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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

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.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables? Also, if Rolls-Royce projects 2029 it doesn't mean it's done by 2029 and most certainly not wide scale deployed/operable. So what kind of renewable infrastructure and tech will be deployed 15-20 years from now? That's what you have to compare it with.
    - renaudg 7y ago
      > Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables? If the electricity storage problem doesn't get solved (which is a pretty small "if", since it requires a very uncertain breakthrough in physics) : nowhere. In 10 years the climate emergency will be even more salient, but one of coal/gas/nuclear/hydro will still be required in the mix. Countries that can't have hydro for geography reasons, and have shut down nuclear early for political reasons will be a liability to the rest of the world.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      Most likely in that time frame we'll be trying to get by on a mix of renewables and non carbon neutral generation from coal or similar, and we'll also have implemented limits on carbon generation that will effectively be crippling various industries and increasing the cost of various necessities worldwide. We won't have a choice... it'll be down to either everyone accepting reduced quality of life or nuclear... at which point nuclear starts to look very good.
    - Reason077 7y ago
      > "It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?" It's not a question of nuclear or renewables - we absolutely need renewables, and right now renewables are much cheaper, and can be delivered faster, than nuclear. But there are regions of the world that may struggle to decarbonise completely without nuclear in the mix. Especially if you consider additional demands in the future from electrification of transport, building heat, etc.
- belorn 7y ago
  Renewables are not a replacement for existing nuclear power unless you either add fossil fuels or batteries to the mix. Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels, with fossil fuels burning when renewables are not producing. Batteries, usually reverse hydro power, is an interesting future technology. Some argue it is significant more developed than fusion. The bigger question is if its economically competitive compared to fission. There is costs and energy loss in every single step of producing electricity from renewables, transmitting it to the battery, converting it into potential, recreate the electricity, and finnally transmitting it to the end users. With fission you go directly from the power plant to the end user. Reverse hydro power plants also take a long time to build and either use a lot of land or coast. If you build it on land it also release a lot of methane as top layer of the land decompose.
  - cygx 7y ago
    Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels Which countries? Germany for example isn't - yet. We're still in a place where we can reduce usage of both fossil fuels and nuclear, though that won't last unless we figure out effective means of energy storage.
    - belorn 7y ago
      As an example, Sweden. People will use fossil fueled energy when the choice is between people freezing in their home or burning fossil fuels. Sweden rely on a mix between hydro and nuclear, but it is not feasible to extend hydro beyond current capacity. The nuclear plants however is getting older, and politically people want to shut them down. Something has to produce the energy, and during the winter it is imported fossil fuels energy when the wind is not blowing. Germany as an example illustrate the issue quite nice, as can be seen live at electricitymap.org. When the wind is blowing the country goes green with around 70% of energy being produced by wind. Very sunny days you get around 20% solar. Days like today that is a bit rainy and not very windy, and you have 60% fossil fuels. The constant is nuclear around 10%, so remove that and the above numbers will go up depending on weather conditions.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month. Why are you comparing the state of nuclear energy today with the potential scientific breakthroughs of renewable energy in the future? If you compare nuclear of today with renewables of today, then the winner is clear. If you compare the two accounting for potential scientific breakthroughs..who knows?
- Accujack 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? To nitpick a bit, he didn't say the sun was powered by fusion, he said fissionable elements are present in the sun. Which is entirely true.
logfromblammo 7y ago
Stellar fusion like that which occurs in our sun is effectively aneutronic, but is also relatively slow, because the limiting step is the combination of two protons into a proton-neutron pair. You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass. So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster. It's a bit beyond our means right now.
- cuspycode 7y ago
  Aneutronic reactors are good of course, but the Sun still puts out lots of other dangerous radiation. In particular, ultraviolet electromagnetic radiation from the Sun causes tens of thousands of cancer deaths every year. I have no problem accepting a few percent of that mortality from man-made radiation sources if that helps solving the CO2 emission crisis.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Good. For the foreseeable future, the limit of energy available from solar will be the total surface area of the Earth divided by two. And that includes hydro from evaporation-rainfall cycling, photosynthesis, and wind. Which basically leaves as alternate energy sources tidal, from the sun and moon dragging the oceans around, energy stored from long periods of solar absorption in ages past, residual geothermal, and nuclear. A little neutron-activated waste is indeed a small price to pay.
erulabs 7y ago
Edit: subset of nuclear at a distance. Yes the sun is powered by fusion, not fission, but the point still stands.

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.
- neuronic 7y ago
  It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables? Also, if Rolls-Royce projects 2029 it doesn't mean it's done by 2029 and most certainly not wide scale deployed/operable. So what kind of renewable infrastructure and tech will be deployed 15-20 years from now? That's what you have to compare it with.
  - renaudg 7y ago
    > Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables? If the electricity storage problem doesn't get solved (which is a pretty small "if", since it requires a very uncertain breakthrough in physics) : nowhere. In 10 years the climate emergency will be even more salient, but one of coal/gas/nuclear/hydro will still be required in the mix. Countries that can't have hydro for geography reasons, and have shut down nuclear early for political reasons will be a liability to the rest of the world.
  - Accujack 7y ago
    Most likely in that time frame we'll be trying to get by on a mix of renewables and non carbon neutral generation from coal or similar, and we'll also have implemented limits on carbon generation that will effectively be crippling various industries and increasing the cost of various necessities worldwide. We won't have a choice... it'll be down to either everyone accepting reduced quality of life or nuclear... at which point nuclear starts to look very good.
  - Reason077 7y ago
    > "It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?" It's not a question of nuclear or renewables - we absolutely need renewables, and right now renewables are much cheaper, and can be delivered faster, than nuclear. But there are regions of the world that may struggle to decarbonise completely without nuclear in the mix. Especially if you consider additional demands in the future from electrification of transport, building heat, etc.
belorn 7y ago
Renewables are not a replacement for existing nuclear power unless you either add fossil fuels or batteries to the mix. Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels, with fossil fuels burning when renewables are not producing. Batteries, usually reverse hydro power, is an interesting future technology. Some argue it is significant more developed than fusion. The bigger question is if its economically competitive compared to fission. There is costs and energy loss in every single step of producing electricity from renewables, transmitting it to the battery, converting it into potential, recreate the electricity, and finnally transmitting it to the end users. With fission you go directly from the power plant to the end user. Reverse hydro power plants also take a long time to build and either use a lot of land or coast. If you build it on land it also release a lot of methane as top layer of the land decompose.
- cygx 7y ago
  Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels Which countries? Germany for example isn't - yet. We're still in a place where we can reduce usage of both fossil fuels and nuclear, though that won't last unless we figure out effective means of energy storage.
  - belorn 7y ago
    As an example, Sweden. People will use fossil fueled energy when the choice is between people freezing in their home or burning fossil fuels. Sweden rely on a mix between hydro and nuclear, but it is not feasible to extend hydro beyond current capacity. The nuclear plants however is getting older, and politically people want to shut them down. Something has to produce the energy, and during the winter it is imported fossil fuels energy when the wind is not blowing. Germany as an example illustrate the issue quite nice, as can be seen live at electricitymap.org. When the wind is blowing the country goes green with around 70% of energy being produced by wind. Very sunny days you get around 20% solar. Days like today that is a bit rainy and not very windy, and you have 60% fossil fuels. The constant is nuclear around 10%, so remove that and the above numbers will go up depending on weather conditions.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month. Why are you comparing the state of nuclear energy today with the potential scientific breakthroughs of renewable energy in the future? If you compare nuclear of today with renewables of today, then the winner is clear. If you compare the two accounting for potential scientific breakthroughs..who knows?
Accujack 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? To nitpick a bit, he didn't say the sun was powered by fusion, he said fissionable elements are present in the sun. Which is entirely true.

logfromblammo 7y ago

Stellar fusion like that which occurs in our sun is effectively aneutronic, but is also relatively slow, because the limiting step is the combination of two protons into a proton-neutron pair. You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass. So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster. It's a bit beyond our means right now.

cuspycode 7y ago
Aneutronic reactors are good of course, but the Sun still puts out lots of other dangerous radiation. In particular, ultraviolet electromagnetic radiation from the Sun causes tens of thousands of cancer deaths every year. I have no problem accepting a few percent of that mortality from man-made radiation sources if that helps solving the CO2 emission crisis.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Good. For the foreseeable future, the limit of energy available from solar will be the total surface area of the Earth divided by two. And that includes hydro from evaporation-rainfall cycling, photosynthesis, and wind. Which basically leaves as alternate energy sources tidal, from the sun and moon dragging the oceans around, energy stored from long periods of solar absorption in ages past, residual geothermal, and nuclear. A little neutron-activated waste is indeed a small price to pay.

erulabs 7y ago

Edit: subset of nuclear at a distance. Yes the sun is powered by fusion, not fission, but the point still stands.