4 ms·

"but it can't without a major tech breakthrough. " It can absolutely compete on cost, the only 'breakthrough' we need is operational fidelity. It's 'expensive

by jariel 6y ago

"but it can't without a major tech breakthrough. " It can absolutely compete on cost, the only 'breakthrough' we need is operational fidelity. It's 'expensive' for the same reason that the AHA web site cost $1B to build when it should have cost $50M or the tunnel in Boston went 5x over budget. Also, there's the issue of liability and insurance is problematic, it needs to be externalized i.e. we need to have rules, safeguards around what happens and how people are comped. The 'modern world' is significantly harangued by our inability to build complicated things with effectiveness, Nuclear Power is just an artifact of that.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
In theory yes; in practice, all of the existing nuclear deployments rank among the least cost effective ways to generate energy on the planet. Without a 2 order magnitudes improvements in cost, any plans towards building anything nuclear are probably futile over the course of a 5 decade run time of the facility starting about 2-3 decades from now given current and likely improvements with alternatives in terms of cost reductions in the same time span. Sub 1 $ct /kwh energy plants are very close (there have been a few solar bids in the 1-1.5 $ct range recently). I expect prices to routinely start dipping below that as early as next year. If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. That's not feasible just yet but there are plenty of researchers playing with prototypes for this right now. So, that has the potential to deliver some order of magnitude cost advantage over the already dirt cheap current state of the art for clean energy. That's what I call a feasible path to delivering orders of magnitudes cost improvements. We have similar things in the works for energy storage. And off shore wind is also delivering nice improvements still. Hell, at with that kind of improvement, even producing synthetic fuel at ludicrously low inefficiencies could still be worth the trouble from a cost perspective over anything nuclear. And there's research chipping away at that problem as well (i.e. doing it more efficiently and cheaper). IMHO there's actually nothing stopping people coming up with dirt cheap nuclear in theory but lots of non trivial obstacles preventing us from getting there on a timescale where it matters. And then once we do get there; there's still the notion that mass producing material for dirty bombs poses some non trivial security challenges. E.g. mass deploying micro reactors all over the world massively increases the possibility that some of them end up in the wrong hands. All it takes to create a dirty bomb is some cheap explosives and some radioactive material. All it takes to depopulate e.g. downtown Manhattan is one such bomb. Nuclear safety not just about reactor failure but also ensuring the nuclear waste is properly secured for however many millennia it takes for it to degrade. Another issue is the lack of ambition on growing the energy market. A lot of projections are based on our current energy consumption patterns and seem to assume that ballpark what we currently consume globally does not need to grow by orders of magnitude. The reality is that throughout history, our ability to deliver cost improvements for energy production has always resulted in increased demand together with economic growth. There's no shortage of useful things we could do with a supply of dirt cheap peta watt hours. Unlocking that potential would create something similar to the industrial revolution in terms of economic growth. IMHO that's exactly what this century is going to be about. A few orders magnitude improvement in cost would go hand in hand with a few orders magnitude increase in energy produced. The premise that we need to get nuclear done is based on the notion that we can somehow break that pattern of it being too expensive by orders of magnitudes. However, I don't see how this could happen. Most articles I read about nuclear seem to ignore the security aspect and tend to gloss over the cost aspect or just generally even lack the ambition to do better than even current approaches in the market. So, I'll just put a stake in the ground and spell it out: anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete from a cost perspective before it is ready for the market I.e. shipping in volume and at a relevant price point for the state of the art for other technologies at that point. That's decades from now at the earliest IMHO. And that's only a 10X improvement over today, which is arguably not good enough. To play it safe, you really need to be thinking closer to 0.0001$ per kwh or better. That would be at least a 100x improvement. I can see fusion delivering this potentially towards the end of the second half of this century (earliest) but not nuclear in any of its current imagined incarnations. Certainly not in under 2 decades like this article seems to suggest: too little, too late and for too much $. It just doesn't add up. Offshore wind will have removed most gas/coal plants from the equation around that time in any case. China is currently talking about 2060. The UK is talking 2030. Nuclear does not really factor into those intentions. Wind and solar are outstripping everything else in terms of growth currently. If you break down new capacity coming online, coal and nuclear are mere footnotes (production with that is actually shrinking in lot of markets). New nuclear coming online is not keeping pace with old nuclear going offline. And there's a lot of that happening currently as a lot of 1960s/1970s reactors are basically at the end of their useful life.
- jariel 6y ago
  " anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete" is a fantastical statement that has little credibility without a lot of referential material, even then ... We are not even scratching the surface of the potential energy we extract from fission. If we approached it with the same vigour as renewable, and Greenpeace didn't effectively make Nuclear politically toxic, we might already be 'most of the way' towards carbon neutrality.
- vehementi 6y ago
  Hi, I just watched this video that some other commenter posted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY Where is this prof getting it wrong by a factor of 100? What is he leaving out?
- cesarb 6y ago
  > If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. If the panels are too cheap, the cost of the inverter becomes the bottleneck. That is, there's a limit to how low you can go; even if the panels cost zero to produce, you still have to produce the inverters.

by jariel 6y ago

jillesvangurp 6y ago

In theory yes; in practice, all of the existing nuclear deployments rank among the least cost effective ways to generate energy on the planet. Without a 2 order magnitudes improvements in cost, any plans towards building anything nuclear are probably futile over the course of a 5 decade run time of the facility starting about 2-3 decades from now given current and likely improvements with alternatives in terms of cost reductions in the same time span. Sub 1 $ct /kwh energy plants are very close (there have been a few solar bids in the 1-1.5 $ct range recently). I expect prices to routinely start dipping below that as early as next year. If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. That's not feasible just yet but there are plenty of researchers playing with prototypes for this right now. So, that has the potential to deliver some order of magnitude cost advantage over the already dirt cheap current state of the art for clean energy. That's what I call a feasible path to delivering orders of magnitudes cost improvements. We have similar things in the works for energy storage. And off shore wind is also delivering nice improvements still. Hell, at with that kind of improvement, even producing synthetic fuel at ludicrously low inefficiencies could still be worth the trouble from a cost perspective over anything nuclear. And there's research chipping away at that problem as well (i.e. doing it more efficiently and cheaper). IMHO there's actually nothing stopping people coming up with dirt cheap nuclear in theory but lots of non trivial obstacles preventing us from getting there on a timescale where it matters. And then once we do get there; there's still the notion that mass producing material for dirty bombs poses some non trivial security challenges. E.g. mass deploying micro reactors all over the world massively increases the possibility that some of them end up in the wrong hands. All it takes to create a dirty bomb is some cheap explosives and some radioactive material. All it takes to depopulate e.g. downtown Manhattan is one such bomb. Nuclear safety not just about reactor failure but also ensuring the nuclear waste is properly secured for however many millennia it takes for it to degrade. Another issue is the lack of ambition on growing the energy market. A lot of projections are based on our current energy consumption patterns and seem to assume that ballpark what we currently consume globally does not need to grow by orders of magnitude. The reality is that throughout history, our ability to deliver cost improvements for energy production has always resulted in increased demand together with economic growth. There's no shortage of useful things we could do with a supply of dirt cheap peta watt hours. Unlocking that potential would create something similar to the industrial revolution in terms of economic growth. IMHO that's exactly what this century is going to be about. A few orders magnitude improvement in cost would go hand in hand with a few orders magnitude increase in energy produced. The premise that we need to get nuclear done is based on the notion that we can somehow break that pattern of it being too expensive by orders of magnitudes. However, I don't see how this could happen. Most articles I read about nuclear seem to ignore the security aspect and tend to gloss over the cost aspect or just generally even lack the ambition to do better than even current approaches in the market. So, I'll just put a stake in the ground and spell it out: anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete from a cost perspective before it is ready for the market I.e. shipping in volume and at a relevant price point for the state of the art for other technologies at that point. That's decades from now at the earliest IMHO. And that's only a 10X improvement over today, which is arguably not good enough. To play it safe, you really need to be thinking closer to 0.0001$ per kwh or better. That would be at least a 100x improvement. I can see fusion delivering this potentially towards the end of the second half of this century (earliest) but not nuclear in any of its current imagined incarnations. Certainly not in under 2 decades like this article seems to suggest: too little, too late and for too much $. It just doesn't add up. Offshore wind will have removed most gas/coal plants from the equation around that time in any case. China is currently talking about 2060. The UK is talking 2030. Nuclear does not really factor into those intentions. Wind and solar are outstripping everything else in terms of growth currently. If you break down new capacity coming online, coal and nuclear are mere footnotes (production with that is actually shrinking in lot of markets). New nuclear coming online is not keeping pace with old nuclear going offline. And there's a lot of that happening currently as a lot of 1960s/1970s reactors are basically at the end of their useful life.

jariel 6y ago
" anything over 0.001$ per kwh is basically going to be obsolete" is a fantastical statement that has little credibility without a lot of referential material, even then ... We are not even scratching the surface of the potential energy we extract from fission. If we approached it with the same vigour as renewable, and Greenpeace didn't effectively make Nuclear politically toxic, we might already be 'most of the way' towards carbon neutrality.
vehementi 6y ago
Hi, I just watched this video that some other commenter posted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY Where is this prof getting it wrong by a factor of 100? What is he leaving out?
cesarb 6y ago
> If you consider e.g. organic solar panels mass produced using some inkjet style production process, producing many TWH of solar capability might become a matter of just printing such panels by the square mile using cheap production processes that don't involve a lot of exotic materials, energy, etc. If the panels are too cheap, the cost of the inverter becomes the bottleneck. That is, there's a limit to how low you can go; even if the panels cost zero to produce, you still have to produce the inverters.