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Three most important things for 1.5C are: 1. Stop burning coal 2. Get shipping off oil and onto renewables 3. DAC efforts need to be stepped up, both biologica

Three most important things for 1.5C are: 1. Stop burning coal 2. Get shipping off oil and onto renewables 3. DAC efforts need to be stepped up, both biological and technological All of those are achieved by turning to Gen 4 nuclear reactors. MSRs are now entering trial phases [1] where nuclear energy generation is not as strictly regulated as in the States. Miniaturization efforts have found solutions where such a power plant [2] could be cost effective for shipping. DAC efforts are a bit strange. I've looked a bit into tree planting and haven't found anything that looks like it scales with investment. I can't purchase a product knowing it will result in extra efforts, or put another way, if a billionaire would pour in a billion dollars, it wouldn't scale up the operation proportionately to the increased funds. Technological DAC is a solved problem that would scale but needs a power source. 4th gen reactors are the only thing that tackles these points on all fronts. [1] http://thorconpower.com/project/ http://thorconpower.com/project/ [2] https://www.seaborg.co/ https://www.seaborg.co/

L_Rahman 7y ago
Would not be a hacker news climate thread without someone jumping in immediately with nuclear. I am not opposed to the technology in a meaningful way but the problem is that the conditions in which nuclear can thrive - regulatory scheme, public perception of climate change risk, long time horizon infrastructure development, $$$ - non nuclear renewables easily outcompete. I wonder how the nuclear folks think about this. The tech doesn’t exist in a numerical vacuum of efficiency and dollars per watt. It lived inside a complex ecosystem within which it doesn’t really seem competitive.
- Beltiras 7y ago
  If Greenpeace only knew the damage they did back in the 80's and 90's... Granted that nuclear power back then was primitive and dangerous. You are absolutely right. Most of the innovative projects are putting up shop in less developed countries exactly for this reason. Once proven there the regulatory hindrances in the west will disappear because for industrial purposes nothing else will be able to compete. MSRs can produce thermals in excess of 2000C which is enough for most smelting operations. This will increase efficiency almost twofold. This will mean all smelting operations will move to areas where the technology can be employed. Because of the economic incentives there will be countries with emerging economies (and already are, see Indonesia) that will take advantage. This will take a decade or two to percolate but the writing is on the wall. Failing to react to it will only make dinos out of the countries unwilling to change.
  - olau 7y ago
    They didn't. The nuclear industry failed to innovate themselves out of increasing costs. It is regulatory bodies that set the requirements, not Greenpeace, and those requirements are based on risk calculations. It could be that the industry is just dysfunctional. But it could also be that nuclear tech is just way harder in the real world than what some people seem to think.
    - Beltiras 7y ago
      The nuclear industry is still wearing the ball and chain of solid fuels. Everything wrong with nuclear energy is due to that single engineering faux pas. Oak Ridge ran an MSR for 5 years. It would be tragic if it couldn't be mended but it can. I'm 100% sure that Gen 4 will dominate energy generation within 2 decades. I'd put money on that.
      - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        I'd take the other side of that. Fifty bucks?
        Beltiras 7y ago
        I meant as an investment. I'd see more return than 1:1.
        SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        Fair enough, hope you're right!
- Recurecur 7y ago
  Right now wind+solar account for less than 1% of global electric generation. I'm highly skeptical that prices can remain low as that scales out to 10-40% of electric generation, given constraints on things like rare earth metals. There is also the issue of equipment wearing out relatively quickly compared to conventional/nuclear plants. SMRs, built using mass production rather than one-off construction, and possessing safety qualities far beyond current reactors, will be necessary to provide safe, reliable, clean and cheap energy alongside "renewables", IMNSHO.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    Less than 1%? Not true in the slightest. In the US alone, wind and solar (including rooftop) produce approximately 11% (about 53GW average) of electrical energy given the very latest data (last 12 months rolling) from: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... (and this should be updated today) The US consumes about 485GW average electricity, compared to the world total of 2485GW average. So approximately 1/5th. So US solar + wind ALONE is at least 2% of global electric generation (50GW/2485GW > 2%), twice your claim (again, this is just the solar and wind in the US compared to world total electricity). I suspect your figures are far outdated (not uncommon in this field...). EDIT: This is still using old data (2018), but it shows that 7.5% of global electricity energy (again, energy, not mere nameplate power) comes from solar+wind: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-electricity-production.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-el...
- belorn 7y ago
  To me it is pretty simple. I look at places like Germany and Denmark and see how natural gas is booming. I then compare that to nations with a lot of nuclear. Nuclear is expensive, take a long time to build, and can not compete with the price of using a combination of renewables and fossil fuels. It is however the only current example of energy grids that work without fossil fuels. My political interest in the topic is exclusively in not having fossil fuels being burned for power and heat. The economics of combining renewables and fossil fuels only works to a point, as illustrated by the energy grid of Germany and Denmark. Both countries now need to go to over capacity and battery technology to further reduce fossil fuel usage, and for about the same reason that nuclear has problem competing, battery technology and overcapacity cost too much. As more countries in EU reach the same point we get fewer countries that need to buy during periods of overcapacity (as show by negative prices). This reduces the interest in building more renewables, and it becomes more attractive to stay at 100% renewable at peak conditions and have fossil fuels picking up everything when its not at peak. This is a typical example of a local maximum and a Nash equilibrium. Any action that goes towards 100% renewables at peak condition are competitive and any action that goes beyond 100% during peak conditions are noncompetitive. Such countries then get stuck, with the problematic consequences that fossil fuels continue to burn.
  - Beltiras 7y ago
    1$/watt capital costs and 2.5c/kwhr. This blows every other competitor out of the water. I was stunned when I started to research the economics of 4th gen. It's going to win in the end.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I don't think they think about it at all. My university had a strong nuclear research program and I took some classes from the professors in the field. It's clearly really hard, to the point that even PhD level intellects can only do it when they're hyperfocused on the nuts and bolts of the physics. I think even beyond that, maybe for national security reasons, people in the nuclear industry don't get outside their bubble much. I'm sure if any of them took a weekend of genuinely trying to understand why it wasn't cost-competitive they'd understand it better than me, but then they'd fall behind in their 'real' research. So they lobby for more state support without ever questioning why they need it.
adrianN 7y ago
Building enough reactors is impossible in the time we have left. Especially if you want to go for unproven tech that is just now entering trials.
- Beltiras 7y ago
  Thorcon aims to transform a shipyard into a factory for these things. Their plan is to mass-produce 250MW reactors.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    The world need on the order of 100k 250MW (thermal) reactors to replace today's energy consumption. How many are they planning to produce per year.
    - spiderfarmer 7y ago
      If it only delivers .5% of the worlds energy consumption it's still an enormous (and welcome) feat.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        Yeah, sure. Build as much nuclear as you can reasonably integrate into a grid that primarily runs on renewables. But don't trust in Thorium to somehow fix our problem.
        Beltiras 7y ago
        Thorcon is using 20% enriched U-235. Their design can accomodate the Thorium fuel cycle in the future but for now it's mostly repurposed nuclear wastes.
    - Beltiras 7y ago
      I don't remember the figures. There are plenty of videos on Youtube with presentations from the Thorcon team. I think it's 250MW electric, 500MW thermal that the design delivers.
_Microft 7y ago
In case you did not know the abbreviations: DAC: direct air capture MSR: molten salt reactor
usrusr 7y ago
> Technological DAC is a solved problem that would scale but needs a power source. If nuclear was as safe as technological DAC is solved we'd all be dead already from radiation ten times over.
- Beltiras 7y ago
  I'm not talking about currently running solid-fuel reactors that burn only 0.3% of their fuel. I'm talking about 4th gen liquid fuel reactors that manage to burn 99.7% of their fuels (bonus: can burn the waste fuels old reactors leave behind), are walk-away safe and the wastes they do leave have a half-life of hundreds of years instead of millions. DAC that you can feed power into and that way stream more CO2 into sequestration solutions is mostly a solved issue at scale [1]. Sequestration is also a solved issue [2]. [1] https://carbonengineering.com/ [2] https://climeworks.shop/how-it-works/
ryanmercer 7y ago
> Get shipping off oil and onto renewables Good luck moving container ships without diesel. You'll also have to put the passenger airlines and air cargo carriers completely out of business. It is honestly something we need to do but doing so would require every continent to rely entirely upon the resources on that continent. It would also mean all of those hundreds of millions to billions of newly middle class folks around the world would have to give up their newly won quality of life and go back to living how they were before. We either have to radically change society on nearly every level or cross our fingers and hope a humanitarian (alientarian?) fleet of alien ships show up in orbit with highly advanced technology that can replace all of our energy needs AND actively remove huge amounts of CO2 out of the air.
- Beltiras 7y ago
  Jet fuel can be generated carbon neutrally with these 4th gen reactors. They provide high enough thermals to split water and hydrogen energy efficiently and any process where you generate hydrogen you can very easily produce hydrocarbons instead. We have the technology. It's economical. It's safer than any alternative ALREADY HERE. Solar is not carbon free and environmentally friendly. Silicon smelting is a really dirty process. None of the alternatives have the capability to scale the same way.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    Assuming they can produce jet fuel, I doubt it would be anywhere close to enough to replace the current fossil fuel. I've looked before and it is hard to get a decent figure due to military/private/commercial passenger flights, non-passenger military flights, freight flights etc but >Collectively, United States air carriers burn through 17 billion gallons of jet fuel annually https://thepointsguy.com/guide/cost-of-fueling-an-airliner/ https://thepointsguy.com/guide/cost-of-fueling-an-airliner/ I think that figure is only commercial passenger flights.
    - Beltiras 7y ago
      It's simple really. They need to be cheaper than fossil fuels. Can't find the link right now but I remember reading about it being possible with a little subsidy (way less than oil companies are getting now).
jillesvangurp 7y ago
Nuclear is not going to happen in time and other technologies that are completely uncontroversial are already running circles around it for the past decade in terms of cost and growth (which would be negative for nuclear). I don't expect meaningful results to come from nuclear investments in the next decades. This would be the same period of time most modern countries will cross the 50-100% covered by renewable energy mark. Much of the current deployed nuclear capacity might actually end up being retired in the same period because most of it is already on the edge of it's economic life and replacements are controversial from a cost perspective (never mind the safety). The status quo is that nuclear plants are multi billion $ projects that take decades to plan and realize and that have very dubious economics. 100% renewable everywhere is not going to happen everywhere in the next two decades; but there are plenty of countries shooting for that on a 15-20 year time line. In 20 years, most of the remaining countries will be actively planning to catch up in a hurry or simply end up importing excess energy from more clued in places at a premium. Even approved plans for nuclear plants (of which there are preciously few) would probably take longer to realize; and lets face it, mostly these plans reside in some drawer gathering dust. Nuclear is not a solution short term (< 20 years) or mid term (< 40 years) and long term (>40 years) it will have to be cost competitive with vastly cheaper than today renewables. Which is a different way of saying the winter olympics will be organized in hell regularly. Nuclear security alone makes it a non starter from a cost point of view. Any nuclear reactor requires 24x7 security to prevent people from depopulating their local area with a bit of explosives. Micro reactors make excellent dirty bombs and with tens of thousands of them around it's more a question of when than if somebody manages to do this. The resulting security requirements alone makes them impractical, even if they would be able to compete with the renewable solutions that will be common in a few decades. These are likely to be vastly cheaper than what we have today. The main question is how many orders of magnitude cheaper things can get before people stop caring about the price. Below a certain price, using excess renewable energy to synthesize all sorts of fuels will also become vastly cheaper than refining oil no matter how inefficient that is from an energy point of view (and it's actually not that bad). Ironically, refining oil requires a lot of energy, which comes from ... renewables. That's why Texas leads everyone else with solar and wind deployments.
- Beltiras 7y ago

L_Rahman 7y ago

Would not be a hacker news climate thread without someone jumping in immediately with nuclear. I am not opposed to the technology in a meaningful way but the problem is that the conditions in which nuclear can thrive - regulatory scheme, public perception of climate change risk, long time horizon infrastructure development, $$$ - non nuclear renewables easily outcompete. I wonder how the nuclear folks think about this. The tech doesn’t exist in a numerical vacuum of efficiency and dollars per watt. It lived inside a complex ecosystem within which it doesn’t really seem competitive.

Beltiras 7y ago
If Greenpeace only knew the damage they did back in the 80's and 90's... Granted that nuclear power back then was primitive and dangerous. You are absolutely right. Most of the innovative projects are putting up shop in less developed countries exactly for this reason. Once proven there the regulatory hindrances in the west will disappear because for industrial purposes nothing else will be able to compete. MSRs can produce thermals in excess of 2000C which is enough for most smelting operations. This will increase efficiency almost twofold. This will mean all smelting operations will move to areas where the technology can be employed. Because of the economic incentives there will be countries with emerging economies (and already are, see Indonesia) that will take advantage. This will take a decade or two to percolate but the writing is on the wall. Failing to react to it will only make dinos out of the countries unwilling to change.
- olau 7y ago
  They didn't. The nuclear industry failed to innovate themselves out of increasing costs. It is regulatory bodies that set the requirements, not Greenpeace, and those requirements are based on risk calculations. It could be that the industry is just dysfunctional. But it could also be that nuclear tech is just way harder in the real world than what some people seem to think.
  - Beltiras 7y ago
    The nuclear industry is still wearing the ball and chain of solid fuels. Everything wrong with nuclear energy is due to that single engineering faux pas. Oak Ridge ran an MSR for 5 years. It would be tragic if it couldn't be mended but it can. I'm 100% sure that Gen 4 will dominate energy generation within 2 decades. I'd put money on that.
    - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      I'd take the other side of that. Fifty bucks?
      - Beltiras 7y ago
        I meant as an investment. I'd see more return than 1:1.
        SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        Fair enough, hope you're right!
Recurecur 7y ago
Right now wind+solar account for less than 1% of global electric generation. I'm highly skeptical that prices can remain low as that scales out to 10-40% of electric generation, given constraints on things like rare earth metals. There is also the issue of equipment wearing out relatively quickly compared to conventional/nuclear plants. SMRs, built using mass production rather than one-off construction, and possessing safety qualities far beyond current reactors, will be necessary to provide safe, reliable, clean and cheap energy alongside "renewables", IMNSHO.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Less than 1%? Not true in the slightest. In the US alone, wind and solar (including rooftop) produce approximately 11% (about 53GW average) of electrical energy given the very latest data (last 12 months rolling) from: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... (and this should be updated today) The US consumes about 485GW average electricity, compared to the world total of 2485GW average. So approximately 1/5th. So US solar + wind ALONE is at least 2% of global electric generation (50GW/2485GW > 2%), twice your claim (again, this is just the solar and wind in the US compared to world total electricity). I suspect your figures are far outdated (not uncommon in this field...). EDIT: This is still using old data (2018), but it shows that 7.5% of global electricity energy (again, energy, not mere nameplate power) comes from solar+wind: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-electricity-production.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/wind-solar-share-el...
belorn 7y ago
To me it is pretty simple. I look at places like Germany and Denmark and see how natural gas is booming. I then compare that to nations with a lot of nuclear. Nuclear is expensive, take a long time to build, and can not compete with the price of using a combination of renewables and fossil fuels. It is however the only current example of energy grids that work without fossil fuels. My political interest in the topic is exclusively in not having fossil fuels being burned for power and heat. The economics of combining renewables and fossil fuels only works to a point, as illustrated by the energy grid of Germany and Denmark. Both countries now need to go to over capacity and battery technology to further reduce fossil fuel usage, and for about the same reason that nuclear has problem competing, battery technology and overcapacity cost too much. As more countries in EU reach the same point we get fewer countries that need to buy during periods of overcapacity (as show by negative prices). This reduces the interest in building more renewables, and it becomes more attractive to stay at 100% renewable at peak conditions and have fossil fuels picking up everything when its not at peak. This is a typical example of a local maximum and a Nash equilibrium. Any action that goes towards 100% renewables at peak condition are competitive and any action that goes beyond 100% during peak conditions are noncompetitive. Such countries then get stuck, with the problematic consequences that fossil fuels continue to burn.
- Beltiras 7y ago
  1$/watt capital costs and 2.5c/kwhr. This blows every other competitor out of the water. I was stunned when I started to research the economics of 4th gen. It's going to win in the end.
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
I don't think they think about it at all. My university had a strong nuclear research program and I took some classes from the professors in the field. It's clearly really hard, to the point that even PhD level intellects can only do it when they're hyperfocused on the nuts and bolts of the physics. I think even beyond that, maybe for national security reasons, people in the nuclear industry don't get outside their bubble much. I'm sure if any of them took a weekend of genuinely trying to understand why it wasn't cost-competitive they'd understand it better than me, but then they'd fall behind in their 'real' research. So they lobby for more state support without ever questioning why they need it.

adrianN 7y ago

Building enough reactors is impossible in the time we have left. Especially if you want to go for unproven tech that is just now entering trials.

Beltiras 7y ago
Thorcon aims to transform a shipyard into a factory for these things. Their plan is to mass-produce 250MW reactors.
- adrianN 7y ago
  The world need on the order of 100k 250MW (thermal) reactors to replace today's energy consumption. How many are they planning to produce per year.
  - spiderfarmer 7y ago
    If it only delivers .5% of the worlds energy consumption it's still an enormous (and welcome) feat.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Yeah, sure. Build as much nuclear as you can reasonably integrate into a grid that primarily runs on renewables. But don't trust in Thorium to somehow fix our problem.
      - Beltiras 7y ago
        Thorcon is using 20% enriched U-235. Their design can accomodate the Thorium fuel cycle in the future but for now it's mostly repurposed nuclear wastes.
  - Beltiras 7y ago
    I don't remember the figures. There are plenty of videos on Youtube with presentations from the Thorcon team. I think it's 250MW electric, 500MW thermal that the design delivers.

_Microft 7y ago

In case you did not know the abbreviations: DAC: direct air capture MSR: molten salt reactor

usrusr 7y ago

> Technological DAC is a solved problem that would scale but needs a power source. If nuclear was as safe as technological DAC is solved we'd all be dead already from radiation ten times over.

Beltiras 7y ago
I'm not talking about currently running solid-fuel reactors that burn only 0.3% of their fuel. I'm talking about 4th gen liquid fuel reactors that manage to burn 99.7% of their fuels (bonus: can burn the waste fuels old reactors leave behind), are walk-away safe and the wastes they do leave have a half-life of hundreds of years instead of millions. DAC that you can feed power into and that way stream more CO2 into sequestration solutions is mostly a solved issue at scale [1]. Sequestration is also a solved issue [2]. [1] https://carbonengineering.com/ [2] https://climeworks.shop/how-it-works/

ryanmercer 7y ago

> Get shipping off oil and onto renewables Good luck moving container ships without diesel. You'll also have to put the passenger airlines and air cargo carriers completely out of business. It is honestly something we need to do but doing so would require every continent to rely entirely upon the resources on that continent. It would also mean all of those hundreds of millions to billions of newly middle class folks around the world would have to give up their newly won quality of life and go back to living how they were before. We either have to radically change society on nearly every level or cross our fingers and hope a humanitarian (alientarian?) fleet of alien ships show up in orbit with highly advanced technology that can replace all of our energy needs AND actively remove huge amounts of CO2 out of the air.

Beltiras 7y ago
Jet fuel can be generated carbon neutrally with these 4th gen reactors. They provide high enough thermals to split water and hydrogen energy efficiently and any process where you generate hydrogen you can very easily produce hydrocarbons instead. We have the technology. It's economical. It's safer than any alternative ALREADY HERE. Solar is not carbon free and environmentally friendly. Silicon smelting is a really dirty process. None of the alternatives have the capability to scale the same way.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Assuming they can produce jet fuel, I doubt it would be anywhere close to enough to replace the current fossil fuel. I've looked before and it is hard to get a decent figure due to military/private/commercial passenger flights, non-passenger military flights, freight flights etc but >Collectively, United States air carriers burn through 17 billion gallons of jet fuel annually https://thepointsguy.com/guide/cost-of-fueling-an-airliner/ https://thepointsguy.com/guide/cost-of-fueling-an-airliner/ I think that figure is only commercial passenger flights.
  - Beltiras 7y ago
    It's simple really. They need to be cheaper than fossil fuels. Can't find the link right now but I remember reading about it being possible with a little subsidy (way less than oil companies are getting now).

jillesvangurp 7y ago

Nuclear is not going to happen in time and other technologies that are completely uncontroversial are already running circles around it for the past decade in terms of cost and growth (which would be negative for nuclear). I don't expect meaningful results to come from nuclear investments in the next decades. This would be the same period of time most modern countries will cross the 50-100% covered by renewable energy mark. Much of the current deployed nuclear capacity might actually end up being retired in the same period because most of it is already on the edge of it's economic life and replacements are controversial from a cost perspective (never mind the safety). The status quo is that nuclear plants are multi billion $ projects that take decades to plan and realize and that have very dubious economics. 100% renewable everywhere is not going to happen everywhere in the next two decades; but there are plenty of countries shooting for that on a 15-20 year time line. In 20 years, most of the remaining countries will be actively planning to catch up in a hurry or simply end up importing excess energy from more clued in places at a premium. Even approved plans for nuclear plants (of which there are preciously few) would probably take longer to realize; and lets face it, mostly these plans reside in some drawer gathering dust. Nuclear is not a solution short term (< 20 years) or mid term (< 40 years) and long term (>40 years) it will have to be cost competitive with vastly cheaper than today renewables. Which is a different way of saying the winter olympics will be organized in hell regularly. Nuclear security alone makes it a non starter from a cost point of view. Any nuclear reactor requires 24x7 security to prevent people from depopulating their local area with a bit of explosives. Micro reactors make excellent dirty bombs and with tens of thousands of them around it's more a question of when than if somebody manages to do this. The resulting security requirements alone makes them impractical, even if they would be able to compete with the renewable solutions that will be common in a few decades. These are likely to be vastly cheaper than what we have today. The main question is how many orders of magnitude cheaper things can get before people stop caring about the price. Below a certain price, using excess renewable energy to synthesize all sorts of fuels will also become vastly cheaper than refining oil no matter how inefficient that is from an energy point of view (and it's actually not that bad). Ironically, refining oil requires a lot of energy, which comes from ... renewables. That's why Texas leads everyone else with solar and wind deployments.

Beltiras 7y ago