7 ms·

The crux of the matter is that we need to drive thermodynamics backward at planetary scale. This is a fancy way of saying that we need to increase electricity g

The crux of the matter is that we need to drive thermodynamics backward at planetary scale. This is a fancy way of saying that we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor beyond current global demand without producing net CO2. The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this that don't rely on burning carbon is extremely short: nuclear fission. I don't see any possibility of the required power generation capability being built. Even if the economic resources were made available, which is at least plausible in the abstract, the irrational politics around nuclear power in the developed world would guarantee that there would be little actual progress. Constructively addressing climate change means massively increasing power generation capacity as a primary input. Given the ample evidence that this is not politically achievable, I think it is fair to call pessimism "realism".

smoll 7y ago
But necessity is the mother of invention, so we will probably invent a viable nuclear fission-based energy solution at the 11th hour, probably by someone who also helped cause the death of countless people through their earlier work[0]. I know this sounds absurdly far-fetched, but it’s pretty much par for the course for us humans. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
- roenxi 7y ago
  Plans that involve being pleasantly surprised are not good plans. Haber was preceded by centuries of warfare that did not produce inventions of such significance.
- guelo 7y ago
  The 11th hour came and went and we didn't notice because it takes decades for the planetary system to react to the pollution.
- yifanl 7y ago
  I dont accept this line of thinking, we cant hand wave away hard problems just because we've solved hard problems in a pinch before. This sounds like a tautology, but we solved hard problems by solving them, not by believing we'd solve them.
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
>irrational politics around nuclear power Fusion is safe! D: Fusion when?
- juped 7y ago
  Fission is safe. Fission many decades ago.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Yes, entirely safe, that's why nobody is living in Chernobyl and they're using robots to enter Fukashima. Totally safe....
    - vkou 7y ago
      Hydro power generation has killed over a hundred thousand people, yet we are still building, and using hydro dams. Nuclear is safe compared to the alternatives.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        And the region in which those hundred-thousand-plus were killed ... is now home to some 7 millions of souls. Hydro power, for much the same organisational, political, and disaster response reasons as nuclear, which is to say, non-technical reasons, can be exceedingly risky. But once the immediate hazard is resolved, over the course of months to years, the region returns to normal. The immediate innundation from Banqiao was responsible for ~25k deaths. The additional 100k or so came from starvation and disease due to widespread disruption of the region, and a grossly inadequate disaster response plan and capability. Organisational / institutional failures at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and for that matter, Hanford and Sellafield, were and are massive contributing factors. You cannot engineer around those.
        jfnixon 7y ago
        If Japan had hundreds of acres of solar panels back when the tsunami occurred, they would be resting out on the ocean floor, leaching heavy metals into the water. Definitely better, right?
greglindahl 7y ago
> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.
- Scaevolus 7y ago
  You still need baseload power plants, and the economics of battery-based storage plants aren't there yet. Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.
  - graeme 7y ago
    For using power to suck carbon out of the air, would you need baseload power, or could you have a machine that ran whenever cheap solar electricity was available. Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.
    - jandrewrogers 7y ago
      Most steps of an industrial process will work with intermittent power, albeit with substantial loss of process efficiency that will therefore require building more infrastructure for the same effect than if you were using baseload power. Some steps of an industrial process may effectively require non-stop baseload power because restarting it is prohibitively slow and costly. It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.
  - ofrzeta 7y ago
    Hydropower is actually not so nice when you take into account that it's the reason that many fish species are on the brink of extinction. That's in Europe at least but it seems that it's also a problem in the US, see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-boiling-salmon-trout-and-sturgeon-alive https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-b...
hanniabu 7y ago
> irrational politics around nuclear power You sounds like the typical advocator of oil pipelines over protected land and I'm sure you know how that ended up. Can we build safe pipelines? Yes. Do we? No. Why? Because of the human factor, which comes down to greed, stupidity, and laxation of regulation. This is the same exact case for nuclear. Already we see that a majority of nuclear power plants in the US are operating at almost 2x the design life and will likely get additional extensions. This is done by continued laxation of regulation. And this is in the US where I would expect the strictest of regulation. When the rest of the world sees the US doing this, it sets a precedence for them to follow and I'm sure other countries will have even less strict regulations and inspections. It's really only a matter of time until we have another disaster.
uoaei 7y ago
Breaking ground today, a nuclear reactor will be operational after about 10 years. In that time, other forms of energy generation (with no major lasting effects following catastrophic failure) and storage are getting cheaper, and if that happens at a sufficiently fast (e.g. half-life (heh) of price of a few years) than fission reactors will be priced out before they even start running.
8bitsrule 7y ago
> we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor As in India, which is nearly finished building from ~ 40GW to 170GW of renewable energy. And you skip past the powers of conservation. We don't need more power, we need less CO2. > capable of scaling ... nuclear fission The CO2 problem needs to be addressed promptly, and efficiently. Renewables build -much- more quickly, and the immediate cost of hundreds of nukes would finance thousands of green installs. (Waste aside.) Sunlight and wind are the result of the Sun's NF ... it eats the waste problem. > I don't see any possibility. Oh it's possible. What you 'see' as irrational politics I see as just as rational as the CO2 evidence. And the rational response is to vote out all of those who stand in the way of prompt and efficient.
- cgh 7y ago
  Did you read the articles (there are two)? They address renewables in depth.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    I did. I prefer to read what scientists and engineers have concluded, and have for decades. I like this: https://thesolutionsproject.org/resources/ https://thesolutionsproject.org/resources/ Consider if we had acted and done in the same short period what India has done, we'd now have the equivalent of 130 nuclear plants online ... ready for a mandate to move to electric transportation. The future cost of continued reliance on fossils completes the calculation.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Thousands of green installations are two orders of magnitude behind in energy generation than hundreds of nuclear plants. And we're not even talking about economies of scale which renewables enjoy but nuclear plants do not yet.
fouc 7y ago
There's a limited number of spots to stick a nuclear reactor. So it's hard to actually scale that up.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Of the many strikes against nuclear power, a paucity of siting locations is almost certainly well down the list. Something I say as no particular fan (though also not a doctrinaire opponent) of nuclear power. The fact that scaling nuclear beyond its present contribution would require vast numbers of plants, many in politically (and otherwise) unstable regions, is a much larger concern in my book. We're committing to decades to millennia of addressing consequences in regions where stability is often measured in years, sometimes months.
dwd 7y ago
Unfortunately there are no realists in a position to really affect Government investment. Why is every nation not committing an investment on the scale of the Apollo/Manhattan Projects? Politically it should be sell-able as a near-term investment (jobs) and future prosperity (cheaper renewable energy). Governments should be putting billions into fusion, wave/tidal generation (nothing should be too expensive), upgrading all hydro to pumped hydro as well as developing more. Ideas like this: https://www.arup.com/projects/bendigo-underground-pumped-hydro https://www.arup.com/projects/bendigo-underground-pumped-hyd... should be fully supported and funded. As each of the dozens of 400m+ deep underground coal mines around the world are wound down and replaced with wind or solar generation, convert them to pumped hydro, providing jobs for displaced coal miners and saving their communities in the process.
- rayiner 7y ago
  The Manhattan project cost $4 billion per year for 6 years. Apollo cost $15 billion per year for 11 years. (All today’s dollars.) The US currently subsidies renewables at about $7 billion annually.
  - harryh 7y ago
    That's a pretty interesting stat. Though the renewables subsidy doesn't look as generous if you compare things in % of GDP terms.
    - dwd 7y ago
      It would be interesting to see the amount of carbon reduction that 7 billion in annual subsidies generates compared to what you would get investing it in replacing coal plants with the equivalent pumped hydro. The current US Government investment seems pretty small. https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/usa https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/usa
- basch 7y ago
  Isnt that basically ITER? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bo...

smoll 7y ago

But necessity is the mother of invention, so we will probably invent a viable nuclear fission-based energy solution at the 11th hour, probably by someone who also helped cause the death of countless people through their earlier work[0]. I know this sounds absurdly far-fetched, but it’s pretty much par for the course for us humans. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

roenxi 7y ago
Plans that involve being pleasantly surprised are not good plans. Haber was preceded by centuries of warfare that did not produce inventions of such significance.
guelo 7y ago
The 11th hour came and went and we didn't notice because it takes decades for the planetary system to react to the pollution.
yifanl 7y ago
I dont accept this line of thinking, we cant hand wave away hard problems just because we've solved hard problems in a pinch before. This sounds like a tautology, but we solved hard problems by solving them, not by believing we'd solve them.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago

>irrational politics around nuclear power Fusion is safe! D: Fusion when?

juped 7y ago
Fission is safe. Fission many decades ago.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Yes, entirely safe, that's why nobody is living in Chernobyl and they're using robots to enter Fukashima. Totally safe....
  - vkou 7y ago
    Hydro power generation has killed over a hundred thousand people, yet we are still building, and using hydro dams. Nuclear is safe compared to the alternatives.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      And the region in which those hundred-thousand-plus were killed ... is now home to some 7 millions of souls. Hydro power, for much the same organisational, political, and disaster response reasons as nuclear, which is to say, non-technical reasons, can be exceedingly risky. But once the immediate hazard is resolved, over the course of months to years, the region returns to normal. The immediate innundation from Banqiao was responsible for ~25k deaths. The additional 100k or so came from starvation and disease due to widespread disruption of the region, and a grossly inadequate disaster response plan and capability. Organisational / institutional failures at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and for that matter, Hanford and Sellafield, were and are massive contributing factors. You cannot engineer around those.
      - jfnixon 7y ago
        If Japan had hundreds of acres of solar panels back when the tsunami occurred, they would be resting out on the ocean floor, leaching heavy metals into the water. Definitely better, right?

greglindahl 7y ago

> The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this ... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.

Scaevolus 7y ago
You still need baseload power plants, and the economics of battery-based storage plants aren't there yet. Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.
- graeme 7y ago
  For using power to suck carbon out of the air, would you need baseload power, or could you have a machine that ran whenever cheap solar electricity was available. Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    Most steps of an industrial process will work with intermittent power, albeit with substantial loss of process efficiency that will therefore require building more infrastructure for the same effect than if you were using baseload power. Some steps of an industrial process may effectively require non-stop baseload power because restarting it is prohibitively slow and costly. It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.
- ofrzeta 7y ago
  Hydropower is actually not so nice when you take into account that it's the reason that many fish species are on the brink of extinction. That's in Europe at least but it seems that it's also a problem in the US, see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-boiling-salmon-trout-and-sturgeon-alive https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvm7vq/power-plants-are-b...

hanniabu 7y ago

> irrational politics around nuclear power You sounds like the typical advocator of oil pipelines over protected land and I'm sure you know how that ended up. Can we build safe pipelines? Yes. Do we? No. Why? Because of the human factor, which comes down to greed, stupidity, and laxation of regulation. This is the same exact case for nuclear. Already we see that a majority of nuclear power plants in the US are operating at almost 2x the design life and will likely get additional extensions. This is done by continued laxation of regulation. And this is in the US where I would expect the strictest of regulation. When the rest of the world sees the US doing this, it sets a precedence for them to follow and I'm sure other countries will have even less strict regulations and inspections. It's really only a matter of time until we have another disaster.

uoaei 7y ago

Breaking ground today, a nuclear reactor will be operational after about 10 years. In that time, other forms of energy generation (with no major lasting effects following catastrophic failure) and storage are getting cheaper, and if that happens at a sufficiently fast (e.g. half-life (heh) of price of a few years) than fission reactors will be priced out before they even start running.

8bitsrule 7y ago

> we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor As in India, which is nearly finished building from ~ 40GW to 170GW of renewable energy. And you skip past the powers of conservation. We don't need more power, we need less CO2. > capable of scaling ... nuclear fission The CO2 problem needs to be addressed promptly, and efficiently. Renewables build -much- more quickly, and the immediate cost of hundreds of nukes would finance thousands of green installs. (Waste aside.) Sunlight and wind are the result of the Sun's NF ... it eats the waste problem. > I don't see any possibility. Oh it's possible. What you 'see' as irrational politics I see as just as rational as the CO2 evidence. And the rational response is to vote out all of those who stand in the way of prompt and efficient.

cgh 7y ago
Did you read the articles (there are two)? They address renewables in depth.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  I did. I prefer to read what scientists and engineers have concluded, and have for decades. I like this: https://thesolutionsproject.org/resources/ https://thesolutionsproject.org/resources/ Consider if we had acted and done in the same short period what India has done, we'd now have the equivalent of 130 nuclear plants online ... ready for a mandate to move to electric transportation. The future cost of continued reliance on fossils completes the calculation.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Thousands of green installations are two orders of magnitude behind in energy generation than hundreds of nuclear plants. And we're not even talking about economies of scale which renewables enjoy but nuclear plants do not yet.

fouc 7y ago

There's a limited number of spots to stick a nuclear reactor. So it's hard to actually scale that up.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Of the many strikes against nuclear power, a paucity of siting locations is almost certainly well down the list. Something I say as no particular fan (though also not a doctrinaire opponent) of nuclear power. The fact that scaling nuclear beyond its present contribution would require vast numbers of plants, many in politically (and otherwise) unstable regions, is a much larger concern in my book. We're committing to decades to millennia of addressing consequences in regions where stability is often measured in years, sometimes months.

dwd 7y ago

Unfortunately there are no realists in a position to really affect Government investment. Why is every nation not committing an investment on the scale of the Apollo/Manhattan Projects? Politically it should be sell-able as a near-term investment (jobs) and future prosperity (cheaper renewable energy). Governments should be putting billions into fusion, wave/tidal generation (nothing should be too expensive), upgrading all hydro to pumped hydro as well as developing more. Ideas like this: https://www.arup.com/projects/bendigo-underground-pumped-hydro https://www.arup.com/projects/bendigo-underground-pumped-hyd... should be fully supported and funded. As each of the dozens of 400m+ deep underground coal mines around the world are wound down and replaced with wind or solar generation, convert them to pumped hydro, providing jobs for displaced coal miners and saving their communities in the process.

rayiner 7y ago
The Manhattan project cost $4 billion per year for 6 years. Apollo cost $15 billion per year for 11 years. (All today’s dollars.) The US currently subsidies renewables at about $7 billion annually.
- harryh 7y ago
  That's a pretty interesting stat. Though the renewables subsidy doesn't look as generous if you compare things in % of GDP terms.
  - dwd 7y ago
    It would be interesting to see the amount of carbon reduction that 7 billion in annual subsidies generates compared to what you would get investing it in replacing coal plants with the equivalent pumped hydro. The current US Government investment seems pretty small. https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/usa https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/usa
basch 7y ago
Isnt that basically ITER? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bo...