from the start is almost certainly a recipe for failure.
datavirtue 7y ago
Came here to say that nuclear was missing. Sad. There are nuclear plant technologies available that can actually run on old nuclear waste, turning it into benign product, and are incapable of melting down.
safgasCVS 7y ago
Carbon capture is a completely absurd idea, but agreed on the nuclear.
- 29_29 7y ago
  No it's not. What do you think trees do?
  - melling 7y ago
    They seem to get in the way of humans. We keep burning them down. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/americas/amazon-rainforest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/americas/amazon-rai...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- unpwn 7y ago
  why do you say that?
  - safgasCVS 7y ago
    I should be clear by carbon capture I dont mean planting trees (which is clearly an excellent idea) but the commercial co2 -> liquid/solid process. Firstly it can only be applied to large stationary emitters of co2 so stuff like refineries and gas/coal power stations but that makes up if i remember only 25% of our total emissions so the bigger stuff like transport and agriculture is missed. Secondly its quite challenging to implement. think about how few plants can be retrofitted with the process, and even so you need a bunch more energy to convert it to a liquid form for long term storage so you need excess power generation in the first place (even more if you want to convert into a sort of brick). Even once its in liquid form thats an enormous volume of liquid we need to store somewhere and just think how much people hate living next to powerstations right now - so people are going to be okay living under like a billion cubic meters of Co2 gas that can start seeping into air in a few years time. So ok we have to start piping this gas far away into giant underground storage containers but even so thats a lot of infrastructure and there arent many places that have these big caverns we can pipe it into. And the volumes must be immense. Like absolutely immense if we want to do it on a large scale. And right now oil is worth like 30-40 USD per barrel? Pumping that Co2 back into the ground who wants to pay for that? It seems crazy to me. Planting trees and stopping the amazon from burning seems like a much more sensible investment
MSM 7y ago
Do you see nuclear as a stopgap between coal and renewable, or do you think that 100% renewable is not going to be possible? I'm with you as being pretty pro nuclear, but if I'm making a plan to spend $16T, why even bother with half measures; just go straight for the future ideal.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  You can replace all current nuclear generation in the US with solar and batteries in less than 2 years, for a lower cost (nuclear generators take at least 10 years to build, and almost always go over budget; some are never finished and abandoned [See Duke in Florida, ratepayers got soaked on a nuclear plant they gave up on]). Your point is spot on. Nuclear lost (for commercial generation; edge cases like the Arctic circle and marine applications are still valid). It’s time we get over it and build as much solar, wind, and batteries as we can, and get Americans trained to deploy these technologies. Anything else is deck chairs on the Titanic. Drive out fossil fuel use through any means necessary.
  - calvinbhai 7y ago
    Do you mean, replace just the nuclear with solar in 2 years, but keep the rest of the infra (Coal and other source of power generation) as is? If so, it can only mean exponentially more coal/gas power generation to supply power during peak demand. How does that help?
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Coal is going away regardless due to it not being competitive against natural gas, no solar required. I’m saying nuclear should stick around until it’s the last base load left, but not bother building one more nuclear generating unit. Safely extend operating licenses whenever possible. Batteries and their lower costs will meet us at peaking needs in 3-5 years. There are hundreds of GWs of battery manufacturing capacity coming online over that time frame. Every million Tesla EVs is 10GW of controllable battery storage load on demand (example used only because I’m familiar with their presentation on it, and have seen it’s orchestration demo).
unpwn 7y ago
https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/
- stochastic_monk 7y ago
  I rather like Yang. He’s my favorite candidate outside of my Warren and Sanders. His policies are evidence-based, compassionate, and Yang Gang is fun.
  - xvector 7y ago
    Yang is just flat out the best candidate IMO for those two reasons. Rational and empathetic. Wish he had more of the spotlight.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Just as the US wasn’t ready for Sanders in 2016, it’s not yet ready for Yang in 2020. You can be ahead of your time but still right.
    - GoodJokes 7y ago
      He has no idea, when it comes to working class politics. All of his ideas are things that happen AFTER you give workers more power.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    He would get my vote because of his views on nuclear too. It is a same that people are so uninformed about energy and have a strong view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak
js8 7y ago
Opposes? Or just "doesn't support"? I mean, free market is still free to jump in and create nuclear power plants and CCS technologies, or am I wrong?
wongarsu 7y ago
I'm on board with not funding nuclear (takes forever to build, on those time frames it will likely be outcompeted by solar+storage). But carbon capture and storage seems essential for keeping carbon levels on an acceptable level. We dragged our feet too long to solve this with just reducing pollution. And while carbon capture is expensive it's a bargain compared to the costs of climate change over a few decades.
StreamBright 7y ago
Sooner or later we gonna have nuclear power as the main source of energy.

why

cma 7y ago

To disambiguate, it doesn't oppose energy storage technology, "carbon capture and storage" should be read as one thing, relating to carbon capture only.

marricks 7y ago

I'm for nuclear energy as it gets us away from coal the most reliably, but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. Not only that, but we'd actually be willing to share those green solutions around the world.

bluejekyll 7y ago
Seems that building nuclear plants takes much too long to have any noticeable effect in the short term, better to take it off the table so that it’s not present as a red-herring.
umvi 7y ago
> but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. 2 questions: Don't huge windfarms affect the local climate and wildlife? Afaik we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms. Have we solved the solar storage problem yet? I read something about massive battery plants and/or high speed flywheel energy storage, but as far as I know this is still a problem. I vote we go all in on nuclear just to quickly remove coal, and then slowly phase out nuclear with better, low-impact renewables.
- avmich 7y ago
  > we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms. Yes, and we should pay (with money) more attention to study that. However we shouldn't/can't stop because of that and wait till we'll know more certainly - in general; some decisions need to be made early, and this question is an example. > Have we solved the solar storage problem yet? We have a variety of ways to store energy, and we're getting better with it with time, so forecasts here are optimistic. This is still a problem, but, again, we may move forward with other parts while we improving on batteries. > I vote we go all in on nuclear I think with nuclear we're uncapping worst case scenarios. This is harder to calculate, so I'm hesitant.

NittLion78 7y ago

I can understand the opposition on a long enough timeline, but to dismiss it from the start is almost certainly a recipe for failure.

datavirtue 7y ago

Came here to say that nuclear was missing. Sad. There are nuclear plant technologies available that can actually run on old nuclear waste, turning it into benign product, and are incapable of melting down.

safgasCVS 7y ago

Carbon capture is a completely absurd idea, but agreed on the nuclear.

29_29 7y ago
No it's not. What do you think trees do?
- melling 7y ago
  They seem to get in the way of humans. We keep burning them down. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/americas/amazon-rainforest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/americas/amazon-rai...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
unpwn 7y ago
why do you say that?
- safgasCVS 7y ago
  I should be clear by carbon capture I dont mean planting trees (which is clearly an excellent idea) but the commercial co2 -> liquid/solid process. Firstly it can only be applied to large stationary emitters of co2 so stuff like refineries and gas/coal power stations but that makes up if i remember only 25% of our total emissions so the bigger stuff like transport and agriculture is missed. Secondly its quite challenging to implement. think about how few plants can be retrofitted with the process, and even so you need a bunch more energy to convert it to a liquid form for long term storage so you need excess power generation in the first place (even more if you want to convert into a sort of brick). Even once its in liquid form thats an enormous volume of liquid we need to store somewhere and just think how much people hate living next to powerstations right now - so people are going to be okay living under like a billion cubic meters of Co2 gas that can start seeping into air in a few years time. So ok we have to start piping this gas far away into giant underground storage containers but even so thats a lot of infrastructure and there arent many places that have these big caverns we can pipe it into. And the volumes must be immense. Like absolutely immense if we want to do it on a large scale. And right now oil is worth like 30-40 USD per barrel? Pumping that Co2 back into the ground who wants to pay for that? It seems crazy to me. Planting trees and stopping the amazon from burning seems like a much more sensible investment

MSM 7y ago

Do you see nuclear as a stopgap between coal and renewable, or do you think that 100% renewable is not going to be possible? I'm with you as being pretty pro nuclear, but if I'm making a plan to spend $16T, why even bother with half measures; just go straight for the future ideal.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
You can replace all current nuclear generation in the US with solar and batteries in less than 2 years, for a lower cost (nuclear generators take at least 10 years to build, and almost always go over budget; some are never finished and abandoned [See Duke in Florida, ratepayers got soaked on a nuclear plant they gave up on]). Your point is spot on. Nuclear lost (for commercial generation; edge cases like the Arctic circle and marine applications are still valid). It’s time we get over it and build as much solar, wind, and batteries as we can, and get Americans trained to deploy these technologies. Anything else is deck chairs on the Titanic. Drive out fossil fuel use through any means necessary.
- calvinbhai 7y ago
  Do you mean, replace just the nuclear with solar in 2 years, but keep the rest of the infra (Coal and other source of power generation) as is? If so, it can only mean exponentially more coal/gas power generation to supply power during peak demand. How does that help?
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Coal is going away regardless due to it not being competitive against natural gas, no solar required. I’m saying nuclear should stick around until it’s the last base load left, but not bother building one more nuclear generating unit. Safely extend operating licenses whenever possible. Batteries and their lower costs will meet us at peaking needs in 3-5 years. There are hundreds of GWs of battery manufacturing capacity coming online over that time frame. Every million Tesla EVs is 10GW of controllable battery storage load on demand (example used only because I’m familiar with their presentation on it, and have seen it’s orchestration demo).

unpwn 7y ago

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/

stochastic_monk 7y ago
I rather like Yang. He’s my favorite candidate outside of my Warren and Sanders. His policies are evidence-based, compassionate, and Yang Gang is fun.
- xvector 7y ago
  Yang is just flat out the best candidate IMO for those two reasons. Rational and empathetic. Wish he had more of the spotlight.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Just as the US wasn’t ready for Sanders in 2016, it’s not yet ready for Yang in 2020. You can be ahead of your time but still right.
  - GoodJokes 7y ago
    He has no idea, when it comes to working class politics. All of his ideas are things that happen AFTER you give workers more power.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  He would get my vote because of his views on nuclear too. It is a same that people are so uninformed about energy and have a strong view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

js8 7y ago

Opposes? Or just "doesn't support"? I mean, free market is still free to jump in and create nuclear power plants and CCS technologies, or am I wrong?

wongarsu 7y ago

I'm on board with not funding nuclear (takes forever to build, on those time frames it will likely be outcompeted by solar+storage). But carbon capture and storage seems essential for keeping carbon levels on an acceptable level. We dragged our feet too long to solve this with just reducing pollution. And while carbon capture is expensive it's a bargain compared to the costs of climate change over a few decades.

StreamBright 7y ago

Sooner or later we gonna have nuclear power as the main source of energy.