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I'm also a fusion power fanboy but >nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the

I'm also a fusion power fanboy but >nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is at best many decades away. So while I think fusion energy has the potential to transform energy generation, and by extent everything about our life, it's wrong to assume renewables aren't probably our safest bet in the near future. Also there's something amusing about "Here's my sure assessment. Anyway I checked the wiki page on fusion power and".

scythe 6y ago
>This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is at best many decades away. So while I think fusion energy has the potential to transform energy generation, and by extent everything about our life, it's wrong to assume renewables aren't probably our safest bet in the near future. We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. But since peak load can be several times average and nuclear plants can't be spun up in a day, we also need storage, and with storage around renewables can be cheaper than nuclear. It's not an either-or question; both should be used. Climate agreements have largely avoided the thorny question of providing nuclear power to the developing world, but if they're to achieve a prosperous standard of living in a sustainable future based on foreseeable technology, this has to be addressed.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. The problem with statements like this is that when they're proven wrong (they aren't always, but when they are), it's often because of some massive underlying shift that makes a bunch of assumptions wrong, leading to a wrong prediction. If we envision a system where not only delivery, but storage is centrally managed, then yes, there's a massive amount of energy storage required, and that's hard to justify and invest in for large companies. If instead you assume that maybe electric cars will act like large battery reservoirs, and stuff like the powerwall will also be used to supplement it, then we end up with a massive amount of battery storage already distributed to different endpoints, an d paid for by individuals instead of a few massive companies. Whether that's all that likely, or even possible at a huge scale because of required rare materials is a question, but that's an entirely different type of scenario than "energy companies invest in massive batteries to leverage solar/wind for efficiently", and the type of thing that's hard to predict and because of that often overlooked. That doesn't mean stuff like that doesn't happen all the time. In fact, I would say there's a major shift like that every decade or so, we just don't necessarily notice them unless we look at them. The internet itself was a major thing. Just relating to the internet, there have been major advanced every few years. The rollout of new major advancements is unevenly distributed and often over the span of a decade, leading to it being hard to notice them. Just this last year, the massive increase in remote work will likely cause a major shift in the economics of many markets, and change how many predictions would play out. Bringing this back to energy, consider that it seems like every year California is having massive fires, and is bankrupting its public utility provider to the point that the state is prepared to take it over if it gets much worse. At that point, if the state decides it needs to actually replace a lot of infrastructure that PG&E needs to maintain, maybe pushing for some partially distributed model starts to make sense. These are all things that go into making predictions about energy really hard, since we're at an inflection point where a lot of stuff that used to work is not working very well, and new technologies are just at the cusp of being useful.
  - gibolt 6y ago
    *useful and financially competitive
- clomond 6y ago
  Important distinction here: nobody actually cares or wants power that is baseload. In some cases it can actually be a bad thing. The property you really want is “dispatchable”. There when you want it. Not when you don’t.
  - 6nf 6y ago
    Yes sure you can break it down like that. At larger scales (e.g. interstate transmission lines) you have to aggregate and then becomes baseload + surge again. Individual users want dispatchable, cities or counties becomes baseload +.
  - scythe 6y ago
    >nobody actually cares or wants power that is baseload. That doesn't make sense. At all hours of the day there is some demand on the grid: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 If you only have to store for the fluctuations vs. having to store all night you end up with massively less storage. Electric cars won't do it either. There are less than 300 million registered vehicles in the US and a car battery holds about 100 kWh. That's 30 billion kWh and overnight demand may be as high as 5 billion kWh/night. You'd need an extremely high compliance rate to pull that off. But seasonal productivity fluctuations are the bigger issue with solar and wind. You might get way more power in July than you need and way less in January -- wind is also seasonal, but the peak month varies by region. You're not going to store months and months worth of electricity in cars and even grid storage facilities would become cost-prohibitive, and you can't reset a nuclear reactor on a weekly basis, but one or two starts a year might be achievable if you design for it. Currently that's not legal: http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nuclear-plants/ http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nu...
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Go there and model (with real historical weather data) how much a solar/wind/battery/hydrogen system would cost to deliver steady power. Then compare against new nuclear. Sorry, nuclear. (The hydrogen part is essential in some places, like northern Europe, and its impact is not fully appreciated by many nuclear fans.)
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. This is not true. With a properly designed solar/wind/battery/hydrogen system, a steady stream of power can be delivered more cheaply than what you could get from a new nuclear reactor. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but it's true now, and many (such as yourself) have not updated your priors.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
Hydro is extremely restricted because of geographical and environmental constraints. Solar is also quite constrained by lack of large-scale storage and environmental concerns, and just by the weather. Same goes for wind. Keeping in mind that electricity production has to increase significantly to absorb the shift from ICE to EV vehicles I would tend to agree that there is no way to meet demand without nuclear even if renewables are, and should be, pushed. Being part of does not mean being sufficient.
- clomond 6y ago
  I will challenge your assertion that energy storage is some kind of “deterministic barrier” that needs to be crossed before decarbonizing our grid. Solar is still negligible in terms of penetration in many places in the world (even though it and wind are the cheapest new build primary energy today, so expect this to rapidly change). As well, you can add quite a bit of solar to a grid before curtailments become necessary. Add that solar and wind pair together (when it’s not sunny, it’s often windy and visa versa). Many grids today (Uk, Denmark, Germany, etc) can have decent penetration of renewables with 0 energy storage. Add in large scale grid interconnectivity (sunny in Nevada, windy in Idaho, Hydro in pacific north west) it will always be sunny and windy somewhere.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    > I will challenge your assertion that energy storage is some kind of “deterministic barrier” that needs to be crossed before decarbonizing our grid. This is clearly not my assertion.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  My bet is that large scale storage is a much, much easier problem to solve than power-generating nuclear fusion.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Yes, but that does not change anything to the point of the importance of nuclear (fission) power.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Hydro is actually pretty bad in terms of big safety incidents (Banqiao: 171000 dead, Machchu: 5000 dead, South Fork: 2208 dead) and solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt. Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series. Anyway, I tend to agree that going forward solar + storage is probably workable. The storage part isn't proven yet but I have faith we'll figure it out. There are lots of promising options under investigation and the proven fallbacks aren't that horrendously expensive, all things considered. It's just a pity we stopped building nuclear 40 years ago because it was viable all the way back then. Heck, we got to 20% nuclear! Compare to 2% solar today. If we had merely continued building nuclear at the same pace instead of stopping in the 1980s our grid would be 100% low-CO2 today instead of maybe 30 years from now if we hurry. But that didn't happen. We made the super-mature and responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead and now we get to live with that decision. So it goes.
- dghughes 6y ago
  Hydroelectric projects also cause an increase in mercury levels specifically methylmercury. You'd think hydroelectric would be a safe method of generating power with flooding being the only bad effect. An Inuk guy in Labrador I follow on Twitter (@AndersenAngus) is trying to raise awareness about methylmercury due to flooding of land for hydroelectric dams. Here is some info on it via the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11/human-health-risks-hydroelectric-projects https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11/human-health-risks... "Microbes convert naturally occurring mercury in soils into potent methylmercury when land is flooded, such as when dams are built for hydroelectric projects. The methylmercury moves into the water and animals, magnifying as it moves up the food chain. This makes the toxin especially dangerous for indigenous communities living near hydroelectric projects because they tend to have diets rich in local fish, birds and marine mammals such as seals. "
  - UweSchmidt 6y ago
itsangaris 6y ago
>This is just not true A lot of smart people would beg to differ.
- VyperCard 6y ago
  A lot of smart people would beg to differ.
m0zg 6y ago
> Hydro is dirt cheap already Said HN reader as the Three Gorges dam was about to burst in China, submerging millions of households.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  [citation needed]
  - m0zg 6y ago
    Are you even serious? https://www.google.com/search?q=three+gorges+dam&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2m6Sn-fDqAhWsJzQIHfltBCQQ_AUoAXoECBYQAw&biw=1365&bih=702 https://www.google.com/search?q=three+gorges+dam&newwindow=1...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      "Xinhua also stressed in its report that all metrics were still up to standard and all the variables being monitored fell within the design parameters." "Meanwhile, Wang Hao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an authority on hydraulics who sits on the Ministry of Water Resources’ Yangtze River Administration Commission, has also assured that the dam is sound enough to withstand the impact from floods twice the mass flow rate recorded on Saturday." - https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-safe-say-operators/ https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-... Citation needed for your claim "was about to burst"
      - m0zg 6y ago
        > who sits on the Ministry of Water Resources’ Yangtze River Administration Commission That's all you need to know. If you don't understand what I'm telling you, go watch "Chernobyl".
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
ckastner 6y ago
> Hydro is dirt cheap already. Apparently, hydro produces a significant amount of greenhouse gases within the first 100 years or so, resulting from decaying plant matter and so on. There was a story on HN a few years ago, IIRC it listed hydro providing 4% of the world's electricity while being responsible for 1% greenhouse gases. I couldn't find the original story, but I didn't look too hard. Here's the first other source I found: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/2754271 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/275427...
cwhiz 6y ago
I would like to see some models on how solar power could work in northern cities, or honestly any city. The NYC metro area has over 23 million residents and there is essentially zero space for a solar farm. In the winter it's cloudy almost all day and there are only 9 hours of sunlight. Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro area electricity requirements. I just don't see how solar is even close to being viable for anything outside of small cities with access to massive swathes of empty land.
- dantillberg 6y ago
  You could imagine building a globe-spanning power distribution network. Solar panels on one side of the planet could provide power at night on the other side of the planet.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    I bet the power transportation cost and loss would be too significant.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    If we could transmit power across vast distances like that then we wouldn't even need to bother with solar. We could build a thousand nuclear power plants in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, power transmission suffers from line losses. Even a few hundred miles requires several hundred thousand volts to avoid losses. Maybe that's an easier problem to solve than fusion.
    - Ygg2 6y ago
      You'd JUST need to move current from AC to DC, and span the whole of earth with superconductor cables. You know, easy stuff to build and maintain.
    - D-Coder 6y ago
      Use the local electricity to crack water into H2 and O2. Release the O2, use the local electricity to compress the H2 into liquid hydrogen, pump in across the country. The pipes themselves are a storage facility.
soperj 6y ago
Hydro can actually be worse than coal in terms of ghgs. All depends on what they flood. If it's forest, it's bad.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
>>nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is also not true if we dealt with the massive overpopulation of the earth instead of acting as its some sort of moral crisis not to stuff as many people as possible onto a planet with finite renewable resources.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  How do we go about dealing with the massive overpopulation?
  - CarbyAu 6y ago
    As per sibling comment to yours, society wide development seems to lead to lower birth rates. Lift the masses out of poverty.
  - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    One of the simplest ways is to offer economic incentives to people who have fewer (or no) children instead of the opposite (which is our current policy).
  - rimliu 6y ago
    Soon enough we will have the opposite problem to worry about.
- godelski 6y ago
  This appears to be a problem that is solving itself. Developed countries have birth rates below replacement and more countries are becoming developed (with the same trend happening as those countries develop).
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    That’s all well and good if you reach stability below a level that is sustainable. We aren’t going to be anywhere near that from an environmental point of view.
bobthechef 6y ago
Are you factoring in the costs and environmental impact of producing and maintaining storage for solar, the production and maintenance of solar cells and all the other externalized costs and impacts of so-called renewables? From what I understand, there is a great deal of hype around these technologies that doesn’t really stack up and that the renewables industry is rife with shady practices and bogus claims. Personally, I think nuclear (fission and hopefully fusion) are the best options, though I can accept a minor niche role for tech like solar.
- godelski 6y ago
  The problem shouldn't be thought about in this way, or maybe I'm misunderstanding your position. There is no single technology that will solve the issue of climate change (and in this case just limiting our conversation to the production of electricity). The landscapes in large geographical areas like the US are not homogeneous. Solar and wind work great in the Southwest, but not as well in the Northeast. Hydro works fantastically in the South, but not in Southwest (yes I'm aware there is hydropower in the SW, that's not the point). There's questions about base load, storage, peak and intermittent demand, transmission, and so on. So I dislike these conversations because they seem to be framed as Solar/renewables VS nuclear. When really the conversation should be "should nuclear be part of the solution?" I do believe that the answer is yes (because above factors), but the phrasing matters. This is because it leads to the next obvious and more important question: "If yes, how much?" Clearly a fully nuclear grid is not a smart idea, just like a fully solar grid wouldn't be. But the framing matters. It isn't a "OR" debate, it is an "AND" debate.
ptmcc 6y ago
When accounting for all externalities, hydro doesn't usually pencil out all that well. It's a sad reality, because through a certain limited lens hydro looks amazing. There are many efforts underway removing old hydro dams to restore the environments and ecosystems that were totally devastated by them. A notable recent example is the Elwha River Dam removal that finished about 4 years ago in Washington: https://therevelator.org/elwha-dam-removal/ https://therevelator.org/elwha-dam-removal/
godelski 6y ago
The question about needing nuclear really comes down to how you model energy dependence. Is the US (or X country) homogeneous in ability to produce, store, and distribute energy or is it heterogeneous? Of course, things get much more complicated once we start talking about lifetime emissions and external environmental impacts.
hlfy_hn 6y ago
"This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. " ROTFL. You made my day mate. For starters: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  > For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9% to 2.3% per year ... When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. His argument is that sometime in the next 275 years we have to make some change to our economic system, unless economic growth decouples from energy use growth during that time. What he doesn't say is that it has been decoupling for decades even before he wrote that post, and, by an equally valid extrapolation argument, economic growth will become completely decoupled from energy use globally in another 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-economies https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-econo...
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    Or perhaps it isn’t, when you actually account for everything: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-growth-is-a-myth https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      That Vice article is talking about the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from material resource usage growth. It's possible that our inability to recycle (in an economically efficient way) will end up putting some limit on economic growth, but this is very different from the global thermodynamic argument being made by the article that I was responding to above.
  - 6y ago
alliao 6y ago
I am a fusion power fanboy but would hope other researches are getting some loving too... I mean what about seasonal energy storage? would be a great technology in current times where weather's getting wilder. we capture excessive heat and dump it back when it's cold etc...
modmans2nd 6y ago
You’re fooling yourself.

scythe 6y ago

>This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is at best many decades away. So while I think fusion energy has the potential to transform energy generation, and by extent everything about our life, it's wrong to assume renewables aren't probably our safest bet in the near future. We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. But since peak load can be several times average and nuclear plants can't be spun up in a day, we also need storage, and with storage around renewables can be cheaper than nuclear. It's not an either-or question; both should be used. Climate agreements have largely avoided the thorny question of providing nuclear power to the developing world, but if they're to achieve a prosperous standard of living in a sustainable future based on foreseeable technology, this has to be addressed.

kbenson 6y ago
> We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. The problem with statements like this is that when they're proven wrong (they aren't always, but when they are), it's often because of some massive underlying shift that makes a bunch of assumptions wrong, leading to a wrong prediction. If we envision a system where not only delivery, but storage is centrally managed, then yes, there's a massive amount of energy storage required, and that's hard to justify and invest in for large companies. If instead you assume that maybe electric cars will act like large battery reservoirs, and stuff like the powerwall will also be used to supplement it, then we end up with a massive amount of battery storage already distributed to different endpoints, an d paid for by individuals instead of a few massive companies. Whether that's all that likely, or even possible at a huge scale because of required rare materials is a question, but that's an entirely different type of scenario than "energy companies invest in massive batteries to leverage solar/wind for efficiently", and the type of thing that's hard to predict and because of that often overlooked. That doesn't mean stuff like that doesn't happen all the time. In fact, I would say there's a major shift like that every decade or so, we just don't necessarily notice them unless we look at them. The internet itself was a major thing. Just relating to the internet, there have been major advanced every few years. The rollout of new major advancements is unevenly distributed and often over the span of a decade, leading to it being hard to notice them. Just this last year, the massive increase in remote work will likely cause a major shift in the economics of many markets, and change how many predictions would play out. Bringing this back to energy, consider that it seems like every year California is having massive fires, and is bankrupting its public utility provider to the point that the state is prepared to take it over if it gets much worse. At that point, if the state decides it needs to actually replace a lot of infrastructure that PG&E needs to maintain, maybe pushing for some partially distributed model starts to make sense. These are all things that go into making predictions about energy really hard, since we're at an inflection point where a lot of stuff that used to work is not working very well, and new technologies are just at the cusp of being useful.
- gibolt 6y ago
  *useful and financially competitive
clomond 6y ago
Important distinction here: nobody actually cares or wants power that is baseload. In some cases it can actually be a bad thing. The property you really want is “dispatchable”. There when you want it. Not when you don’t.
- 6nf 6y ago
  Yes sure you can break it down like that. At larger scales (e.g. interstate transmission lines) you have to aggregate and then becomes baseload + surge again. Individual users want dispatchable, cities or counties becomes baseload +.
- scythe 6y ago
  >nobody actually cares or wants power that is baseload. That doesn't make sense. At all hours of the day there is some demand on the grid: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 If you only have to store for the fluctuations vs. having to store all night you end up with massively less storage. Electric cars won't do it either. There are less than 300 million registered vehicles in the US and a car battery holds about 100 kWh. That's 30 billion kWh and overnight demand may be as high as 5 billion kWh/night. You'd need an extremely high compliance rate to pull that off. But seasonal productivity fluctuations are the bigger issue with solar and wind. You might get way more power in July than you need and way less in January -- wind is also seasonal, but the peak month varies by region. You're not going to store months and months worth of electricity in cars and even grid storage facilities would become cost-prohibitive, and you can't reset a nuclear reactor on a weekly basis, but one or two starts a year might be achievable if you design for it. Currently that's not legal: http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nuclear-plants/ http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/09/03/why-dont-we-mothball-nu...
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Go there and model (with real historical weather data) how much a solar/wind/battery/hydrogen system would cost to deliver steady power. Then compare against new nuclear. Sorry, nuclear. (The hydrogen part is essential in some places, like northern Europe, and its impact is not fully appreciated by many nuclear fans.)
pfdietz 6y ago
> We need nuclear to meet baseload because the storage requirements (for PV particularly, by far the largest renewable) would be absurd without it. This is not true. With a properly designed solar/wind/battery/hydrogen system, a steady stream of power can be delivered more cheaply than what you could get from a new nuclear reactor. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but it's true now, and many (such as yourself) have not updated your priors.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

Hydro is extremely restricted because of geographical and environmental constraints. Solar is also quite constrained by lack of large-scale storage and environmental concerns, and just by the weather. Same goes for wind. Keeping in mind that electricity production has to increase significantly to absorb the shift from ICE to EV vehicles I would tend to agree that there is no way to meet demand without nuclear even if renewables are, and should be, pushed. Being part of does not mean being sufficient.

clomond 6y ago
I will challenge your assertion that energy storage is some kind of “deterministic barrier” that needs to be crossed before decarbonizing our grid. Solar is still negligible in terms of penetration in many places in the world (even though it and wind are the cheapest new build primary energy today, so expect this to rapidly change). As well, you can add quite a bit of solar to a grid before curtailments become necessary. Add that solar and wind pair together (when it’s not sunny, it’s often windy and visa versa). Many grids today (Uk, Denmark, Germany, etc) can have decent penetration of renewables with 0 energy storage. Add in large scale grid interconnectivity (sunny in Nevada, windy in Idaho, Hydro in pacific north west) it will always be sunny and windy somewhere.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  > I will challenge your assertion that energy storage is some kind of “deterministic barrier” that needs to be crossed before decarbonizing our grid. This is clearly not my assertion.
nicoburns 6y ago
My bet is that large scale storage is a much, much easier problem to solve than power-generating nuclear fusion.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Yes, but that does not change anything to the point of the importance of nuclear (fission) power.

jjoonathan 6y ago

Hydro is actually pretty bad in terms of big safety incidents (Banqiao: 171000 dead, Machchu: 5000 dead, South Fork: 2208 dead) and solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt. Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series. Anyway, I tend to agree that going forward solar + storage is probably workable. The storage part isn't proven yet but I have faith we'll figure it out. There are lots of promising options under investigation and the proven fallbacks aren't that horrendously expensive, all things considered. It's just a pity we stopped building nuclear 40 years ago because it was viable all the way back then. Heck, we got to 20% nuclear! Compare to 2% solar today. If we had merely continued building nuclear at the same pace instead of stopping in the 1980s our grid would be 100% low-CO2 today instead of maybe 30 years from now if we hurry. But that didn't happen. We made the super-mature and responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead and now we get to live with that decision. So it goes.

dghughes 6y ago
Hydroelectric projects also cause an increase in mercury levels specifically methylmercury. You'd think hydroelectric would be a safe method of generating power with flooding being the only bad effect. An Inuk guy in Labrador I follow on Twitter (@AndersenAngus) is trying to raise awareness about methylmercury due to flooding of land for hydroelectric dams. Here is some info on it via the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11/human-health-risks-hydroelectric-projects https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/11/human-health-risks... "Microbes convert naturally occurring mercury in soils into potent methylmercury when land is flooded, such as when dams are built for hydroelectric projects. The methylmercury moves into the water and animals, magnifying as it moves up the food chain. This makes the toxin especially dangerous for indigenous communities living near hydroelectric projects because they tend to have diets rich in local fish, birds and marine mammals such as seals. "
- UweSchmidt 6y ago

itsangaris 6y ago

>This is just not true A lot of smart people would beg to differ.

VyperCard 6y ago
A lot of smart people would beg to differ.

m0zg 6y ago

> Hydro is dirt cheap already Said HN reader as the Three Gorges dam was about to burst in China, submerging millions of households.

matkoniecz 6y ago
[citation needed]
- m0zg 6y ago
  Are you even serious? https://www.google.com/search?q=three+gorges+dam&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2m6Sn-fDqAhWsJzQIHfltBCQQ_AUoAXoECBYQAw&biw=1365&bih=702 https://www.google.com/search?q=three+gorges+dam&newwindow=1...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    "Xinhua also stressed in its report that all metrics were still up to standard and all the variables being monitored fell within the design parameters." "Meanwhile, Wang Hao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an authority on hydraulics who sits on the Ministry of Water Resources’ Yangtze River Administration Commission, has also assured that the dam is sound enough to withstand the impact from floods twice the mass flow rate recorded on Saturday." - https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-safe-say-operators/ https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/three-gorges-dam-deformed-but-... Citation needed for your claim "was about to burst"
    - m0zg 6y ago
      > who sits on the Ministry of Water Resources’ Yangtze River Administration Commission That's all you need to know. If you don't understand what I'm telling you, go watch "Chernobyl".
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago

ckastner 6y ago

> Hydro is dirt cheap already. Apparently, hydro produces a significant amount of greenhouse gases within the first 100 years or so, resulting from decaying plant matter and so on. There was a story on HN a few years ago, IIRC it listed hydro providing 4% of the world's electricity while being responsible for 1% greenhouse gases. I couldn't find the original story, but I didn't look too hard. Here's the first other source I found: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/2754271 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/275427...

cwhiz 6y ago

I would like to see some models on how solar power could work in northern cities, or honestly any city. The NYC metro area has over 23 million residents and there is essentially zero space for a solar farm. In the winter it's cloudy almost all day and there are only 9 hours of sunlight. Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro area electricity requirements. I just don't see how solar is even close to being viable for anything outside of small cities with access to massive swathes of empty land.

dantillberg 6y ago
You could imagine building a globe-spanning power distribution network. Solar panels on one side of the planet could provide power at night on the other side of the planet.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  I bet the power transportation cost and loss would be too significant.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  If we could transmit power across vast distances like that then we wouldn't even need to bother with solar. We could build a thousand nuclear power plants in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, power transmission suffers from line losses. Even a few hundred miles requires several hundred thousand volts to avoid losses. Maybe that's an easier problem to solve than fusion.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    You'd JUST need to move current from AC to DC, and span the whole of earth with superconductor cables. You know, easy stuff to build and maintain.
  - D-Coder 6y ago
    Use the local electricity to crack water into H2 and O2. Release the O2, use the local electricity to compress the H2 into liquid hydrogen, pump in across the country. The pipes themselves are a storage facility.

soperj 6y ago

Hydro can actually be worse than coal in terms of ghgs. All depends on what they flood. If it's forest, it's bad.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

>>nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is also not true if we dealt with the massive overpopulation of the earth instead of acting as its some sort of moral crisis not to stuff as many people as possible onto a planet with finite renewable resources.

Avicebron 6y ago
How do we go about dealing with the massive overpopulation?
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  As per sibling comment to yours, society wide development seems to lead to lower birth rates. Lift the masses out of poverty.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  One of the simplest ways is to offer economic incentives to people who have fewer (or no) children instead of the opposite (which is our current policy).
- rimliu 6y ago
  Soon enough we will have the opposite problem to worry about.
godelski 6y ago
This appears to be a problem that is solving itself. Developed countries have birth rates below replacement and more countries are becoming developed (with the same trend happening as those countries develop).
- foobiekr 6y ago
  That’s all well and good if you reach stability below a level that is sustainable. We aren’t going to be anywhere near that from an environmental point of view.

bobthechef 6y ago

Are you factoring in the costs and environmental impact of producing and maintaining storage for solar, the production and maintenance of solar cells and all the other externalized costs and impacts of so-called renewables? From what I understand, there is a great deal of hype around these technologies that doesn’t really stack up and that the renewables industry is rife with shady practices and bogus claims. Personally, I think nuclear (fission and hopefully fusion) are the best options, though I can accept a minor niche role for tech like solar.

godelski 6y ago
The problem shouldn't be thought about in this way, or maybe I'm misunderstanding your position. There is no single technology that will solve the issue of climate change (and in this case just limiting our conversation to the production of electricity). The landscapes in large geographical areas like the US are not homogeneous. Solar and wind work great in the Southwest, but not as well in the Northeast. Hydro works fantastically in the South, but not in Southwest (yes I'm aware there is hydropower in the SW, that's not the point). There's questions about base load, storage, peak and intermittent demand, transmission, and so on. So I dislike these conversations because they seem to be framed as Solar/renewables VS nuclear. When really the conversation should be "should nuclear be part of the solution?" I do believe that the answer is yes (because above factors), but the phrasing matters. This is because it leads to the next obvious and more important question: "If yes, how much?" Clearly a fully nuclear grid is not a smart idea, just like a fully solar grid wouldn't be. But the framing matters. It isn't a "OR" debate, it is an "AND" debate.

ptmcc 6y ago

When accounting for all externalities, hydro doesn't usually pencil out all that well. It's a sad reality, because through a certain limited lens hydro looks amazing. There are many efforts underway removing old hydro dams to restore the environments and ecosystems that were totally devastated by them. A notable recent example is the Elwha River Dam removal that finished about 4 years ago in Washington: https://therevelator.org/elwha-dam-removal/ https://therevelator.org/elwha-dam-removal/

godelski 6y ago

The question about needing nuclear really comes down to how you model energy dependence. Is the US (or X country) homogeneous in ability to produce, store, and distribute energy or is it heterogeneous? Of course, things get much more complicated once we start talking about lifetime emissions and external environmental impacts.

hlfy_hn 6y ago

"This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. " ROTFL. You made my day mate. For starters: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

dane-pgp 6y ago
> For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9% to 2.3% per year ... When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. His argument is that sometime in the next 275 years we have to make some change to our economic system, unless economic growth decouples from energy use growth during that time. What he doesn't say is that it has been decoupling for decades even before he wrote that post, and, by an equally valid extrapolation argument, economic growth will become completely decoupled from energy use globally in another 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-economies https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-econo...
- foobiekr 6y ago
  Or perhaps it isn’t, when you actually account for everything: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-growth-is-a-myth https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    That Vice article is talking about the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from material resource usage growth. It's possible that our inability to recycle (in an economically efficient way) will end up putting some limit on economic growth, but this is very different from the global thermodynamic argument being made by the article that I was responding to above.
- 6y ago

alliao 6y ago

I am a fusion power fanboy but would hope other researches are getting some loving too... I mean what about seasonal energy storage? would be a great technology in current times where weather's getting wilder. we capture excessive heat and dump it back when it's cold etc...

modmans2nd 6y ago

You’re fooling yourself.