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Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing. They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative (let's be honest if there was a good alte

Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing. They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative (let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it). Hand-wavey stuff about hydrogen and turbines don't cut it I'm afraid. They have done good work in the past, but perhaps if they had backed nuclear a long time ago we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now? I've actually been pretty critical of them for years because of this stance they have. And before anyone comments about Chernobyl, my view is all energy production comes with risks. You have to weigh those up against global climate change IMHO.

Mrdarknezz 6y ago
Well they're not building an RBMK reactor so Chernobyl is not really relevant since they are totally different type of NPP
- dTal 6y ago
  In any case, an RBMK would still be very safe. They're well tested and we know not to do the thing that makes them explode. Additionally, you could just not skip the containment dome like the builders of Chernobyl did.
  - pulse7 6y ago
    "we know not to do the thing that makes them explode" This is not the core problem. The core problem is that explosion can still happen - even if we "know not to do the thing that makes them explode". It can happen because of a natural disaster, because of war and because of other unpredictable reason. To avoid the possible explosion and consequences altogether it is better to not have them in the first place!
    - wrkronmiller 6y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the way to avoid an explosion: "don't pull the control rods all the way out" It would take a very specific kind of war or natural disaster to pull out the control rods from a nuclear reactor, methinks.
      - drran 6y ago
        Don't steer a civil plane into a tower, please, because the tower will collapse.
    - riquito 6y ago
      Any technology will have deaths, that's inevitable. Without advocating for one versus the other, we should consider what will be number of deaths/diseases/etc versus costs/climate impact/energy produced over the lifetime of a solution
  - m-p-3 6y ago
    > we know not to do the thing that makes them explode. We collectively know a lot of thing, but as soon as you leave the opportunity to a human an accident will happen sooner or later. We know not to start heavy machinery while there is a maintenance technician inside it, but it still happens. This is why we have safety lockout systems, to avoid an accident even if we know better.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Which is why nuclear reactors in the west all have safety confinement domes.
  - kayfox 6y ago
    The RBMK has a lot of issues that make it really unsuitable for further development: 1. Because of the size of the core, it develops uneven reactivity during operation and requires attention to be paid to this. 2. The measures put in place do not entirely eliminate the chance of a power excursion. 3. The cost of a suitable containment building would make RBMK more expensive than an equivalent VVER installation. Also as far as I can tell no such containment building has ever been designed. 4. No international agency or government would allow the construction of a new RBMK. Edit: to be clear, this is not only because of the safety issues, but also because of the nuclear weapon proliferation issues associated with the design. Overall, the cost savings of a RBMK depend on not having a large containment structure and the RBMK was on its way out as a design by time the Chernobyl accident happened. The large number of RBMKs under construction at the time was largely because of initiatives to increase the installed nuclear capacity in the Soviet Union during the mid 80s, existing RBMK sites would receive additional reactors and all but one of the new sites were to receive VVER reactors.
raverbashing 6y ago
Greenpeace is to the environment what Peta is to pets ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/ ) Smaller, safer, mass produced (and low start time) reactors is one way that fission power could make a comeback.
DrBazza 6y ago
If Greenpeace was full of scientists that understood nuclear power (not weapons), I'd take them seriously. Instead it's full of people that get their science from tabloid newspapers and facebook.
- drran 6y ago
  Greenpeace is full of scientists.
  - cyphar 6y ago
    Greenpeace opposes GMOs under the pretense that they are unsafe for human consumption. They may have scientists on staff, but that doesn't make them immune to spreading unscientific opinions.
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    The bulk of Greenpeace policy is driven by its membership, which is very much not full of scientists I'm afraid.
ThinkBeat 6y ago
Where does the US store highly radioactive waste from the nuclear plants?
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  In managable containers that you can bury underground?
  - bildung 6y ago
    Has the US actually decided on a permanent nuclear waste repository?
    - numpad0 6y ago
      Permanent means they can’t reuse it so
    - hoseja 6y ago
      They did but then Nevada had a NIMBY moment for a bit of uninhabited desert so they are back to square one.
- virmundi 6y ago
  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-do-with-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-... At one of 121 locations near our nuclear plants. We are not allowed to recycle the waste so it sits there waiting for transport.
Shivetya 6y ago
Well proliferation is a constant bogey man but sadly far too much politics is involved that seems to insure it occurs more often than not. Just that the world tolerates North Korea should be example enough that politicians would rather look the other way and hope nothing goes boom. That ten year lead time seems to be excessive for announcing at this time unless its more of a trial balloon - looking to gauge public and political reactions before sinking more money into it. Renewable combined with storage solutions cannot guarantee one hundred percent coverage and I doubt they ever will. However a well connected grid with wind and solar spread across the country as a whole can minimize some of the effects of weather.
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
There is a good alternative, and we are already using it. Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up. They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons. It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal. Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.
- unwind 6y ago
  Of course solar and wind are awesome, but they are dependent on external factors and thus not fully comparable. If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. Nuclear and fuel-burning power plants are not like that, and the difference matters. You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    There are (at least) 6 solutions for the sun not shining. In order of desirability. 1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix. 2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere. 3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper. 4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit. 5: batteries 6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.
  - audunw 6y ago
    > If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough. > You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines. Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there. And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term. > or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :) If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times. And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field. I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.
masklinn 6y ago
> Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing. But completely unsurprising. Greenpeace pivoted from an anti-military nuclear to an anti-civilian nuclear stance to try and remain relevant, they've been a negative force in the world ever since. They've been raising awareness about AGW while actively fighting one of the best tools to mitigate it for more than 30 years.
- gmac 6y ago
  Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent. See, for example, the UK government's otherwise incomprehensible willingness to pay extraordinary sums for new nuclear capacity such as Hinkley C[1]: "it is difficult fully to comprehend the persistent intensity of official UK attachments to nuclear power, without also considering aims to maintain nuclear submarine capabilities". [2] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c... [2] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2016-16-swps-cox-et-al.pdf&site=25 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2016-...
  - masklinn 6y ago
    > Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent. By "military nuclear" what is meant is mostly "nuclear arsenal". Hence the peace part of Greenpeace.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    I don't think the military angle plays a big role in the British case. Hinkley C uses mostly foreign technologies and expertise, not domestic one. There were even talks about building a plant using Chinese technologies! Also submarine and power plant reactors are two very different beasts, so building the latter does not help much with maintaining expertise for the former. Plus Britain is quite dependent on the US help to maintain its nuclear capabilities. But I think it's true for Russia, maintaining full nuclear cycle does help with supporting its military nuclear capabilities. Thus the substantial political support which the industry gets there. For example the floating plant [0] is based on reactors used in icebreakers, which in turn have roots in submarine reactors. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
amelius 6y ago
> They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative Use less energy?
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  The OP asked for reasonable alternatives. Using less energy, at least on a scale that actually matters, is just never going to happen. Sure, we can - and should - be striving towards energy efficiency, but without regressing a hundred years or so as a society a meaningful reduction in energy usage is impossible.
ck425 6y ago
The part everyone forgets is that there have been plenty of other power plan disasters far worse than Chernobyl and most of them were Hydropower. Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.
- luibelgo 6y ago
  Chernobyl won't be habitable in the next 20.000 years. I doubt there's a hydropower disaster comparable to that.
  - Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
    The way things are going, large part of the planet (say, latitudes -30...30) won't be habitable in the next XX years
    - drran 6y ago
      Nuclear can cover the gap at poles. Anyway, nuclear power GENERATES heat and electricity, so it increases global temperature, while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature.
      - Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
        > while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature Do you know why solar panels looks dark, almost black? Because they absorb as much solar as they can. IN real life if you cover surface with panels, albedo would decrease and system as a whole would absorb MORE solar energy. But part of absorbed energy would be converted to electricity and do some work. At the end it all would be heat, so on pure heat basis solar panels would increase temperature
        drran 6y ago
        Problem with solar panels is solvable: a special material to emit heat in a narrow infrared region, to which Earth atmosphere is transparent, is already invented in India. It will keep solar panels cool, which will increase their efficiency. Per watt price for this material is unknown for me.
hyper_reality 6y ago
Similar opinions are expressed by a number of Green political groups around the world, and I've also struggled to reconcile their commitment to slowing global climate change with their rejection of nuclear power. Ignoring the typical arguments against nuclear, I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. So nuclear places the focus of energy transformation in the wrong place, and allows governments to believe they are solving the problem when much larger investment in renewables is required. I'm not qualified enough in the area to agree or disagree with the implicit tradeoffs there, it's just the argument I've heard.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  It's not hard to understand their argument, if you make the attempt. More CO2 is avoided per unit of currency spent with renewables than with building nuclear plants.
- jabl 6y ago
  > I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. If we're taking climate change seriously, we need massive investment in clean electricity generation. There's place for both nuclear and renewables. Secondly, the goal is to reduce emissions. Increasing renewables (or nuclear for that matter) isn't the goal. What we need is a least-cost zero-carbon grid. If that happens to be 0% nuclear, fine. Just as fine as if that happens to be 100% nuclear. Most likely it'll be a combination (see e.g. work by Jenkins, Caldeira etc.). > Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. They aren't powered by wind or solar either, which are the renewable sources with, so far at least, the best potential. That's why there needs to be, together with a massive push to clean and expand the electric grid, a massive push to electrify transportation and heating.
- drilldrive 6y ago
  Here is an easier argument for the nuclear anti-support: Green parties across the globe are spouting Chinese propaganda to further China's hold on the energy market (since they own 99% of rare-earth metals + a good grip on otherwise "green" energy manufacturing).
yodelshady 6y ago
Greenpeace's real opposition is mainly that, since SMR's are related to submarine reactor designs, they're subsidising those same subs. Sort of like if you oppose beef by-products because you think a cow died for it. They're wrong - the cow died regardless, because of high-profit steak, and the submarines are funded regardless of whether we also get carbon-free power from it - but it's a valid argument. But yes, in northern latitudes - in winter we run fossil fuels, which create literally millions of tonnes of gaseous waste for ever tonne of solid nuclear waste, or we freeze and die. If you respond but what about [green magic], congratulations, you've not done the sums for winter in cold countries, and I'm not wasting time arguing with you. Go do them.
- hyper_reality 6y ago
  I don't think you can dismiss the beef/submarine by-products argument without further analysis. If the beef by-products are being sold by cow farmers for a profit, that makes slaughtering a cow more profitable for farmers. It could mean that more cows are farmed, the price of beef goes down, and therefore the demand goes up. It's only if beef by-products are relatively worthless that your argument is justified, and from a quick search that doesn't seem to be true at all - byproducts are worth 10-15% of the carcass [1]. Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies. [1] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-beef-byproducts-buoy-cattle-prices-9-122532 https://www.farmprogress.com/story-beef-byproducts-buoy-catt...
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies. it's still a silly position. pretty much any research in physics/engineering enables the military to create more efficient ways of killing people. should we stall all technological progress to starve the military?
  - jabl 6y ago
this_was_posted 6y ago
Personally I imagine biomass/fuel could be a very attractive option if executed properly (sustainably and locally sourced): * Where you grow the biomass you could create somewhat biodiverse piece of nature * Storage of biomass is cheap * Knowledge and machinery from regular fossil fuels can be (partially) reused * No waste that will need to be looked after for 1000s of years in fear of leakage/terrorism Unfortunately biomass seems to be looked at similarly as nuclear; just because it could be executed poorly the whole idea is written off..
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Biomass's effective power/area is too low.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  That was an initial thought of mine about a decade ago. The energy densities don't work out. At present rates of per-capita energy consumption, population, and rates of plant growth, there is either not enough primary productivity, or too large an environmental impact. Humans simply use immense amounts of energy. Other sources, lower per-capita usage, and/or fewer people, are the options. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/tag/biofuels/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/tag/biofuels/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1026391317686 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A102639131768... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_biofuel_breakthrough_less_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...
  - this_was_posted 6y ago
    Thank you for providing these links backing your claim, so far I haven't been able to disprove the numbers that have been used. I still feel like it could be made competitive somehow, I'll get back to shouting that biofuel is an option when I've found out how :)
    - 6y ago
tw04 6y ago
The thing that gets me is: even if hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW. I think what frustrates me more than anything are the people that just think/say: "well we have amazing scientists so we'll find a solution to the problem when it becomes an issue" - in response to global warming. And more often than not they're the people saying that scientists warning that global warming is going to be a catastrophe that may be impossible to stop are just overreacting. Green Peace kind of feels like its policy is being set by one of those folks...
- pfdietz 6y ago
  We can build hydrogen turbines and storage caverns (and renewables to make the hydrogen) much faster than we can make nuclear power plants. Electrolysers are being built at gigawatts/year rates now, and factories can be scaled up rapidly. The speed argument comes down strongly against new nuclear power plants.
- 7952 6y ago
  A global deployment of nuclear would still need a vast amount of engineering hours to complete. There may be room for optimisim, but that is also true of other technologies. And those other technologies are often simpler. It may well be easier to deploy battery farms with new technology than build an existing nuclear design.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW. If you look at the past ten years of the UK, we've hugely expanded our wind production, shut down and demolished almost all the coal plants, and ... failed to build a nuclear plant. Renewables are the technology that's ready. Nuclear is the technology that suffers huge time overruns.
pfdietz 6y ago
The Greenpeace guy's comments are devastatingly on the mark. This idea faces very serious headwinds, not because of naysayers or greens, but because it its own inherent inferiority, especially compared to where renewables and storage are likely to be by the time any of these could be online.
fsloth 6y ago
Agree. Given the push back green NGO:s and parties have directed towards nuclear energy around the globe it's as if they were funded by the coal industry.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
Is Greenpeace well regarded? As in, when they say things does it tend to influence policy? I thought they lost their credibility in at least the United States.
- wow_yes 6y ago
  They seem to have a lot of pull in the UK - they've had a lot of success in blocking the new Heathrow runway
jka 6y ago
It's possible that Greenpeace's quote is misinterpretable; it depends on the context it was taken from. "Greenpeace ... says if the government wants to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power." (emphasis mine) Perhaps they consider renewable energy to be existing -- that is, not new -- technology. Here is Greenpeace's renewable energy policy: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/renewable-energy/ https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/renewable-energy/
- vlovich123 6y ago
  No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs. We have data[1]. The only technology that displaces cole & natural gas power supplies is nuclear (& hydro technically but that's generally tapped out). To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions than Greenpeace & he's actually an expert on SMR and nuclear energy policy: > He says UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says. > He is sceptical[sic] that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out. > He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations. > Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready. > "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," says Prof Ramana. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_nuclear_power_is_hurting_the_environment https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...
  - jka 6y ago
    Thanks for the video reference - I'll check that out. > No, actually it's not. Sorry, not sure I follow - which part of my comment were you responding to here? > To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions Yep - there are some fairly blunt conclusions in a recently co-authored publication[1] of theirs regarding SMR prospects for the UK and elsewhere: "There is every likelihood that, as with the previous nuclear renaissance, SMRs will be still born with few reactors built. This will mean that public money will again have been wasted on nuclear technology, but, as previously, the main cost will be the opportunity costs of the options not pursued and properly funded because resources have been pre-empted by the nuclear sector." One perspective of many, but worth considering. [1] - https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub277-Attachment-2.pdf https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub2...
bnralt 6y ago
> let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it No one's using the SMR's that are proposed here either. They're hoping to get the first one online in 10 years. A lot of nuclear fans get excited about unproven future tech when it comes to nuclear and then dismiss non-nuclear alternatives for being unproven future tech.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  SMRs are used in Nuclear Subs are they not? What we are talking about here is using them for civilian power. The unproven bit is the use of factories to make Lego-like peices for the construction.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  No one should be inherently excited about SMRs for the technology alone. The excitement is it's a way to hack around political failure. - Renewable are great, but our current political economy just likes them because they don't require coordination and are marginally cheap. But when trying to do a completely renewable economy, those benefits dissipate when we need electricity storage or arbitrage/rationing on a huge scale, and that requires good good old coordination and politics again. - Regular nuclear power plants are great but the anglo-sphere can't do them for the same reasons they can't do subways. - Tiny nuclear power plants aren't intrinsically better at all, but perhaps can both have reneweable's ability to accommodate our shitty political economy, and maintain that ability all the way to 100% no fossil fuels for electricity. There's nothing great here, just a last ditch to throw technological band-aids on social issues.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    We are humans. You gotta work from that premise.
justin66 6y ago
> They have done good work in the past, but perhaps if they had backed nuclear a long time ago we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now? Yes, clearly our problems are due to the misapplication of Greenpeace's weighty, almost unfathomably formidable influence on public policy.
Meandering 6y ago
I'm not attempting to argue against the merit of hydrogen as a feature of the energy infrastructure....But, the only reason hydrogen is taking off, in a political sense, is because it's a transport mechanism. "Green" people like it because it can support renewable sources although it works just as well for fossil fuels. The potential of nuclear is locked between two well funded lobbies. Nuclear is extremely viable and I'm consistently disappointed with people's inability to recognize and invest in the necessary research for cleaner and safer plants. Or, those who succumb to an illusion that fusion will be ready and commercialized in the near future.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Hydrogen is taking off because, first, there's already a global demand for many megatons of the stuff each year, and second, because the cost per kWh (equivalent) of storage capacity for it is extremely low, compared to just about any other scaleable way to store excess electrical power.

Mrdarknezz 6y ago

Well they're not building an RBMK reactor so Chernobyl is not really relevant since they are totally different type of NPP

dTal 6y ago
In any case, an RBMK would still be very safe. They're well tested and we know not to do the thing that makes them explode. Additionally, you could just not skip the containment dome like the builders of Chernobyl did.
- pulse7 6y ago
  "we know not to do the thing that makes them explode" This is not the core problem. The core problem is that explosion can still happen - even if we "know not to do the thing that makes them explode". It can happen because of a natural disaster, because of war and because of other unpredictable reason. To avoid the possible explosion and consequences altogether it is better to not have them in the first place!
  - wrkronmiller 6y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the way to avoid an explosion: "don't pull the control rods all the way out" It would take a very specific kind of war or natural disaster to pull out the control rods from a nuclear reactor, methinks.
    - drran 6y ago
      Don't steer a civil plane into a tower, please, because the tower will collapse.
  - riquito 6y ago
    Any technology will have deaths, that's inevitable. Without advocating for one versus the other, we should consider what will be number of deaths/diseases/etc versus costs/climate impact/energy produced over the lifetime of a solution
- m-p-3 6y ago
  > we know not to do the thing that makes them explode. We collectively know a lot of thing, but as soon as you leave the opportunity to a human an accident will happen sooner or later. We know not to start heavy machinery while there is a maintenance technician inside it, but it still happens. This is why we have safety lockout systems, to avoid an accident even if we know better.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Which is why nuclear reactors in the west all have safety confinement domes.
- kayfox 6y ago
  The RBMK has a lot of issues that make it really unsuitable for further development: 1. Because of the size of the core, it develops uneven reactivity during operation and requires attention to be paid to this. 2. The measures put in place do not entirely eliminate the chance of a power excursion. 3. The cost of a suitable containment building would make RBMK more expensive than an equivalent VVER installation. Also as far as I can tell no such containment building has ever been designed. 4. No international agency or government would allow the construction of a new RBMK. Edit: to be clear, this is not only because of the safety issues, but also because of the nuclear weapon proliferation issues associated with the design. Overall, the cost savings of a RBMK depend on not having a large containment structure and the RBMK was on its way out as a design by time the Chernobyl accident happened. The large number of RBMKs under construction at the time was largely because of initiatives to increase the installed nuclear capacity in the Soviet Union during the mid 80s, existing RBMK sites would receive additional reactors and all but one of the new sites were to receive VVER reactors.

raverbashing 6y ago

Greenpeace is to the environment what Peta is to pets ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peta-taking-pets/ ) Smaller, safer, mass produced (and low start time) reactors is one way that fission power could make a comeback.

DrBazza 6y ago

If Greenpeace was full of scientists that understood nuclear power (not weapons), I'd take them seriously. Instead it's full of people that get their science from tabloid newspapers and facebook.

drran 6y ago
Greenpeace is full of scientists.
- cyphar 6y ago
  Greenpeace opposes GMOs under the pretense that they are unsafe for human consumption. They may have scientists on staff, but that doesn't make them immune to spreading unscientific opinions.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  The bulk of Greenpeace policy is driven by its membership, which is very much not full of scientists I'm afraid.

ThinkBeat 6y ago

Where does the US store highly radioactive waste from the nuclear plants?

CodeGlitch 6y ago
In managable containers that you can bury underground?
- bildung 6y ago
  Has the US actually decided on a permanent nuclear waste repository?
  - numpad0 6y ago
    Permanent means they can’t reuse it so
  - hoseja 6y ago
    They did but then Nevada had a NIMBY moment for a bit of uninhabited desert so they are back to square one.
virmundi 6y ago
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-do-with-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-... At one of 121 locations near our nuclear plants. We are not allowed to recycle the waste so it sits there waiting for transport.

Shivetya 6y ago

Well proliferation is a constant bogey man but sadly far too much politics is involved that seems to insure it occurs more often than not. Just that the world tolerates North Korea should be example enough that politicians would rather look the other way and hope nothing goes boom. That ten year lead time seems to be excessive for announcing at this time unless its more of a trial balloon - looking to gauge public and political reactions before sinking more money into it. Renewable combined with storage solutions cannot guarantee one hundred percent coverage and I doubt they ever will. However a well connected grid with wind and solar spread across the country as a whole can minimize some of the effects of weather.

ZeroGravitas 6y ago

There is a good alternative, and we are already using it. Solar PV and wind turbines are already the cheapest and greenest source of energy and are set to decrease in price more as they ramp up. They're already causing the closure of existing coal and nuclear plants for purely economic reasons. It sometimes feels like people with oddly strong opinions on nuclear power are posting from some alternate dimension where the only alternative is coal. Nuclear is cool tech, so are vertical wind turbines and wave powered generators and concentrated solar molten salt generators. But they're all more expensive than PV and turbines.

unwind 6y ago
Of course solar and wind are awesome, but they are dependent on external factors and thus not fully comparable. If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. Nuclear and fuel-burning power plants are not like that, and the difference matters. You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :)
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  There are (at least) 6 solutions for the sun not shining. In order of desirability. 1: A mix of renewables. Not solar or wind or hydro or geothermal, but a good mix. 2: A large grid. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere. 3: Over-provisioning. Size your installations for cloudy days and winds at 2km/h. Solar&wind are an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, so 1.5X - 3X over-provisioning is still a lot cheaper. 4: Indirect storage. If you're overprovisioned, then you will have lots of excess power, even more power than you can store in your batteries. (See 5). So use that power to hit several goals at once. For example, if you use it to produce methane, you can use that methane for carbon storage, use it to power peaker plants (see 6) or sell it for profit. 5: batteries 6: peaker plants. If 99.9% of your power is handled through 1-5, the emissions from the remaining 0.1% are negligible and can be offset with #4.
- audunw 6y ago
  > If there is no sun (or wind), you get no power. No wind or sun? What are we talking about here, an apocalypse? I know you're exagerating, but sun AND wind tend to balance each other out. If there's a freak occurence where there's "none" of either for several days.. well running some gas power plants once in a while is a drop in the bucket when it comes to CO2, and at such a small scale you could probably create the fuel renewably (biogas or synthetic gas from electricity+H2+CO2). I think finding a way to reuse the gas power plants we have already built in a CO2-neutral way will be a big key to solving the climate crisis quickly enough. > You either need to specify an an energy storage solution on a scale large enough to handle when there is no sun, And/or just integrate the continent with more HVDC lines. Germanys main problem now is getting power from the windy north to the industrial south. But if they manage to construct some HVDC lines they should be able to get pretty close to 100% renewable. They could restart the nuclear industry too, but I don't see how that's an easier problem than building HVDC lines. Getting more off-shore wind should also help, since the wind is more stable there. And why just "AN" energy storage solutions? There are dozens of different ones being constructed commercially right now, and they each have their strong sides. Li-ion is better for fast frequency regulation, flow batteries for medium term storage, and pumped hydro, and possibly compressed or liquified air for long term. > or expect us poor folks in the Nordics (for instance) to just migrate to the south. :) If you mean the Scandinavian region, there's already two solutions that are working great: exchanging power with Norway (where you got tons of hydropower to smooth out long term energy fluctuations) and trash burning power plants (which also supplies heat to nearby homes and businesses). We don't need to move south, we just need everyone in the south to send us all their trash for us to burn during the winter ;) If we can move more plastics over to bioplastics, then it could even end up being renewable. Yeah, we should recycle/reuse as much as possible, but there will always be a huge stream of material that's just too mixed up or recycled too many times. And finally there's deep hydrothermal. It has most of the benefits of nuclear, at possibly a similar cost if we scale it up. The great thing is we can re-use a LOT of expertise from the oil and gas sector, which I think will be important for scaling it up quick and to gain political support from worker in that field. I'm not against nuclear, we should definitely use the expertise we already have to keep developing and building reactors. But I'm not convinced about a large scale global bet on it, and I don't think it's as essential to solving the climate crisis as some would have us believe.

masklinn 6y ago

> Greenpeace's comment is pretty disappointing. But completely unsurprising. Greenpeace pivoted from an anti-military nuclear to an anti-civilian nuclear stance to try and remain relevant, they've been a negative force in the world ever since. They've been raising awareness about AGW while actively fighting one of the best tools to mitigate it for more than 30 years.

gmac 6y ago
Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent. See, for example, the UK government's otherwise incomprehensible willingness to pay extraordinary sums for new nuclear capacity such as Hinkley C[1]: "it is difficult fully to comprehend the persistent intensity of official UK attachments to nuclear power, without also considering aims to maintain nuclear submarine capabilities". [2] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c... [2] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2016-16-swps-cox-et-al.pdf&site=25 https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=2016-...
- masklinn 6y ago
  > Don't mention nuclear on HN if you value your karma ... but in the UK, at least, civilian and military nuclear have never really been independent. By "military nuclear" what is meant is mostly "nuclear arsenal". Hence the peace part of Greenpeace.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  I don't think the military angle plays a big role in the British case. Hinkley C uses mostly foreign technologies and expertise, not domestic one. There were even talks about building a plant using Chinese technologies! Also submarine and power plant reactors are two very different beasts, so building the latter does not help much with maintaining expertise for the former. Plus Britain is quite dependent on the US help to maintain its nuclear capabilities. But I think it's true for Russia, maintaining full nuclear cycle does help with supporting its military nuclear capabilities. Thus the substantial political support which the industry gets there. For example the floating plant [0] is based on reactors used in icebreakers, which in turn have roots in submarine reactors. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...

amelius 6y ago

> They refuse to back nuclear without offering any reasonable alternative Use less energy?

M2Ys4U 6y ago
The OP asked for reasonable alternatives. Using less energy, at least on a scale that actually matters, is just never going to happen. Sure, we can - and should - be striving towards energy efficiency, but without regressing a hundred years or so as a society a meaningful reduction in energy usage is impossible.

ck425 6y ago

The part everyone forgets is that there have been plenty of other power plan disasters far worse than Chernobyl and most of them were Hydropower. Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.

luibelgo 6y ago
Chernobyl won't be habitable in the next 20.000 years. I doubt there's a hydropower disaster comparable to that.
- Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
  The way things are going, large part of the planet (say, latitudes -30...30) won't be habitable in the next XX years
  - drran 6y ago
    Nuclear can cover the gap at poles. Anyway, nuclear power GENERATES heat and electricity, so it increases global temperature, while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature.
    - Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
      > while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature Do you know why solar panels looks dark, almost black? Because they absorb as much solar as they can. IN real life if you cover surface with panels, albedo would decrease and system as a whole would absorb MORE solar energy. But part of absorbed energy would be converted to electricity and do some work. At the end it all would be heat, so on pure heat basis solar panels would increase temperature
      - drran 6y ago
        Problem with solar panels is solvable: a special material to emit heat in a narrow infrared region, to which Earth atmosphere is transparent, is already invented in India. It will keep solar panels cool, which will increase their efficiency. Per watt price for this material is unknown for me.

hyper_reality 6y ago

Similar opinions are expressed by a number of Green political groups around the world, and I've also struggled to reconcile their commitment to slowing global climate change with their rejection of nuclear power. Ignoring the typical arguments against nuclear, I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. So nuclear places the focus of energy transformation in the wrong place, and allows governments to believe they are solving the problem when much larger investment in renewables is required. I'm not qualified enough in the area to agree or disagree with the implicit tradeoffs there, it's just the argument I've heard.

pfdietz 6y ago
It's not hard to understand their argument, if you make the attempt. More CO2 is avoided per unit of currency spent with renewables than with building nuclear plants.
jabl 6y ago
> I think a main point from them specifically is that investment in energy is zero-sum, and state resources directed towards nuclear energy are resources not going towards renewable energies. If we're taking climate change seriously, we need massive investment in clean electricity generation. There's place for both nuclear and renewables. Secondly, the goal is to reduce emissions. Increasing renewables (or nuclear for that matter) isn't the goal. What we need is a least-cost zero-carbon grid. If that happens to be 0% nuclear, fine. Just as fine as if that happens to be 100% nuclear. Most likely it'll be a combination (see e.g. work by Jenkins, Caldeira etc.). > Furthermore, heating and transport make up a large proportion of carbon emissions, and these generally aren't powered by nuclear energy. They aren't powered by wind or solar either, which are the renewable sources with, so far at least, the best potential. That's why there needs to be, together with a massive push to clean and expand the electric grid, a massive push to electrify transportation and heating.
drilldrive 6y ago
Here is an easier argument for the nuclear anti-support: Green parties across the globe are spouting Chinese propaganda to further China's hold on the energy market (since they own 99% of rare-earth metals + a good grip on otherwise "green" energy manufacturing).

yodelshady 6y ago

Greenpeace's real opposition is mainly that, since SMR's are related to submarine reactor designs, they're subsidising those same subs. Sort of like if you oppose beef by-products because you think a cow died for it. They're wrong - the cow died regardless, because of high-profit steak, and the submarines are funded regardless of whether we also get carbon-free power from it - but it's a valid argument. But yes, in northern latitudes - in winter we run fossil fuels, which create literally millions of tonnes of gaseous waste for ever tonne of solid nuclear waste, or we freeze and die. If you respond but what about [green magic], congratulations, you've not done the sums for winter in cold countries, and I'm not wasting time arguing with you. Go do them.

hyper_reality 6y ago
I don't think you can dismiss the beef/submarine by-products argument without further analysis. If the beef by-products are being sold by cow farmers for a profit, that makes slaughtering a cow more profitable for farmers. It could mean that more cows are farmed, the price of beef goes down, and therefore the demand goes up. It's only if beef by-products are relatively worthless that your argument is justified, and from a quick search that doesn't seem to be true at all - byproducts are worth 10-15% of the carcass [1]. Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies. [1] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-beef-byproducts-buoy-cattle-prices-9-122532 https://www.farmprogress.com/story-beef-byproducts-buoy-catt...
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > Similarly, if commissioning new nuclear submarines is cheaper because the SMR research has already been done, then defence procurers can make a stronger case to buy more of them as opposed to other military technologies. it's still a silly position. pretty much any research in physics/engineering enables the military to create more efficient ways of killing people. should we stall all technological progress to starve the military?
- jabl 6y ago

this_was_posted 6y ago

Personally I imagine biomass/fuel could be a very attractive option if executed properly (sustainably and locally sourced): * Where you grow the biomass you could create somewhat biodiverse piece of nature * Storage of biomass is cheap * Knowledge and machinery from regular fossil fuels can be (partially) reused * No waste that will need to be looked after for 1000s of years in fear of leakage/terrorism Unfortunately biomass seems to be looked at similarly as nuclear; just because it could be executed poorly the whole idea is written off..

pfdietz 6y ago
Biomass's effective power/area is too low.
dredmorbius 6y ago
That was an initial thought of mine about a decade ago. The energy densities don't work out. At present rates of per-capita energy consumption, population, and rates of plant growth, there is either not enough primary productivity, or too large an environmental impact. Humans simply use immense amounts of energy. Other sources, lower per-capita usage, and/or fewer people, are the options. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/tag/biofuels/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/tag/biofuels/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1026391317686 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A102639131768... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_biofuel_breakthrough_less_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings...
- this_was_posted 6y ago
  Thank you for providing these links backing your claim, so far I haven't been able to disprove the numbers that have been used. I still feel like it could be made competitive somehow, I'll get back to shouting that biofuel is an option when I've found out how :)
  - 6y ago

tw04 6y ago

The thing that gets me is: even if hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW. I think what frustrates me more than anything are the people that just think/say: "well we have amazing scientists so we'll find a solution to the problem when it becomes an issue" - in response to global warming. And more often than not they're the people saying that scientists warning that global warming is going to be a catastrophe that may be impossible to stop are just overreacting. Green Peace kind of feels like its policy is being set by one of those folks...

pfdietz 6y ago
We can build hydrogen turbines and storage caverns (and renewables to make the hydrogen) much faster than we can make nuclear power plants. Electrolysers are being built at gigawatts/year rates now, and factories can be scaled up rapidly. The speed argument comes down strongly against new nuclear power plants.
7952 6y ago
A global deployment of nuclear would still need a vast amount of engineering hours to complete. There may be room for optimisim, but that is also true of other technologies. And those other technologies are often simpler. It may well be easier to deploy battery farms with new technology than build an existing nuclear design.
pjc50 6y ago
> hydrogen and turbines can solve the issue, it's still years and years and years out and may or may not end up being good enough. We've got nuclear as an option RIGHT NOW for a problem we have to solve RIGHT NOW. If you look at the past ten years of the UK, we've hugely expanded our wind production, shut down and demolished almost all the coal plants, and ... failed to build a nuclear plant. Renewables are the technology that's ready. Nuclear is the technology that suffers huge time overruns.

pfdietz 6y ago

The Greenpeace guy's comments are devastatingly on the mark. This idea faces very serious headwinds, not because of naysayers or greens, but because it its own inherent inferiority, especially compared to where renewables and storage are likely to be by the time any of these could be online.

fsloth 6y ago

Agree. Given the push back green NGO:s and parties have directed towards nuclear energy around the globe it's as if they were funded by the coal industry.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

Is Greenpeace well regarded? As in, when they say things does it tend to influence policy? I thought they lost their credibility in at least the United States.

wow_yes 6y ago
They seem to have a lot of pull in the UK - they've had a lot of success in blocking the new Heathrow runway

jka 6y ago

It's possible that Greenpeace's quote is misinterpretable; it depends on the context it was taken from. "Greenpeace ... says if the government wants to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power." (emphasis mine) Perhaps they consider renewable energy to be existing -- that is, not new -- technology. Here is Greenpeace's renewable energy policy: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/renewable-energy/ https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/renewable-energy/

vlovich123 6y ago
No, actually it's not. None of these can satisfy the energy needs. We have data[1]. The only technology that displaces cole & natural gas power supplies is nuclear (& hydro technically but that's generally tapped out). To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions than Greenpeace & he's actually an expert on SMR and nuclear energy policy: > He says UK SMR's 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says. > He is sceptical[sic] that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out. > He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere - in the US and China, for example - there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations. > Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready. > "Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," says Prof Ramana. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_nuclear_power_is_hurting_the_environment https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_...
- jka 6y ago
  Thanks for the video reference - I'll check that out. > No, actually it's not. Sorry, not sure I follow - which part of my comment were you responding to here? > To me, Professor MV Ramana in the article raises far more valuable concerns/questions Yep - there are some fairly blunt conclusions in a recently co-authored publication[1] of theirs regarding SMR prospects for the UK and elsewhere: "There is every likelihood that, as with the previous nuclear renaissance, SMRs will be still born with few reactors built. This will mean that public money will again have been wasted on nuclear technology, but, as previously, the main cost will be the opportunity costs of the options not pursued and properly funded because resources have been pre-empted by the nuclear sector." One perspective of many, but worth considering. [1] - https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub277-Attachment-2.pdf https://sppga.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/09/sub2...

bnralt 6y ago

> let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it No one's using the SMR's that are proposed here either. They're hoping to get the first one online in 10 years. A lot of nuclear fans get excited about unproven future tech when it comes to nuclear and then dismiss non-nuclear alternatives for being unproven future tech.

CodeGlitch 6y ago
SMRs are used in Nuclear Subs are they not? What we are talking about here is using them for civilian power. The unproven bit is the use of factories to make Lego-like peices for the construction.
Ericson2314 6y ago
No one should be inherently excited about SMRs for the technology alone. The excitement is it's a way to hack around political failure. - Renewable are great, but our current political economy just likes them because they don't require coordination and are marginally cheap. But when trying to do a completely renewable economy, those benefits dissipate when we need electricity storage or arbitrage/rationing on a huge scale, and that requires good good old coordination and politics again. - Regular nuclear power plants are great but the anglo-sphere can't do them for the same reasons they can't do subways. - Tiny nuclear power plants aren't intrinsically better at all, but perhaps can both have reneweable's ability to accommodate our shitty political economy, and maintain that ability all the way to 100% no fossil fuels for electricity. There's nothing great here, just a last ditch to throw technological band-aids on social issues.
- jacobush 6y ago
  We are humans. You gotta work from that premise.

justin66 6y ago

> They have done good work in the past, but perhaps if they had backed nuclear a long time ago we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now? Yes, clearly our problems are due to the misapplication of Greenpeace's weighty, almost unfathomably formidable influence on public policy.

Meandering 6y ago

I'm not attempting to argue against the merit of hydrogen as a feature of the energy infrastructure....But, the only reason hydrogen is taking off, in a political sense, is because it's a transport mechanism. "Green" people like it because it can support renewable sources although it works just as well for fossil fuels. The potential of nuclear is locked between two well funded lobbies. Nuclear is extremely viable and I'm consistently disappointed with people's inability to recognize and invest in the necessary research for cleaner and safer plants. Or, those who succumb to an illusion that fusion will be ready and commercialized in the near future.

pfdietz 6y ago
Hydrogen is taking off because, first, there's already a global demand for many megatons of the stuff each year, and second, because the cost per kWh (equivalent) of storage capacity for it is extremely low, compared to just about any other scaleable way to store excess electrical power.