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“ Published in The Independent, 24 May 2004.” 16 years later coal generated electricity is still huge and 80% of the world’s electricity is still generated by
by melling 7y ago
“ Published in The Independent, 24 May 2004.”
16 years later coal generated electricity is still huge and 80% of the world’s electricity is still generated by fossil fuels.
I imagine if we’d used nuclear instead, the world would have bought itself an extra decade or two to solve the problem.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoMore like an extra 100,000 years http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-will-our-supplies-of-uranium-and-thorium-last/ http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-w...
- melling 7y agoI don’t think going green on electricity alone is enough to solve global warming. We need cars to go electric, etc. The point is that co2 generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner. A slow train wreck of decades that everyone sees coming. At this rate, we’ll be saying the same thing in 2030.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago> We need cars to go electric, etc. Yes, and that creates massive extra demand for electricity generation, which seems very hard to achieve without nuclear power.
- pysxul 7y ago> We need cars to go electric, etc. Marketing is once again far from the truth, check how co2 expensive producing a battery is. Then couple that with the fact that you need let's say 20 years of normal use of a car to "paybacck" that co2 footprint (comparing to an oil car). Last one is : are you going to keep that same electric car for 20 years?
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoBattery research should probably be the single most well funded area of research.
- danieldk 7y agoOr hydrogen production, hydrogen fuel cells, and hydrogen-based engines. Hydrogen can be created with electrolysis using solar, wind, or nuclear power. Hydrogen-based vehicles have a much better range. Refueling a hydrogen vehicle quicker than charging a battery. Also, it is easy to transport hydrogen to locations where there is no power grid. (I guess we should do both, but I feel like hydrogen as a fuel seems to be ignored.)
- pjc50 7y agoHydrogen is hard to handle - it is very good at leaking, including through things not normally thought of as porous like metals, and it has low energy density unless under high pressure. Synthetic CH4 from H2+extracted CO2 seems more likely to happen.
- jessaustin 7y agoI feel that if anyone took hydrogen seriously, they'd start talking about anhydrous ammonia. This compound actually contains more hydrogen by volume and pressure than elemental hydrogen does. It doesn't have the embrittlement issues that elemental hydrogen has. Ammonia liquefies at a much higher temperature and has a much higher heat of vaporization, which makes it easier to handle. It is a hazardous fuel, but not really more so than gasoline and definitely less so than elemental hydrogen. Anyway, there is already a well-developed infrastructure for handling anhydrous ammonia, because it is regularly used in agriculture. Any cheap and environmentally friendly process that produces hydrogen also produces ammonia, because ammonia is just hydrogen plus nitrogen. Because I very rarely see mention of ammonia as a fuel, I conclude that no one is seriously attempting to develop hydrogen fuel cells.
- C14L 7y agoCould you post a source or two? I read this claim a few times, but never seen a credible source to confirm the claim.
- ekianjo 7y ago> We need cars to go electric, etc. Batteries making process is far from being carbon-free yet.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoI completely agree. I imagine using electricity to power everything paired with basically free nuclear power makes for a pretty sweet future. For whatever reason though, people and even “green” politicians generally seem opposed to nuclear.
- simonh 7y agoI do believe nuclear should have a role, but please don’t peddle the ‘basically free’ fantasy.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoCan you elaborate in what way it is a fantasy?
- baq 7y agoIt’s actually very expensive.
- ben_w 7y agoUSA electricity demand was 12071 kWh/person over 2016. Multiply by $0.1/kWh (cost of nuclear power given elsewhere in replies to this submission) means Americans would have spent $1207 on electricity, per person not per household, for that year.
- pjc50 7y agoIt's expensive to build and maintain to the required level of safety? Even if, somehow, you had a perfectly safe magic hot rock that could put out a gigawatt, all the plumbing and turbine machinery would still have a minimum cost level that would be cheap but still metered. Maybe something like half the cost of natural gas.
- cygx 7y agoBecause nuclear is more expensive than on-shore wind and solar (as well as natural gas, for that matter). The problem with renewables today is not cost, but concerns about variability of the output.
- air7 7y agoWhile car batteries are charged using fossil fuel derived electricity, you're gaining nothing, and probably losing due to inefficiency. Once electricity is green and cheap, electric cars will naturally follow.
- kragen 7y agoTypical car internal combustion engines are about 20% efficient; typical fossil-fuel power plants are about 35% efficient. So you gain significantly, even before you get to regenerative braking.
- kragen 7y ago> We need cars to go electric, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces... > The point is that co2 [sic] generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal
- Dumblydorr 7y agoThe graph of global emissions is a nearly flat line, we will be able to look back at any decade and say it could've bended there...ultimately, we just have decisions day to day that will bend it or not.
- antr 7y agoYour're mixing a non-GHG emmitting technology with waste. Apples and oranges.
- keanzu 7y agoHow long will our supplies of uranium and thorium last? There's never been a commercially viable thorium reactor.
- mcv 7y agoThat's the big thing that keeps surprising me about thorium. It's supposed to be great, cheap, abundant, and much safer than uranium, and yet nobody is actually doing it. If the claims about thorium are true, you'd think we'd see thorium plants popping up all over the place by now.
- keanzu 7y ago> great, cheap, abundant, and much safer than uranium Some of the claims are true. Cheap, abundant and safer. It's the "economically viable" part that's tricky. No-one has solved that yet. India has a ton of thorium and are highly motivated to build a commercial reactor but haven't been successful yet.
- willis936 7y agoMSRs have to deal with some truly harsh materials for very long periods. Getting that to be reliable for 30+ years of on time is not easy.
- mpweiher 7y agoDidn't see that, thanks! Title updated. And totally agreed on the rest. The crazy bit is that in order to make nuclear power as safe as possible, very strict standards were created. Laudable. Now those very strict safety standard are used to paint nuclear power as unsafe, when any realistic accounting of actual harm done shows it to be either the single safest or at least amongst the safest forms of power generation available. And we could make it better still, by switching to reactor designs that weren't optimised for military use.
- mc32 7y agoSome of the blame for this should lie at the feet of activists with good intentions like Jane Fonda. I don’t think she realizes the damage she’s responsible for. Lots of the fossil fuel usage she is now against only happened because of her cause in the 70s.
- mnky9800n 7y agoWhat was her cause in the 1970s
- melling 7y agoNuclear power: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/25/archives/haydens-start-a-52city-nuclear-protest-80-endorsement-withheld.html https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/25/archives/haydens-start-a-... After the movie the China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island accident, no one wanted nuclear power.
- teachrdan 7y agoYour comment seems to be equate the impact on public consciousness of a movie with an actual nuclear disaster. Surely the near-meltdown of Three Mile Island had a far greater impact?
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoPeople protest everything. People a few towns over protested a wind turbine and won. People are even protesting the ITER fusion reactor.
- willis936 7y agoWhat? I feel like an ITER protest could be broken up by one informed individual coming to clear up misunderstandings for ten minutes. Though, it is entirely possible people lose their mind at “tritium” or the word “nuclear”.
- 7y ago
- hannob 7y agoAround the time this was published Finland tried to use nuclear instead. What they got was a nuclear plant that was planned to operate in 2011 and still doesn't work. There was actually big talk about a "nuclear renaissance" in the first decade of this millennium. It hasn't worked out.
- ttkari 7y agoThe new OL3 reactor at Olkiluoto power plant is an EPR reactor with nameplate capacity of 1600 MW, i.e. it was the first of it's kind anywhere. With all the delays in Olkiluoto project, there are now two units with similar design running in China so it will not be the first one to start. Reason for the delays mostly has to do with the project model, i.e. having two vendors from France (Areva) and Germany (Siemens) working for the Finnish client TVO. Poor management by the client has allowed the vendors to point fingers at each other on various issues, so not only is the plant completing a decade late but there's also a court battle brewing between the parties. Most of this has nothing to do with nuclear power per se, however.
- regularfry 7y agoIn a sense it is a problem distinct to nuclear, at least in the energy space. Reactors need to be so big and are so complex that they're vulnerable to horrific project management failure modes. Avoiding those failure modes takes experience at a level very few people get to operate, so skills are rarer than projects.
- vasco 7y agoThe fact that nuclear projects require this sort of huge, long term projects, instead of a quick buildout as compared to solar, does indeed mean that all of that has to do with nuclear power.
- ttkari 7y agoWhen you're not building on a new design at a scale never done before, it is a very different story from the case of OL3. Just take a look at how the French built their currently serving reactors in the 1970s - more than 30 units with the same design were build in a timeframe of about 10 years. High degree of standardization has significant benefits also in the nuclear space. But of course you're right - it's very easy to deploy a bunch of solar panels compared to building a nuclear plant. And once you're done, you get to start to figure out the energy storage part - which in many practical settings is still mostly an unsolved problem.
- k_bx 7y agoFrom the info I got on one of the conferences on energy saving, the coal is used in addition to nuclear because of the spikes in electricity usage. So nuclear is only covering whatever is the lowest level throughout the day, while coal plant is being started two times a day to cover the spikes.
- tomatocracy 7y agoCoal plants are not able to rapidly start and stop like that and still operate efficiently or at peak capacity - their startup time is measured in hours not minutes. Gas (particularly OCGTs - CCGTs are usually less efficient than OCGTs if you do that with them) does that. Coal can be used in some markets seasonally (ie to supply additional baseload demand for summer AC / winter heating depending on local needs).
- legulere 7y agoA year later construction of Olkiluoto 3 began. It is still not finished today. The costs are currently estimated at 11 billion. Original estimated costs were 3 billion.
- adrianN 7y agoIf we used nuclear the first few new plants would probably go online around now.