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>Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2

>Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed. Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.

luspr 7y ago
Agree completely. It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run. We need much more, if we want to advance as a species.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Yep, and nuclear is the only near-infinite source of energy.
  - hannob 7y ago
    I'm always baffled by such statements. Can you explain in which way solar is not a "near-infinite source of energy"? I mean... there are without doubt technical challenges and all that (but arguably less technical challenges than to do the same with nuclear), but there really is no relevant limit to the deployment of solar cells if you include things like large-scale installations in the desert.
    - threeseed 7y ago
      Especially if there are advancements in power distribution e.g. high temperature superconductors. This would be a game changer for the major continents like Europe, US, Africa where you could have power coming from hydro, thermal, solar, wind etc and being shipped to where it is needed.
      - posix_me_less 7y ago
        Loss of power during distribution is not a problem that needs solving, power losses due to transmission in conventional grid are mere 5%. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo... Considering how costly and inflexible all superconductors are, I don't see why they would help.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Those losses are on a per 100 mile basis. 2-5% per 100 miles of line (not as the crow flies mind you). Superconductors would make a huge difference if they could build a room temperature superconductor.
        Already__Taken 7y ago
        Exactly, when people mention losses saved by superconductors they don't mean to improve the current grid. It's to route power from the always sunny side of the planet.
        xorfish 7y ago
        HVDC is already below 3% per 1'000km. So connecting Europe to the Sahara is around 5% with current technology
        chrisco255 7y ago
        No. Sorry the Mediterranean Sea separates Europe from Sahara (as well as several countries) and you can't do this practically by any means. Europe doesn't own the Sahara.
        xorfish 7y ago
        The main problem with installing solar in the Sahara and transporting it to Europe is the political instability of the region. Laying cables across a sea or ocean is already routinely done.
    - erulabs 7y ago
      Solar power is simply indirect nuclear power anyhow. If we can do what’s happening in the sun in a bottle - then no need to produce panels. If there is material in stars to produce solar power, then there is more potential nuclear power. I’m for both, and solar seems distributed in a way that makes me think it’s better for human society, but since stars are made of fissable materials - by definition there is more “potential energy” in fission than solar, since solar is simply a subset of fission at a distance.
      - lorenzhs 7y ago
        Stars are fusion reactors, not fission. They're mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which account for 98% of its mass: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/suncomp.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/suncomp.ht.... You're going to have a hard time building a fission reactor running on hydrogen and helium.
      - neuronic 7y ago
        Solar is fusion and not fission [1]. If you can't even get that right, why should anyone take these weird pro-fission arguments seriously in 2020? The solution is to keep using existing nuclear power and develop renewables for replacement. Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins. And that leaves out years of planning and dealing with contracts. It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month. [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-difference https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-d...
        Reason077 7y ago
        > "Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins." Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      The solar panels do have to be fabricated. That probably doesn't have the same scaling potential as nuclear given how much power/m2 nuclear can reach. Also, at a guess the energy in solar panels drop with the square of distance to the sun. It is unlikely to be a good choice for interstellar travel if 'advance[ing] as a species' heads in the more fantastic directions.
      - hannob 7y ago
        > The solar panels do have to be fabricated. Let me tell you a mindblowing fact: It doesn't matter which energy technology you use, there's always technology involved that has to be fabricated.
      - epistasis 7y ago
        If we are getting to the point where W/m2 is an important win for nuclear, we are going to start to have serious problems with the rejected heat. A fundamental limitation of thermal steam engines is that they can only ever be 50% efficient, and you have to dump that waste heat in order to maintain power. Already, heat mitigation systems for some existing nuclear plants are starting to fail during heat waves as the climate warms. And these are expensive systems: at Diablo Canyon in California, it's cheaper to replace an entire, functioning reactor with renewables than it is to simply build a new cooling system. Which is all to say that nuclear won't scale tremendously well unless we 1) figure out fusion, and 2) figure out direct conversion of energy to electricity rather than using steam turbines to mechanically drive a generator. For the ultimate goal that many people have for nuclear, as a power source when not on earth, these sorts of advancements are also likely also necessary. Cooling in space is not a trivial matter.
    - belorn 7y ago
      What I have heard, you do loose energy in transmitting power over large distances. There exist low loss transmission cables, but I don't know how effective that is over very great distance. There is also the question of how to redesign a distributed power grid into a centralized version where all the power comes from a single sources in desert areas. On top of that there are political challenges. I have a hard time imagine Europe in current climate being happy to rely exclusively on power from the Sahara.
      - hannob 7y ago
        The Sahara thing is ultimately just to illustrate that there's no real limit to solar energy (because the upper commenter claimed that nuclear is the only energy that is practically limitless). But of course in practice you'd do the easy things first - that is, build solar on every rooftop. No country is anywhere close to that. I guess in the future we'll use imported solar for hard to solve problems, e.g. turn it into hydrogen or synthetic fuels (which also makes the transmission loss problem much smaller), while our electricity needs will be served mostly by local wind and solar.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        There's no solar energy in the Sahara at night. And then as people mentioned, there is energy lost in transmission through resistance in power lines. There's also the fact that not too many of the world's 8 billion people live within serviceable range of the Sahara, assuming you can get past the geopolitical instability in that region to construct and maintain such things. The solar cells would need constant cleaning from dust storms to keep them running at high efficiency. No, running solar on rooftops isn't the most practical use either. Depending on latitude, weather, cost of solar installation and battery installation, orientation and layout of roof to the sun, the problems with snow, rain, and hail, the lack of solar at night, the fact that none of this generates enough power for those times when you need it most like in the middle of winter in northern climates, etc. Solar and wind will never meet the growing needs of modern economy. Period. It's a pipe dream. They are great supplemental sources of electricity. They cannot power a first world economy.
    - bra4you 7y ago
      Me too. But lets not forget, we are dealing with 16 years old kiddies here. But for you: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Solar depends on weather, location and battery storage. Solar cells also require massive amounts of physical area to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant. And you can't compare a "2 gigawatt" solar installation to an equivalent nuclear installation because nuclear will produce power 24/7 at peak capacity, rain or shine. A solar plant sees a huge amount of variability and only hits peak efficiency for a brief part of the day on clear days.
      - aplummer 7y ago
        Solar power in the desert produces power 24/7 by keeping the molten sand hot overnight. It’s also always sunny
        Accujack 7y ago
        That technology is far more expensive than photovoltaic panels.... for example, the solar thermal Ivanpah project is now obsolete for that exact reason. Additionally, The storage density of molten salt is far lower than the generation capacity of a reactor.
        ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        Solar plus battery near the equator can be sized for 24/7 power with relative ease. But no one would do that, because we don't need power at the same rate all the time. Near the equator, where most people on the planet live, our need for energy is correlated with when the sun is shining and air con is running and people are awake. This is why solar is better even at the mythical "baseload" than nuclear is.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        You are hand waving the complexity, cost, feasibility and trade-offs of doing this.
        Accujack 7y ago
        >Near the equator, where most people on the planet live Nope. In fact, a minority of people live near the equator... for good reason: https://www.datagraver.com/case/world-population-distribution-by-latitude-and-longitude-2015 https://www.datagraver.com/case/world-population-distributio... Also, the base load most of us are talking about isn't created by people for the most part... it's created by industry, without which life on the equator or anywhere else would be rather primitive. In any case, the equator is going to become unlivable in the next few decades to the point where populations in equatorial areas will drop drastically.
    - The_Double 7y ago
      Not every country has access to a desert to deploy large scale solar. Most of the EU, Russia for instance, and those places do not want to be dependent on other countries.
      - Accujack 7y ago
        It's probably also worth noting that photovoltaics have to be exposed to the sun to work... which means that they can't be protected by armor or bunkers, which means that they're terrifically vulnerable to terrorist or other attack.
        lhopki01 7y ago
        The terrorist attack that is going to take out 1000s of square kilometres of solar panels? Surely they'd just attack a city if they had that amount of firepower? Or in the more likely case that they don't it's easier to attack power transmission than generation.
        Accujack 7y ago
        Assuming there are that many panels, it is in fact quite easy for any industrialized country to design a weapon that can destroy a square mile of panels or more with a single warhead. They're thin sheets of silicon covered in glass.
        kragen 7y ago
        A square mile is 2.6 square km. You are replying to someone who said it would be hard to destroy thousands of square km of panels. It would seem that your reply, that "it is…easy…to…destroy a square mile of panels or more with a single warhead", is not to the point. However, by coincidence, your position is right, for two reasons: 1. Single nuclear warheads routinely have blast radii of tens of km rather than, as you suggest, hundreds of meters. So in fact a single warhead can indeed destroy thousands of square km. 2. 1000km² of solar panels would be 1000 GWp; at a low-cost module price of €0.19/W (the average for 2019) that's €190 billion. Currently solar plants are not built that large, nor nearly so.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    But that hopefully would be nuclear fusion not fission. Fission however (a) is politically unpopular and (b) has a waste problem that no country wants to own.
  - rusk 7y ago
    Forgive me if this is a worn trope, but I've read somewhere that the upper bound on what we can do with nuclear energy is not how much we can produce, but what we can do with the leftovers ... as more and more people use nuclear power we're going to produce more and more nuclear waste, and there isn't really any answer as to what we can do with that. There are plenty of fantastic "ideas" as to what can be done, but it doesn't seem to me that we've fully solved that side of the equation, and I'd be thinking we really should have a good bit more work done before we consider something with such dangerous side effects "a solution".
    - roenxi 7y ago
      If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere. It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored. To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is concentrated in an absurdly small footprint in major cities and fertile belts compared to the size of the planet. The area the waste would sterilise would be a non-issue. I dunno. What do you want to be solved? If we call it poisonous instead of radioactive would you be happy? There are literally poisonous lakes out there and nobody cares much. One more doesn't matter. The only interesting thing about nuclear waste is we use a different word to describe the same outcomes. The outcomes don't seem that dangerous in the big picture.
      - rusk 7y ago
        Yeah man, I dunno either ... I think "poisonous" is understating it somewhat. We're talking about substances that will remain toxic for thousands of years, and are quite happy to go everywhere they can if there is some issue with containment. I appreciate that you have a conviction that this is a problem, but you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions (and I don't mean nuclear waste encased in concrete) than rhetoric as a means to address my concerns.
        7y ago
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    Not really. The supply of economically extractable fissile material is limited in just the same way as any other mineral. If energy prices rise then it will become worthwhile to extract, if they fall then it will be less so. Of course if the number of consumers rises this will also improve the viability of mining. According to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia, it is currently uneconomic to proceed with several mining projects. Regardless of economic considerations fissile material is a finite resource although it could be that we will never reach the limit.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      Technically, yes. In practical terms, however, switching nuclear reactors to use the Thorium fuel cycle would allow us to use a supply of fuel that would probably outlast human civilization.
  - zahrc 7y ago
    But where does all the nuclear waste go? We already struggle with plastics and tech waste.
- dmos62 7y ago
  > we want to advance as a species I'm somewhat weary of people talking of civilization progress as if its definition is obvious and universal.
  - the8472 7y ago
    As far as humans are concerned overall progress has been linked to climbing up fractions of the kardashev scale since fire was invented. And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.
    - dmos62 7y ago
      > overall progress This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.
      - the8472 7y ago
        I am saying that for many or perhaps even almost all measures of progress we want to apply, i.e. the specific definition doesn't matter, that progress was either enabled by or directly required more energy being available.
      - wolfram74 7y ago
        Most quality of life improvements do take energy, and yes, quality of life is subjective, it is conceivable to imagine a mind that takes joy in their child dieing of a preventable disease, some vertebrates eat their young, but overwhelmingly, humans like to see their child get old enough to play and talk as well as laugh and cry. Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy. So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.
- goalieca 7y ago
  Id he happy if we just focused on social issues and happiness. But might is right and every nation state and company and human being needs all the technological might we can muster in order to “win” (win what!?)
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  It's also a fallacy to think that humans will be able to escape the gravity well in large numbers. And once we do, the ones in space will quickly become a new species as they adapt to a different environment -- assuming they survive at all. Science fiction is fun and all, but even an ecologically ruined Earth is going to be a much more welcoming environment to live in than anything else the solar system has to offer. Meaningful exploration of the solar system will be restricted to unmanned probes and complex missions that require 100 Earthbound support staff for each human we send into space. Continuing to live on Earth will require a big reduction in the amount of energy we use per capita. We're already above what the Earth can realistically handle, and the global population is still growing.
- Firadeoclus 7y ago
  As we expand to space. On Earth there is an effective upper limit to the amount of heat we can release into the atmosphere before we'd cause catastrophic warming even without greenhouse effect.
  - pjkundert 7y ago
    That upper limit is probably orders of magnitude higher than we’re currently dissipating. We could blanket every city and town with permanently heated streets, and - as long as we stopped pumping water vapour into the dry upper troposphere - we wouldn’t even notice an increase in temperature. The big problems are 1) gigatons of soot coming over the north poles, permanently lowering the albedo of the planet and 2) pumping water into the dry upper atmosphere via jet exhaust, creating permanent cloud layers where they didn’t exist. Solve those two issues, and we’d have a much more interesting debate...
    - fao_ 7y ago
      You missed out the ecosystem collapsing because marine life has died off, and the oceans and waters becoming acidic (which will affect trade, drinkable water, rain, etc.)
    - mercutio2 7y ago
      Sea ice radiative forcing and overall albedo effects are on the order of 10% of well mixed greenhouse gas radiative forcing. Short term cloud layer albedo effects are even smaller. If we switched all our greenhouse gas emissions to nuclear, I agree there’s huge room for localized waste heat. But reducing albedo effects isn’t going to help if we keep emitting greenhouse gases.
  - quindecagon 7y ago
    That upper limit is in the trillions of people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be&t=948 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be...
- scotradamus 7y ago
  Energy production really isn't the issue. Energy storage is. We produce way more energy than we use. We currently do not have an easy way to store it. So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs, especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.
  - cesarb 7y ago
    > We produce way more energy than we use. [...] So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs That's not how it works. If you generate more than you need, you will have the opposite of a brown out (overvoltage and/or overfrequency). Generation and consumption of power have to always be precisely matched. > especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). When everyone gets home and flips their light switch, the extra demand slightly reduces the system voltage and frequency; feedback loops on the power plants then increase their generation to match the extra demand. > Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up. Keeping the generators running at their maximum means you have no margin for extra demand or sudden loss of generation (for instance, another power plant or a transmission line having an issue and shutting down). It's better to keep the generators running below the maximum to have a reserve for when these things happen.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      Excess energy is an easy problem to solve: use it to desalinate water, produce hydrogen fuel to power ships, or any of several other uses.
- reallydontask 7y ago
  > It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run It's hard to say without knowing your definition of long run so would you care to explain why you believe that less energy is required in your long run? I see it as exactly the opposite, in the short/medium term we will use more energy but it will eventually go into reverse. Maybe Jevons Paradox will intervene and you are correct, I don't know For the record, my long run is 150+ years, if only to make sure that we are all dead.
AtlasLion 7y ago
baby steps I'd say. Let's first fix all the mess we are making here on earth before thinking of space exploration.
- pauljurczak 7y ago
  There will always be some mess on Earth and anywhere else human kind visits in the future. We are flawed. Let's dream about perfect, but settle for good enough.
- C14L 7y ago
  No.
- nolok 7y ago
  You're missing the point. Going to space puts us in very restrictive environments and situations that forces us to solve issues that we "can" just shrug away here on earth (meaning we move it to one or two generations down the line so it's not our problem anymore).
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  No that is an absolutely terrible way of thinking about ANYTHING. That is what the townspeople said to the aristocrat funding development of the microscope. They demanded he care for the sick before engaging in this glass grinding business which had no obvious benefit Yet the microscope proved to be the biggest advance in medicine. Nobody could have predicted that being able to look at really small things would have an impact on how we understand disease. Likewise nobody could have predict the profound impact satellites have had on our economy and on science. Space exploration brings technological progress. If you are concerned about waste of money then first start to worry about industries we spend far more money on 1) Gambling 2) Cosmetics 3) Weapons, bombs etc 4) Disposable fashion Not to mention most of the worlds problems are of political nature. They are not problems a scientists can solve. Insisting that a physicist should apply his skills to create say world peace is a waste of skills and effort.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  That's like saying "let's first neatly reorganize all the files on these 700 harddrives before thinking about backups" when you can just do both. Spending for space exploration is currently at a laughably low level, if countless people didn't manage to solve all our problems in the course of decades then adding a few billions of dollars won't do anything except make a few people even richer.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> solve all kinds of existential problems ...very few existential problems have anything to do with technology.
- the8472 7y ago
  Long-term existential problems (was there ever any meaning to life if it just dies on earth?) most likely require technological solutions.
- Accujack 7y ago
  If you're human, every existential problem has to do with technology. That's who we are.
koheripbal 7y ago
There's also some false equivalency in the quote above. "Environmentalists" is a vague term. If we asked Environmental Energy SCIENTISTS, they overwhelmingly support nuclear power.
- mgoetzke 7y ago
  Scientists are not always thinking through consequences in the real world though. Just the theoretical aspects of something. Theoretically I find nuclear fission impressive and amazing. Practically I see no desirable outcome without bad effects especially when coordinated by the private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    > private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year Bingo. I have no issues with nuclear power. I have an issue with the human component. Safety regulations have been continuously changed and been made more relaxed to keep up with the crumbling nuclear plants that are way past their design life and coming up on another extension. Have a crack in the concrete? Increase the allowable crack tolerance. Have leaking radioactive water? Change the way the test is performed so it allows you to still pass. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspection-weakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe... https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/17/insanely-bad-move-experts-sound-alarm-trumps-nuclear-safety-agency-weighs-rollback https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/17/insanely-bad-mo...
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Dyson swarm. The nuclear reactor comes pre-installed.
arcticbull 7y ago
> ... with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive Expensive, probably. Dangerous? Not according to the data. Lowest deaths per terawatt-hour of any energy source including solar. Yes, even if you count Chernobyl, Fukushima (where 6 folks died) and Three Mile Island (nobody died) [1] [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
- 1MoreThing 7y ago
  Death is not the only measurement of danger.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  It's not "probably" expensive; it's undeniably very expensive, which is why it's a non-starter in most of the world. Look at South Carolina's fiasco with nuclear...the only country doing nuclear is China, which is known for massive infrastructure spending.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Horror story from a friend who worked in China as a consultant on the power grid back in the mid-aughts. Basically the guy who was leading construction on the plants was working with another who was to supply the concrete for the walls. Problem was, the concrete guy was behind on his "five year plan", so plant guy didn't have enough concrete. Plant guy still has to meet _his_ targets, so he just builds the plants with thinner walls. Sure it's an anecdote, but the point is China has very loose safety standards and cuts a lot of corners. She's much more okay with losing a few people here and there.
    - chantelles 7y ago
      Horror story from my stepfather at Bruce Nuclear Power Plant in Ontario Canada: At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted and they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs. He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked. And on and on. Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.

luspr 7y ago

Agree completely. It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run. We need much more, if we want to advance as a species.

chrisco255 7y ago
Yep, and nuclear is the only near-infinite source of energy.
- hannob 7y ago
  I'm always baffled by such statements. Can you explain in which way solar is not a "near-infinite source of energy"? I mean... there are without doubt technical challenges and all that (but arguably less technical challenges than to do the same with nuclear), but there really is no relevant limit to the deployment of solar cells if you include things like large-scale installations in the desert.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Especially if there are advancements in power distribution e.g. high temperature superconductors. This would be a game changer for the major continents like Europe, US, Africa where you could have power coming from hydro, thermal, solar, wind etc and being shipped to where it is needed.
    - posix_me_less 7y ago
      Loss of power during distribution is not a problem that needs solving, power losses due to transmission in conventional grid are mere 5%. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo... Considering how costly and inflexible all superconductors are, I don't see why they would help.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        Those losses are on a per 100 mile basis. 2-5% per 100 miles of line (not as the crow flies mind you). Superconductors would make a huge difference if they could build a room temperature superconductor.
        Already__Taken 7y ago
        Exactly, when people mention losses saved by superconductors they don't mean to improve the current grid. It's to route power from the always sunny side of the planet.
        xorfish 7y ago
        HVDC is already below 3% per 1'000km. So connecting Europe to the Sahara is around 5% with current technology
        chrisco255 7y ago
        No. Sorry the Mediterranean Sea separates Europe from Sahara (as well as several countries) and you can't do this practically by any means. Europe doesn't own the Sahara.
        xorfish 7y ago
        The main problem with installing solar in the Sahara and transporting it to Europe is the political instability of the region. Laying cables across a sea or ocean is already routinely done.
  - erulabs 7y ago
    Solar power is simply indirect nuclear power anyhow. If we can do what’s happening in the sun in a bottle - then no need to produce panels. If there is material in stars to produce solar power, then there is more potential nuclear power. I’m for both, and solar seems distributed in a way that makes me think it’s better for human society, but since stars are made of fissable materials - by definition there is more “potential energy” in fission than solar, since solar is simply a subset of fission at a distance.
    - lorenzhs 7y ago
      Stars are fusion reactors, not fission. They're mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which account for 98% of its mass: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/suncomp.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/suncomp.ht.... You're going to have a hard time building a fission reactor running on hydrogen and helium.
    - neuronic 7y ago
      Solar is fusion and not fission [1]. If you can't even get that right, why should anyone take these weird pro-fission arguments seriously in 2020? The solution is to keep using existing nuclear power and develop renewables for replacement. Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins. And that leaves out years of planning and dealing with contracts. It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month. [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-difference https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/fission-and-fusion-what-d...
      - Reason077 7y ago
        > "Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins." Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    The solar panels do have to be fabricated. That probably doesn't have the same scaling potential as nuclear given how much power/m2 nuclear can reach. Also, at a guess the energy in solar panels drop with the square of distance to the sun. It is unlikely to be a good choice for interstellar travel if 'advance[ing] as a species' heads in the more fantastic directions.
    - hannob 7y ago
      > The solar panels do have to be fabricated. Let me tell you a mindblowing fact: It doesn't matter which energy technology you use, there's always technology involved that has to be fabricated.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      If we are getting to the point where W/m2 is an important win for nuclear, we are going to start to have serious problems with the rejected heat. A fundamental limitation of thermal steam engines is that they can only ever be 50% efficient, and you have to dump that waste heat in order to maintain power. Already, heat mitigation systems for some existing nuclear plants are starting to fail during heat waves as the climate warms. And these are expensive systems: at Diablo Canyon in California, it's cheaper to replace an entire, functioning reactor with renewables than it is to simply build a new cooling system. Which is all to say that nuclear won't scale tremendously well unless we 1) figure out fusion, and 2) figure out direct conversion of energy to electricity rather than using steam turbines to mechanically drive a generator. For the ultimate goal that many people have for nuclear, as a power source when not on earth, these sorts of advancements are also likely also necessary. Cooling in space is not a trivial matter.
  - belorn 7y ago
    What I have heard, you do loose energy in transmitting power over large distances. There exist low loss transmission cables, but I don't know how effective that is over very great distance. There is also the question of how to redesign a distributed power grid into a centralized version where all the power comes from a single sources in desert areas. On top of that there are political challenges. I have a hard time imagine Europe in current climate being happy to rely exclusively on power from the Sahara.
    - hannob 7y ago
      The Sahara thing is ultimately just to illustrate that there's no real limit to solar energy (because the upper commenter claimed that nuclear is the only energy that is practically limitless). But of course in practice you'd do the easy things first - that is, build solar on every rooftop. No country is anywhere close to that. I guess in the future we'll use imported solar for hard to solve problems, e.g. turn it into hydrogen or synthetic fuels (which also makes the transmission loss problem much smaller), while our electricity needs will be served mostly by local wind and solar.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        There's no solar energy in the Sahara at night. And then as people mentioned, there is energy lost in transmission through resistance in power lines. There's also the fact that not too many of the world's 8 billion people live within serviceable range of the Sahara, assuming you can get past the geopolitical instability in that region to construct and maintain such things. The solar cells would need constant cleaning from dust storms to keep them running at high efficiency. No, running solar on rooftops isn't the most practical use either. Depending on latitude, weather, cost of solar installation and battery installation, orientation and layout of roof to the sun, the problems with snow, rain, and hail, the lack of solar at night, the fact that none of this generates enough power for those times when you need it most like in the middle of winter in northern climates, etc. Solar and wind will never meet the growing needs of modern economy. Period. It's a pipe dream. They are great supplemental sources of electricity. They cannot power a first world economy.
  - bra4you 7y ago
    Me too. But lets not forget, we are dealing with 16 years old kiddies here. But for you: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Solar depends on weather, location and battery storage. Solar cells also require massive amounts of physical area to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant. And you can't compare a "2 gigawatt" solar installation to an equivalent nuclear installation because nuclear will produce power 24/7 at peak capacity, rain or shine. A solar plant sees a huge amount of variability and only hits peak efficiency for a brief part of the day on clear days.
    - aplummer 7y ago
      Solar power in the desert produces power 24/7 by keeping the molten sand hot overnight. It’s also always sunny
      - Accujack 7y ago
        That technology is far more expensive than photovoltaic panels.... for example, the solar thermal Ivanpah project is now obsolete for that exact reason. Additionally, The storage density of molten salt is far lower than the generation capacity of a reactor.
        ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        Solar plus battery near the equator can be sized for 24/7 power with relative ease. But no one would do that, because we don't need power at the same rate all the time. Near the equator, where most people on the planet live, our need for energy is correlated with when the sun is shining and air con is running and people are awake. This is why solar is better even at the mythical "baseload" than nuclear is.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        You are hand waving the complexity, cost, feasibility and trade-offs of doing this.
        Accujack 7y ago
        >Near the equator, where most people on the planet live Nope. In fact, a minority of people live near the equator... for good reason: https://www.datagraver.com/case/world-population-distribution-by-latitude-and-longitude-2015 https://www.datagraver.com/case/world-population-distributio... Also, the base load most of us are talking about isn't created by people for the most part... it's created by industry, without which life on the equator or anywhere else would be rather primitive. In any case, the equator is going to become unlivable in the next few decades to the point where populations in equatorial areas will drop drastically.
  - The_Double 7y ago
    Not every country has access to a desert to deploy large scale solar. Most of the EU, Russia for instance, and those places do not want to be dependent on other countries.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      It's probably also worth noting that photovoltaics have to be exposed to the sun to work... which means that they can't be protected by armor or bunkers, which means that they're terrifically vulnerable to terrorist or other attack.
      - lhopki01 7y ago
        The terrorist attack that is going to take out 1000s of square kilometres of solar panels? Surely they'd just attack a city if they had that amount of firepower? Or in the more likely case that they don't it's easier to attack power transmission than generation.
        Accujack 7y ago
        Assuming there are that many panels, it is in fact quite easy for any industrialized country to design a weapon that can destroy a square mile of panels or more with a single warhead. They're thin sheets of silicon covered in glass.
        kragen 7y ago
        A square mile is 2.6 square km. You are replying to someone who said it would be hard to destroy thousands of square km of panels. It would seem that your reply, that "it is…easy…to…destroy a square mile of panels or more with a single warhead", is not to the point. However, by coincidence, your position is right, for two reasons: 1. Single nuclear warheads routinely have blast radii of tens of km rather than, as you suggest, hundreds of meters. So in fact a single warhead can indeed destroy thousands of square km. 2. 1000km² of solar panels would be 1000 GWp; at a low-cost module price of €0.19/W (the average for 2019) that's €190 billion. Currently solar plants are not built that large, nor nearly so.
- threeseed 7y ago
  But that hopefully would be nuclear fusion not fission. Fission however (a) is politically unpopular and (b) has a waste problem that no country wants to own.
- rusk 7y ago
  Forgive me if this is a worn trope, but I've read somewhere that the upper bound on what we can do with nuclear energy is not how much we can produce, but what we can do with the leftovers ... as more and more people use nuclear power we're going to produce more and more nuclear waste, and there isn't really any answer as to what we can do with that. There are plenty of fantastic "ideas" as to what can be done, but it doesn't seem to me that we've fully solved that side of the equation, and I'd be thinking we really should have a good bit more work done before we consider something with such dangerous side effects "a solution".
  - roenxi 7y ago
    If literally all the electricity ever produced by the human waste had been produced by current generation nuclear technologies, there would be a small hill of high-level nuclear waste somewhere. It wouldn't be an issue except locally where it was stored. To believe that is a problem is to not have grappled with just how big the world is and how much of it is uninhabitable to humans already. The human population is concentrated in an absurdly small footprint in major cities and fertile belts compared to the size of the planet. The area the waste would sterilise would be a non-issue. I dunno. What do you want to be solved? If we call it poisonous instead of radioactive would you be happy? There are literally poisonous lakes out there and nobody cares much. One more doesn't matter. The only interesting thing about nuclear waste is we use a different word to describe the same outcomes. The outcomes don't seem that dangerous in the big picture.
    - rusk 7y ago
      Yeah man, I dunno either ... I think "poisonous" is understating it somewhat. We're talking about substances that will remain toxic for thousands of years, and are quite happy to go everywhere they can if there is some issue with containment. I appreciate that you have a conviction that this is a problem, but you're coming across a bit hand-wavy in your arguments. I'd prefer to see concrete solutions (and I don't mean nuclear waste encased in concrete) than rhetoric as a means to address my concerns.
      - 7y ago
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  Not really. The supply of economically extractable fissile material is limited in just the same way as any other mineral. If energy prices rise then it will become worthwhile to extract, if they fall then it will be less so. Of course if the number of consumers rises this will also improve the viability of mining. According to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia, it is currently uneconomic to proceed with several mining projects. Regardless of economic considerations fissile material is a finite resource although it could be that we will never reach the limit.
  - Accujack 7y ago
    Technically, yes. In practical terms, however, switching nuclear reactors to use the Thorium fuel cycle would allow us to use a supply of fuel that would probably outlast human civilization.
- zahrc 7y ago
  But where does all the nuclear waste go? We already struggle with plastics and tech waste.
dmos62 7y ago
> we want to advance as a species I'm somewhat weary of people talking of civilization progress as if its definition is obvious and universal.
- the8472 7y ago
  As far as humans are concerned overall progress has been linked to climbing up fractions of the kardashev scale since fire was invented. And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.
  - dmos62 7y ago
    > overall progress This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.
    - the8472 7y ago
      I am saying that for many or perhaps even almost all measures of progress we want to apply, i.e. the specific definition doesn't matter, that progress was either enabled by or directly required more energy being available.
    - wolfram74 7y ago
      Most quality of life improvements do take energy, and yes, quality of life is subjective, it is conceivable to imagine a mind that takes joy in their child dieing of a preventable disease, some vertebrates eat their young, but overwhelmingly, humans like to see their child get old enough to play and talk as well as laugh and cry. Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy. So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.
goalieca 7y ago
Id he happy if we just focused on social issues and happiness. But might is right and every nation state and company and human being needs all the technological might we can muster in order to “win” (win what!?)
wayoutthere 7y ago
It's also a fallacy to think that humans will be able to escape the gravity well in large numbers. And once we do, the ones in space will quickly become a new species as they adapt to a different environment -- assuming they survive at all. Science fiction is fun and all, but even an ecologically ruined Earth is going to be a much more welcoming environment to live in than anything else the solar system has to offer. Meaningful exploration of the solar system will be restricted to unmanned probes and complex missions that require 100 Earthbound support staff for each human we send into space. Continuing to live on Earth will require a big reduction in the amount of energy we use per capita. We're already above what the Earth can realistically handle, and the global population is still growing.
Firadeoclus 7y ago
As we expand to space. On Earth there is an effective upper limit to the amount of heat we can release into the atmosphere before we'd cause catastrophic warming even without greenhouse effect.
- pjkundert 7y ago
  That upper limit is probably orders of magnitude higher than we’re currently dissipating. We could blanket every city and town with permanently heated streets, and - as long as we stopped pumping water vapour into the dry upper troposphere - we wouldn’t even notice an increase in temperature. The big problems are 1) gigatons of soot coming over the north poles, permanently lowering the albedo of the planet and 2) pumping water into the dry upper atmosphere via jet exhaust, creating permanent cloud layers where they didn’t exist. Solve those two issues, and we’d have a much more interesting debate...
  - fao_ 7y ago
    You missed out the ecosystem collapsing because marine life has died off, and the oceans and waters becoming acidic (which will affect trade, drinkable water, rain, etc.)
  - mercutio2 7y ago
    Sea ice radiative forcing and overall albedo effects are on the order of 10% of well mixed greenhouse gas radiative forcing. Short term cloud layer albedo effects are even smaller. If we switched all our greenhouse gas emissions to nuclear, I agree there’s huge room for localized waste heat. But reducing albedo effects isn’t going to help if we keep emitting greenhouse gases.
- quindecagon 7y ago
  That upper limit is in the trillions of people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be&t=948 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA&feature=youtu.be...
scotradamus 7y ago
Energy production really isn't the issue. Energy storage is. We produce way more energy than we use. We currently do not have an easy way to store it. So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs, especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up.
- cesarb 7y ago
  > We produce way more energy than we use. [...] So why generate more than we need? Well, we need to have power available to prevent brown outs That's not how it works. If you generate more than you need, you will have the opposite of a brown out (overvoltage and/or overfrequency). Generation and consumption of power have to always be precisely matched. > especially right after work when everyone gets home and flips their light switch (so to speak). When everyone gets home and flips their light switch, the extra demand slightly reduces the system voltage and frequency; feedback loops on the power plants then increase their generation to match the extra demand. > Second; it is actually more efficient to keep the generators fully spun up. Keeping the generators running at their maximum means you have no margin for extra demand or sudden loss of generation (for instance, another power plant or a transmission line having an issue and shutting down). It's better to keep the generators running below the maximum to have a reserve for when these things happen.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Excess energy is an easy problem to solve: use it to desalinate water, produce hydrogen fuel to power ships, or any of several other uses.
reallydontask 7y ago
> It's a fallacy to believe we will require less energy in the long run It's hard to say without knowing your definition of long run so would you care to explain why you believe that less energy is required in your long run? I see it as exactly the opposite, in the short/medium term we will use more energy but it will eventually go into reverse. Maybe Jevons Paradox will intervene and you are correct, I don't know For the record, my long run is 150+ years, if only to make sure that we are all dead.

AtlasLion 7y ago

baby steps I'd say. Let's first fix all the mess we are making here on earth before thinking of space exploration.

pauljurczak 7y ago
There will always be some mess on Earth and anywhere else human kind visits in the future. We are flawed. Let's dream about perfect, but settle for good enough.
C14L 7y ago
No.
nolok 7y ago
You're missing the point. Going to space puts us in very restrictive environments and situations that forces us to solve issues that we "can" just shrug away here on earth (meaning we move it to one or two generations down the line so it's not our problem anymore).
socialdemocrat 7y ago
No that is an absolutely terrible way of thinking about ANYTHING. That is what the townspeople said to the aristocrat funding development of the microscope. They demanded he care for the sick before engaging in this glass grinding business which had no obvious benefit Yet the microscope proved to be the biggest advance in medicine. Nobody could have predicted that being able to look at really small things would have an impact on how we understand disease. Likewise nobody could have predict the profound impact satellites have had on our economy and on science. Space exploration brings technological progress. If you are concerned about waste of money then first start to worry about industries we spend far more money on 1) Gambling 2) Cosmetics 3) Weapons, bombs etc 4) Disposable fashion Not to mention most of the worlds problems are of political nature. They are not problems a scientists can solve. Insisting that a physicist should apply his skills to create say world peace is a waste of skills and effort.
alpaca128 7y ago
That's like saying "let's first neatly reorganize all the files on these 700 harddrives before thinking about backups" when you can just do both. Spending for space exploration is currently at a laughably low level, if countless people didn't manage to solve all our problems in the course of decades then adding a few billions of dollars won't do anything except make a few people even richer.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> solve all kinds of existential problems ...very few existential problems have anything to do with technology.

the8472 7y ago
Long-term existential problems (was there ever any meaning to life if it just dies on earth?) most likely require technological solutions.
Accujack 7y ago
If you're human, every existential problem has to do with technology. That's who we are.

koheripbal 7y ago

There's also some false equivalency in the quote above. "Environmentalists" is a vague term. If we asked Environmental Energy SCIENTISTS, they overwhelmingly support nuclear power.

mgoetzke 7y ago
Scientists are not always thinking through consequences in the real world though. Just the theoretical aspects of something. Theoretically I find nuclear fission impressive and amazing. Practically I see no desirable outcome without bad effects especially when coordinated by the private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > private sector with their habit of saving money and squeezing out more profits every year Bingo. I have no issues with nuclear power. I have an issue with the human component. Safety regulations have been continuously changed and been made more relaxed to keep up with the crumbling nuclear plants that are way past their design life and coming up on another extension. Have a crack in the concrete? Increase the allowable crack tolerance. Have leaking radioactive water? Change the way the test is performed so it allows you to still pass. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspection-weakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe... https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/17/insanely-bad-move-experts-sound-alarm-trumps-nuclear-safety-agency-weighs-rollback https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/17/insanely-bad-mo...

JulianMorrison 7y ago

Dyson swarm. The nuclear reactor comes pre-installed.

arcticbull 7y ago

> ... with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive Expensive, probably. Dangerous? Not according to the data. Lowest deaths per terawatt-hour of any energy source including solar. Yes, even if you count Chernobyl, Fukushima (where 6 folks died) and Three Mile Island (nobody died) [1] [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

1MoreThing 7y ago
Death is not the only measurement of danger.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
It's not "probably" expensive; it's undeniably very expensive, which is why it's a non-starter in most of the world. Look at South Carolina's fiasco with nuclear...the only country doing nuclear is China, which is known for massive infrastructure spending.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  Horror story from a friend who worked in China as a consultant on the power grid back in the mid-aughts. Basically the guy who was leading construction on the plants was working with another who was to supply the concrete for the walls. Problem was, the concrete guy was behind on his "five year plan", so plant guy didn't have enough concrete. Plant guy still has to meet _his_ targets, so he just builds the plants with thinner walls. Sure it's an anecdote, but the point is China has very loose safety standards and cuts a lot of corners. She's much more okay with losing a few people here and there.
  - chantelles 7y ago
    Horror story from my stepfather at Bruce Nuclear Power Plant in Ontario Canada: At least twice a year there was a "secret leak" where he had to come home early but no media was alerted and they had to hire racialized folks from the city to go in and make repairs. He also stole reactor sealer to seal our basement from spring leaks and our basement leaked. And on and on. Canada has very loose safety standards and cuts lots of corners.