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I hope to convey this in the least volatile manner, but I must bring it up. > I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to disp

I hope to convey this in the least volatile manner, but I must bring it up. > I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels. The above is a reasonable statement, however, your website says the following: > We can’t quit carbon without energy storage. To stop climate change, renewables must replace fossil fuels. > Without energy storage, renewables will fail to reach even 25% of the energy market by 2040. This will cause global temperatures to rise over 3°C, a level which will cause catastrophic climate damage. Those are not only misleading but outright lies. Now, I won't hide my bias here: I work on nuclear fission. But here's the reality: there are many possible pathways to net-zero carbon and limiting global temperature rise to well below 3°C (below 1.5°C in fact) To just list a few: * Massive adoption of nuclear fission alone * Development & massive adoption of nuclear fusion alone * Shift from coal&oil to natural gas, cleaner fossil fuels + scaling carbon capture/sequestration * Shift from fossil fuels to renewables + storage (probably not alone) Or any combination of those, in addition to a number of alternative approaches. --- Edit: Also, it should be noted that the energy sector alone only represents about 1/5 of the emissions problem. In order to get to net-zero GHG and stop anthroprogenic climate change, the clean energy sector needs to expand well past the current global TPES and supply net-zero electricity that allows for the decarbonization of the other main contributors: Agriculture, steel+cement+plastic, transportation, buildings&appliances, and flora loss leading to lost carbon stores (deforestation etc) Even if renewables and storage could supply 100% of our electricity or even total power supply, you would still only be 1/5 done solving climate change. There is no unitary solution. --- Acting as though renewables are necessary, instead of one of multiple options, is denial or malicious. In reality, renewable energy is nowhere near capable of reliably and safely taking on a large portion of our energy supply globally. It is expensive (you can make claims about unit cost, but what really matters is country-scale - look at German electricity prices vs. just about everywhere else), it is dangerous, it takes a lot of land area, and it is the least reliable. I don't want to spend a lot of time here stomping on renewables, but there is plenty of reason to, and my main point is that I feel it is unjust and immoral for you to claim that renewables "must replace fossil fuels" if we are to stop climate change. It's just not true, and you need to admit that. The energy industry is arguably one of if not the most important backbone of our modern society, and responsible for the safety and health of billions of people. Whether you're working on the generation or storage side, it is all our responsibility to be honest and make true claims - not to spread biased misinformation when it benefits your particular solution. I'd like to finish by making it clear I'm very happy you're working on your tech and I hope you succeed in making it the best it can be - renewables are certainly trending to higher adoption and we need reliable, efficient, scalable storage solution in order to avoid dangerous outages and other grid issues. You bring up valid criticisms of existing solutions, although I do think you should also be fair to those. Most things in life are a trade-off: maybe pumped hydro is a better majority solution for the grid, but lithium ion is an incredibly important, successful and expanding technology that needs to be given credit for its wide range of great applications. I hope this response has not been inflammatory: I just very much care about maintaining a truthful public discussion around energy. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you can take something useful from this.

tjansen 7y ago
> only represents about 1/5 of the emissions problem I wonder what the percentage would be like if the energy sector needs to provide enough energy to replace all fossil fuels. It's certainly much higher than 20%.
- johnmorrison 7y ago
  Yup. That's why we need to exceed the TPES with clean energy. We also need to significantly expand TPES if we are going to eliminate most of the remaining poverty in the world, to improve mean QoL. I'm hoping fission can scale to about 2 EWh annually in the next several decades. Should be noted this is quite aggressive scaling. 500 PWh is more than enough to reach net-zero emissions.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I am for research in fission, but it is expensive in deployment and it needs to solve the problem with nuclear waste in my opinion. I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium. > look at German electricity prices True, pretty expensive. But they also include capital for investment in energy infrastructure. Such as building lines to get power from the north (high production) to the south (high consumption). The implementation tends to slow, but there are other reasons for that. Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities. So fission can be utilized, but I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.
- johnmorrison 7y ago
  > I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium. There are 3 fission fuels occurring in nature: Th232, U235, U238 Actually, our reserves of Uranium are greater (by energy available to generate) than all of our Coal, Oil and Natural Gas reserves combined. Our Thorium reserves are even greater than those. In fact, Thorium is extracted as a byproduct of Rare Earth Metal extraction, and so we currently mine enough Th232 per year to replace the entire global energy and fuel industry even though there is no demand for Th232 extraction. Kind of mind blowing. --- > [fission] it is expensive in deployment I don't see where this idea comes from - in real life, regions which are powered by more fission have significantly cheaper electricity than those who are powered by less. --- > the problem with nuclear waste I genuinely don't think there is a problem with nuclear waste, and that this concern is a myth / misunderstanding based on a mix of fear-mongering via conflation with nuclear weapons and a lack of comparison. Consider the following: all energy sources have waste products - nothing is 100% efficient. Fossil fuels pump literally billions of tonnes of toxic gas into the air as their waste product. It moves around, we can't store it, and it is responsible for the deaths of millions of people each year through air pollution. Renewables production has the same issue (although different gases), and also tends to pollute the water and local environment with other toxic chemicals and metals. Nuclear fission produces the most dense, least amount of waste of any source, which is solid and easy to manage. We know where quite literally all of it is, and it doesn't hurt anybody or negatively affect the environment in any way as long as you keep it store somewhere. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear energy does not have a waste problem, it has a waste solution. Global warming is the problem with energy waste, more specifically it is the problem with hydrocarbon waste. --- > Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities. Agree with you. Renewables tend to vary in effectiveness based on location - in those locations which are well-suited for them, I think they should be used! Though I'm not sure what you mean by "could open up more possibilities" - we've had hydro power for thousands of years. --- > I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision. Note the following excerpt from Mike Shellenberger on Twitter: Germany’s renewables experiment is over. By 2025 it will have spent $580B to make electricity nearly 2x more expensive & 10x more carbon-intensive than France’s. The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. A major new study of Germany's nuclear phase-out finds - it imposes "an annual cost of roughly $12B/year" - "over 70% of the cost is from the 1,100 excess deaths/year from air pollution from coal plants operating in place of the shutdown nuclear plants"

tjansen 7y ago

> only represents about 1/5 of the emissions problem I wonder what the percentage would be like if the energy sector needs to provide enough energy to replace all fossil fuels. It's certainly much higher than 20%.

johnmorrison 7y ago
Yup. That's why we need to exceed the TPES with clean energy. We also need to significantly expand TPES if we are going to eliminate most of the remaining poverty in the world, to improve mean QoL. I'm hoping fission can scale to about 2 EWh annually in the next several decades. Should be noted this is quite aggressive scaling. 500 PWh is more than enough to reach net-zero emissions.

raxxorrax 7y ago

I am for research in fission, but it is expensive in deployment and it needs to solve the problem with nuclear waste in my opinion. I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium. > look at German electricity prices True, pretty expensive. But they also include capital for investment in energy infrastructure. Such as building lines to get power from the north (high production) to the south (high consumption). The implementation tends to slow, but there are other reasons for that. Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities. So fission can be utilized, but I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.

johnmorrison 7y ago
> I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium. There are 3 fission fuels occurring in nature: Th232, U235, U238 Actually, our reserves of Uranium are greater (by energy available to generate) than all of our Coal, Oil and Natural Gas reserves combined. Our Thorium reserves are even greater than those. In fact, Thorium is extracted as a byproduct of Rare Earth Metal extraction, and so we currently mine enough Th232 per year to replace the entire global energy and fuel industry even though there is no demand for Th232 extraction. Kind of mind blowing. --- > [fission] it is expensive in deployment I don't see where this idea comes from - in real life, regions which are powered by more fission have significantly cheaper electricity than those who are powered by less. --- > the problem with nuclear waste I genuinely don't think there is a problem with nuclear waste, and that this concern is a myth / misunderstanding based on a mix of fear-mongering via conflation with nuclear weapons and a lack of comparison. Consider the following: all energy sources have waste products - nothing is 100% efficient. Fossil fuels pump literally billions of tonnes of toxic gas into the air as their waste product. It moves around, we can't store it, and it is responsible for the deaths of millions of people each year through air pollution. Renewables production has the same issue (although different gases), and also tends to pollute the water and local environment with other toxic chemicals and metals. Nuclear fission produces the most dense, least amount of waste of any source, which is solid and easy to manage. We know where quite literally all of it is, and it doesn't hurt anybody or negatively affect the environment in any way as long as you keep it store somewhere. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear energy does not have a waste problem, it has a waste solution. Global warming is the problem with energy waste, more specifically it is the problem with hydrocarbon waste. --- > Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities. Agree with you. Renewables tend to vary in effectiveness based on location - in those locations which are well-suited for them, I think they should be used! Though I'm not sure what you mean by "could open up more possibilities" - we've had hydro power for thousands of years. --- > I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision. Note the following excerpt from Mike Shellenberger on Twitter: Germany’s renewables experiment is over. By 2025 it will have spent $580B to make electricity nearly 2x more expensive & 10x more carbon-intensive than France’s. The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. A major new study of Germany's nuclear phase-out finds - it imposes "an annual cost of roughly $12B/year" - "over 70% of the cost is from the 1,100 excess deaths/year from air pollution from coal plants operating in place of the shutdown nuclear plants"