5 ms·

I'll alleviate your concerns: it is not due to a big nuclear conspiracy aiming at making Big Nuclear fill its pockets, but by people who look at what physics di

by cmehdy 6y ago

I'll alleviate your concerns: it is not due to a big nuclear conspiracy aiming at making Big Nuclear fill its pockets, but by people who look at what physics dictates and notice that with our energy consumption things just don't add up. So you will see an increasing amount of (1) posts about nuclear, and (2) posts about de-growth or accepting to shrink economies through less consumption and production, not because there's a malevolent lobby but because people are becoming increasingly alarmed at the fantastically huge wave of problems already present due to climate change, and are acknowledging that the biggest mid-term effect is CO2 emissions (short term is water vapour and methane for what it's worth). Side note: if you pick a conspiracy to get rich or defend "big money" interests or get swindled by, you're way better off continuing to side with oil and coal and denying that climate change is a thing - since nuclear takes gigantic initial investments and is not stock-market friendly but much more about countries' political will (and I got downvoted on previous discussions where I brought that up).

epistasis 6y ago
There is absolutely no "physics" that goes into those postings. It's just some gut feelings. I've come across this at least a dozen times, with people just sure that "physics" says something, but there is no physical principle that requires we decrease energy use to power the entire world with renewables and storage and possibly hydrogen or other synthetic carbon fuels. We can power all of the developing world at Western energy levels with renewable energy. Our GDP is increasing even as the amount of primary energy per person decreases. It's no longer the 1970s and a lot of assumptions from then have been proven to be very very wrong.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  I can't help you if you don't even understand the scale of renewability of resources such as oil and gas, the ratio of energy extracted to energy put into the various kinds of machines that produce what we need to keep our energy consumption up, the limits to energy extraction for solar power, the lack of predictability and controllability of energy sources other than gas-oil-coal-nuclear, and the CO2-related effects on the atmosphere for the first three out of those four, the depletion of current controllable energy sources, and the energy available in the various kinds of uranium-plutonium-thorium isotopes which lead to the different kinds of nuclear power plants. Amongst other things which take hours of actually trying to wrap your head around the problem instead of putting your fingers in your ears and screaming bloody murder. Because apparently you seem to believe that "there is absolutely no 'physics'" in all of this. edit: as a side-note, take a look at all the countries that have increased their renewables energy consumption and show me that it corresponds to a decrease in production and investments of {oil or gas or coal or nuclear}, i.e. controllable energy sources. You will soon see that the sources that cannot be predicted in a way that ensures your fridge continuously works and you can take a hot shower at all hours of the day are only secondary sources that people are happy to have (and renewables are a great thing to invest in) but that in itself is not enough - unless, again, one accepts that their patterns of behaviour and consumption would change drastically, which is only one of the many possible discussions around the evolution of our societies that you seem to be so anxious to sweep under the rug.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    You can't "help" me understand your claim because it is baldly false! There's an entire field that models different grids and transitioning to carbon free energy. Using fine-grained weather patterns, they optimize for various factors such as cost, by timing out deployments of renewable resources, nuclear, transmission, storage, etc. using projected costs over the next few decades. There are huge fights in the field, particularly over nuclear, but nobody, literally nobody has said it's impossible. The debate is how much cheaper nuclear energy will make the energy transition. So if there's some sort of "physics" that precludes the possibility of what people have already made detailed plans for, you should probably publish that result. But it seems unlikely that you have found something they haven't. Response to your edit: you are shifting the point, without bothering to back up your initial claim. Nonetheless, you are shifting to a new false claim, that "renewables don't decrease carbon output. This is also clearly false: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-of-the-electricity-production-2/assessment-4 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-... The term that is used in the industry isn't "controllable," but rather "dispatchable" energy source. Europe is showing that we can get awfully close to 50% renewable, non-dispatchable energy, without really any storage and reduce carbon output. Storage, demand response, and increased transmission will likely close the rest of the gap.
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      I'm not even sure what fight you're trying to pick here, because I'm all for renewables and energy. It's painfully obvious that no, renewables alone do not have the ability to cover at a low-CO2 footprint and continuous usage the energy needs that we currently have and that are, even with reduction of consumption in richer countries, bound to grow on the whole as population follows the models that indicate about 9 billion people being alive before things potentially slope downwards. It's also not a bad idea at all to be investing seriously into renewables because despite the CO2 footprint related to the creation and maintenance of those sources, from a climate perspective it's the right bet in the long run. But the energy density that you can extract from sources that are inherently at the mercy of a climate that changes are consequently limited and unpredictable (reminder that we are not fully able to predict it - unless you have the magical key to tell us with certainty whether we're really seeing a RCP2.6, a RCP4.5, a RCP8.5, or really any better model), the same sources that by the way aren't scale-able to many places on earth. You don't really bet on wind in the same places and ways you bet on solar for example, since population centers will limit the scale of your operations and weather patterns will limit the scope of what you can extract and CLIMATE CHANGE will change those patterns. You might want to re-assess why is it that you are seemingly so emotionally invested in saying no to the only technique that has an extremely low death count per TWh, can be adapted to most places on Earth, and has an incredibly high and long-lasting ability to power countries.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Modern societies run on heat engines, and nuclear power is still a heat engine just with a carbon free source of heat. It's possible to run a carbon free modern society without drastic change in energy use, through using nuclear energy - France has done so successfully for decades. By comparison proposals to use renewables almost invariably involve immense amounts of energy storage which is nowhere near deliverable with current technologies. Either that or they involve massive changes to how society used energy, essentially refactoring the whole economy and infrastructure to work around the intermittency of renewable generation. There are fundamental physical challenges to using a low density and intermittent source of energy, and nuclear largely offers all of the same benefits as fossil fuels just without the carbon.
  - godelski 6y ago
    I want to add to this because I think it is also something the gp is missing. Decarbonizing the country/world is about much more than cars and electricity. Currently it is only 60% of the problem[0]. That, and we have NO zero carbon power source, if you include lifetime emissions. None. Zip. Nada. So part of the answer is to get some of the other 40% to be included in electricity. That's things like electric stoves, lab grown meat, or electric heaters (also includes electric cars/vehicles). So there is no way to even get to zero emissions (unless you use extraction methods like CCS). Then you have to consider that the US is 15% of emissions and the EU is 9% and where global emissions aren't heavily dependent upon electricity and transportation like they are in the modernized countries[1]. Truth is that most people are only looking at a small portion of the problem. So when someone naively says that we need to decrease energy usage to power the world with renewables it is naive because power is a small part of the global problem. Unfortunately, we're all in this together. Sadly, you ask an undeveloped country what they want: Hospitals, new homes, and electricity or a clean environment, well... we've done that experiment for a few hundred years with various populations. I think we have enough evidence to conclude an answer. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
    - 6y ago

by cmehdy 6y ago

epistasis 6y ago

There is absolutely no "physics" that goes into those postings. It's just some gut feelings. I've come across this at least a dozen times, with people just sure that "physics" says something, but there is no physical principle that requires we decrease energy use to power the entire world with renewables and storage and possibly hydrogen or other synthetic carbon fuels. We can power all of the developing world at Western energy levels with renewable energy. Our GDP is increasing even as the amount of primary energy per person decreases. It's no longer the 1970s and a lot of assumptions from then have been proven to be very very wrong.

cmehdy 6y ago
I can't help you if you don't even understand the scale of renewability of resources such as oil and gas, the ratio of energy extracted to energy put into the various kinds of machines that produce what we need to keep our energy consumption up, the limits to energy extraction for solar power, the lack of predictability and controllability of energy sources other than gas-oil-coal-nuclear, and the CO2-related effects on the atmosphere for the first three out of those four, the depletion of current controllable energy sources, and the energy available in the various kinds of uranium-plutonium-thorium isotopes which lead to the different kinds of nuclear power plants. Amongst other things which take hours of actually trying to wrap your head around the problem instead of putting your fingers in your ears and screaming bloody murder. Because apparently you seem to believe that "there is absolutely no 'physics'" in all of this. edit: as a side-note, take a look at all the countries that have increased their renewables energy consumption and show me that it corresponds to a decrease in production and investments of {oil or gas or coal or nuclear}, i.e. controllable energy sources. You will soon see that the sources that cannot be predicted in a way that ensures your fridge continuously works and you can take a hot shower at all hours of the day are only secondary sources that people are happy to have (and renewables are a great thing to invest in) but that in itself is not enough - unless, again, one accepts that their patterns of behaviour and consumption would change drastically, which is only one of the many possible discussions around the evolution of our societies that you seem to be so anxious to sweep under the rug.
- epistasis 6y ago
  You can't "help" me understand your claim because it is baldly false! There's an entire field that models different grids and transitioning to carbon free energy. Using fine-grained weather patterns, they optimize for various factors such as cost, by timing out deployments of renewable resources, nuclear, transmission, storage, etc. using projected costs over the next few decades. There are huge fights in the field, particularly over nuclear, but nobody, literally nobody has said it's impossible. The debate is how much cheaper nuclear energy will make the energy transition. So if there's some sort of "physics" that precludes the possibility of what people have already made detailed plans for, you should probably publish that result. But it seems unlikely that you have found something they haven't. Response to your edit: you are shifting the point, without bothering to back up your initial claim. Nonetheless, you are shifting to a new false claim, that "renewables don't decrease carbon output. This is also clearly false: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-of-the-electricity-production-2/assessment-4 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-... The term that is used in the industry isn't "controllable," but rather "dispatchable" energy source. Europe is showing that we can get awfully close to 50% renewable, non-dispatchable energy, without really any storage and reduce carbon output. Storage, demand response, and increased transmission will likely close the rest of the gap.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    I'm not even sure what fight you're trying to pick here, because I'm all for renewables and energy. It's painfully obvious that no, renewables alone do not have the ability to cover at a low-CO2 footprint and continuous usage the energy needs that we currently have and that are, even with reduction of consumption in richer countries, bound to grow on the whole as population follows the models that indicate about 9 billion people being alive before things potentially slope downwards. It's also not a bad idea at all to be investing seriously into renewables because despite the CO2 footprint related to the creation and maintenance of those sources, from a climate perspective it's the right bet in the long run. But the energy density that you can extract from sources that are inherently at the mercy of a climate that changes are consequently limited and unpredictable (reminder that we are not fully able to predict it - unless you have the magical key to tell us with certainty whether we're really seeing a RCP2.6, a RCP4.5, a RCP8.5, or really any better model), the same sources that by the way aren't scale-able to many places on earth. You don't really bet on wind in the same places and ways you bet on solar for example, since population centers will limit the scale of your operations and weather patterns will limit the scope of what you can extract and CLIMATE CHANGE will change those patterns. You might want to re-assess why is it that you are seemingly so emotionally invested in saying no to the only technique that has an extremely low death count per TWh, can be adapted to most places on Earth, and has an incredibly high and long-lasting ability to power countries.
manfredo 6y ago
Modern societies run on heat engines, and nuclear power is still a heat engine just with a carbon free source of heat. It's possible to run a carbon free modern society without drastic change in energy use, through using nuclear energy - France has done so successfully for decades. By comparison proposals to use renewables almost invariably involve immense amounts of energy storage which is nowhere near deliverable with current technologies. Either that or they involve massive changes to how society used energy, essentially refactoring the whole economy and infrastructure to work around the intermittency of renewable generation. There are fundamental physical challenges to using a low density and intermittent source of energy, and nuclear largely offers all of the same benefits as fossil fuels just without the carbon.
- godelski 6y ago
  I want to add to this because I think it is also something the gp is missing. Decarbonizing the country/world is about much more than cars and electricity. Currently it is only 60% of the problem[0]. That, and we have NO zero carbon power source, if you include lifetime emissions. None. Zip. Nada. So part of the answer is to get some of the other 40% to be included in electricity. That's things like electric stoves, lab grown meat, or electric heaters (also includes electric cars/vehicles). So there is no way to even get to zero emissions (unless you use extraction methods like CCS). Then you have to consider that the US is 15% of emissions and the EU is 9% and where global emissions aren't heavily dependent upon electricity and transportation like they are in the modernized countries[1]. Truth is that most people are only looking at a small portion of the problem. So when someone naively says that we need to decrease energy usage to power the world with renewables it is naive because power is a small part of the global problem. Unfortunately, we're all in this together. Sadly, you ask an undeveloped country what they want: Hospitals, new homes, and electricity or a clean environment, well... we've done that experiment for a few hundred years with various populations. I think we have enough evidence to conclude an answer. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
  - 6y ago