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I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin. So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IM
by cletus 6y ago
I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin.
So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with:
- Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
- Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
- Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
- The failure modes are awful; and
- Dealing with the waste.
Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far seems to have been far more of a political statement than an economic choice.
As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet convinced there will be.
Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains the "mess".
Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare (for us here on Earth).
I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option. I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles, no weather, no atmospheric interference).
- christiansakai 6y agoWhen we get that solar panels in orbit, how do we transfer the energy back to Earth?
- thinkcontext 6y agoLasers or microwaves are the current candidates.
- isaacg 6y agoHere's an article from the Department of Energy that outlines a few options: https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power Microwaves and lasers are the two options they describe.
- willis936 6y agoThat's a lot of cooked goose. In all seriousness, that is a pretty terrifying industrial project. I'm not sure how you'd make the failsafes strong enough to match the risk of cooking thousands of people alive.
- gameman144 6y agoMoreover, how to keep that from being intentionally weaponized, assuming that it is strong enough to cook people alive.
- Terr_ 6y agoI imagine a large solar power-sat in orbit could be easily crippled by missiles launched from outside its aim-zone, or even well-aimed orbital debris being slung around. I'd worry more about such an installation being hacked/sabotaged by someone who doesn't care if the billions-of-dollars investment gets turned into confetti within a few hours.
- willis936 6y agoThis is why software is kept out of control systems whenever possible. “They hacked the web interface that tells me how much power the diagnostic thinks is being generated so now it doesn’t agree with the receiver” isn’t as scary as “they redirected the death ray to a nearby city”.
- isaacg 6y agoThat's why the microwaves approach might be preferable to the laser approach: "Safe, low intensity levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn’t notice much of anything flying across their paths."
- _Microft 6y agoI guess we do not. The only things one might want to export from space to Earth are things that absolutely cannot be made on Earth. Everything else would almost certainly be produced cheaper on Earth.
- cletus 6y agoAs other commenters note, there are methods of getting power down from orbit and I understand them to be viable, at least in theory. But my point was primarily as a means of producing energy for industries and people that are stationed off Earth. For a space habitat, solar is just ridiculously good compared to the alternatives.
- technocratius 6y agoCreative ideas and all, but we're already struggling to build, transport and store enough solar energy down here on earth. I'm guessing that in the timeframe this needs to deliver the cc mitigating benefits, this might be less feasible...
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- arrosenberg 6y agoIt seems like it would be easier and substantially cheaper to take existing fracking/drilling tech and go for deep-well geothermal, rather than trying to launch a Dyson swarm.
- m4rtink 6y agoWhy not both ? :) Also you don't necessarily need to dismantle all planets during Dyson swarm construction- you can keep a few as a historical curiosity. Sure, it's horribly inefficiency use of mass but still. :)
- tolbish 6y agoThe argument against fusion is that containment vessels aren't there yet. So this becomes a debate on the speed of containments vessel research.
- Hammershaft 6y agoI've had this argument so many times in that last month... renewables outside of hydro are just not viable as baseline power until batteries improve cost and density by several orders of magnitudes. Nuclear fission is really the only choice we have right now. We can't avoid climate change by relying on technologies like fusion power & next gen batteries that haven't even been invented yet, let alone mass manufactured.
- hntrader 6y agoMaybe you should write an article about that, and put it up on HN, given that it's such a common point of contention/misunderstanding.
- Hammershaft 6y agoThere are people more knowledgeable then me who have made these points better than I could, I'd recommend Vaclav Smil as a great source on this. The problem is that his material makes for grim reading, and I think many people researching this subject are drawn to techno optimism even when the numbers don't add up because the subject as a whole is so grim.
- samvher 6y agoDo you have specific recommendations among his writings?
- Hammershaft 6y agohttp://vaclavsmil.com/2017/05/08/energy-and-civilization-a-history/ http://vaclavsmil.com/2017/05/08/energy-and-civilization-a-h... I also recommend looking through his list of books on the sidebar.
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- graeme 6y agoThe waste argument should be made in comparison to the alternative baseload option: carbon. Carbon waste is worse than nuclear waste, yet is given a free pass because it floats and we can’t touch it or see it. But it is very real.
- AstralStorm 6y agoEven the visible carbon ash is stored, toxic and radioactive too. You don't want that contaminating water supplies either.
- moistbar 6y agoThe nuclear waste argument is a purely American one. European countries (France specifically) have a multi-reactor chain where each successive step uses the "waste" from the last step. While this doesn't eliminate the need for long-term storage completely, it does reduce the potency of the leftovers since they're not being discarded after using ~3% of their total stored energy (a la the US). Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid. Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
- ben_w 6y ago> foremost of which is the ability for each household to have its own source of electricity independent of a power grid. While I’m all in favour of each home (or apartment block) being energy independent, I very much do not want widespread access to even RTG material. Consider: average power use is about 1 kW, 1000 J/s, and that the “dead in 1-2 days with treatment” radiation absorbed dose is merely 30 J/kg, so any domestic power supply is capable of killing an adult in 2-3 seconds of full exposure… or, more likely, a tiny flake imbibed or inhaled due to either malice or incompetence would have the same effect during one night of sleep. > Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as useful as if nothing were there at all. I’m definitely against beamed power, at least until we get a single planetary government. Anything which beams with a higher power flux than sunlight is a potential weapon. Anything which isn’t, requires so much more land than PV that it’s always better to use PV even when you have to put the PV in your nearest desert and beam it to you from there using whatever future tech you’re thinking of to get from orbit. (I assume one world government would mean that government could authorise itself to build a weapon pointed at itself without having to worry it might be secretly planning to shoot itself; I don’t see how either the USA or Russia could ever trust the other if either built one).
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- andbberger 6y agoOk a lot of nonsense here but just to address one egregious point: There is no waste problem, stop spreading misinformation [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- FooHentai 6y agoThe finns building a long-term storage site for waste produced domestically does not equate to their being no global issue with long-term nuclear waste sequestration. There absolutely is. The only site in the entire world currently intaking waste is WIPP, and it's been dogged by problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant The only two other sites that have ever actively taken in waste, Gorleben and Morsleben in Germany, are now closed and both have severe site stability issues requiring ongoing remediation into the billions of euros to ensure the sites don't fail.
- andbberger 6y agoThis project has definitively proved that it's a political problem and not a technical one. The solution is to build a deep unmarked hole and bury it, duh. I think it's not that controversial of a statement to say that the main problem with nuclear energy in general is political. As evidenced by the fact that this thread exists and full of people who are trying really hard to find problems with our only extant technology for carbon-free large-scale energy production. And that we keep shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants. There's just no basis on fact here. Meanwhile, the water is lapping at our feet.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoLFTR addresses almost all of those issues that you cite. Those are "old nuclear". Proliferation (doesn't make weapons isotopes as part of its fuel cycle), 99% fuel use and breeding (even can use old "spent fuel"), low/zero meltdown risk with a simple plug that melts and liquid fuel, scalable, startable/stoppable quickly. But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research) until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
- fsflover 6y ago>It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases kill less people than coal done well.
- tinco 6y agoThese arguments are all moot. Even assuming that humans can't be trusted with each of these points, then still you are exchanging hypothetical lives and hypothetical damage to the environment for real lives and real damage to the environment. Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually? We are destroying our environment right now. It's ridiculous we're even still having these conversations. It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
- cletus 6y agoNuclear dangers and issues aren’t theoretical. The Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles.
- robertlagrant 6y agoThe dangers of flying aren't theoretical either. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing 7 years later.
- cletus 6y agoYes and the fatal accident rate for commercial airlines, based on some quick googling, is 0.27 incidents per million flights. We’ve had at least 3 nuclear disasters (Chernobyl, Fukushima and There Mile Island) and Google suggests there are 440 reactors in the world (current; so add a few more for decommissioned).
- robertlagrant 6y agoSo what's the point in absolute statements like "the dangers aren't theoretical". So what if they aren't? Everything is about tradeoffs, and the collective decision to keep coal, with all its attendant problems, is a worse tradeoff.
- tinco 6y agoOf those, only Chernobyl can be reasonably compared to the loss of life of an airline crash. Three Mile Island wasn't even a disaster, except for the wallets of the investors. Working at Fukushima for 40 years was safer than your average construction job, even if you worked during the disaster. And if you have to unfairly compare nuclear safety to airliners, also consider that airliner disasters have become 40 times less frequent than they were when Chernobyl happened.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago> I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power or Bitcoin. ...and every time there's the same litany of poorly researched talking points repeated ad infinitum. Almost nobody ever points out the systemic risks of highly centralized power plants in case of war or civil war or terrorism.