13 ms·

I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by de

I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?" For example, in 2019, 80% of US energy consumption was from fossil fuels.[1] Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share.[2] In any objective discussion, this should be considered a massive shortcoming and people should be scrambling to find a better solution. However, because fossil fuels only compete against themselves in public discourse, it's still considered a victory because gas replaced coal. And one of the reason gas became so popular? Because renewables are rapidly improving but they're still less reliable, so people need an energy source they can rapidly fire up when necessary. Enter gas. And when people point out that we could be using nuclear instead of gas, they are shut down saying "Ewww, so it's better than fossil fuels, big deal, who cares about that now? Everybody knows fossil fuels are bad!" Nuclear, just by being non-fossil-fuel, is forced to compete in the "cool arena" against renewables, and loses out because it's old, expensive, and has had a series of memorable accidents. All the while these renewable plants are enjoying complementary relationship with gas plants, which is OK, because gas is just gas. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/media/File:History_of_energy_consumption_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

legulere 6y ago
Germany had 46% renewables and 10% gas for electricity production in 2019. The United States have 40% of electricity production from gas. Renewables have nothing to do with the high use of gas in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
- fuoqi 6y ago
  Don't forget that Germany is part of the same grid or have HVDC links with other European countries such as France (70% nuclear power), Norway (near 100% hydro, not only generation but also storage), and Poland (72% coal), so you you should not take Germany in isolation in such discussions.
  - lispm 6y ago
    The majority of electricity is not imported. Germany is a net exporter of electricity.
    - fuoqi 6y ago
      The point is: they can rely on their neighbors as a kind of safety net for times when renewables output is not sufficient. And the Norway hydro-storage potential also plays a huge role here, it allows Germany to have less domestic storage and gas peak plants, thus preventing the electricity cost from soaring even higher (which is already the highest in the EU).
      - lispm 6y ago
        Right, that's also the plan. There is also a grid in the North Sea which will be extended, to exchange electricity from the offshore wind production. There will be more lines to Norway. Germany will have their own storage systems in the North, etc.
- Aachen 6y ago
  That's great but there's 84% to go after you have 100% renewable electricity production. At 50% green electricity, that means 92% of energy consumption was generated from fossil fuels on demand. We (I live in Germany) have more than 92% of the road ahead of us, since we will need to expend more and more effort to find suitable places for all this energy production and storage. There is no storage to speak of at the moment, which makes sense because Germany isn't even getting close to having a significant portion of its energy generated without emitting carbon. If we could take a shortcut and generate some 10% with a small amount of land use and variability, that would be a huge win. Cost and the time needed to build are downsides, but from my perspective unavoidable. This will not happen in the next ~2-3 generations (say, a century) because of the ridiculous amount of misinformation about safety being spread in Germany, but other countries don't have that issue so there's still hope to cut corners elsewhere. At best, this is a stop-gap solution, I really don't care if people want to phase out nuclear fission. But then let's do that after we approach 90% renewable energy, not when we approach 90% fossil fuels as Germany currently is doing. We have bigger problems and can't afford to be so picky.
threatripper 6y ago
> we could be using nuclear instead of gas Nuclear power plants are best run at full capacity all the time. If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers. If you have that capacity then you could as well run them at full power all the time and you'd need nothing else. Nuclear displaces every other power source. Currently Nuclear is factored into the base load because that's the easiest one to produce and we don't have enough nuclear power anyways. Gas on the other hand is the cheapest one to provide power on demand. Therefore if you have limited production capacity the demand for gas plants that are mostly on standby will only go up.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Gas plants are also best run all the time in advanced combined cycle plants. Nuclear often in the US already has backing of very large pumped hydro storage facilities. So no, you don’t need enough nuclear to replace all peakers.
- roenxi 6y ago
  Ignoring the economics for a second, the persepctive in play when someone says "replace gas with nuclear" should be: 1) If solar is deployed, gas/batteries/something has to be deployed as well to deal with nighttime. 2) So the 'replacement' of nuclear is steady power that replaces some solar panels, some gas for a net improvement, technically speaking. Of course, the main argument against that is whether the economics plays out. I find it humorous that I'm taking the side of technical excellence and the pro-solar people are saying "who cares, lets just follow the economics". There was a decade where those positions were mostly reversed when it was coal v solar.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Also solar is made primarily in China. It's cheap currently but when the inevitable cold war happens with China and the USA those solar panels may not be nearly as cheap or reliably sourced. Sure we can make our own but it would take a decade or more to ramp up.
- 6y ago
Lammy 6y ago
> Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share. Strangely even some environmental groups seem to be pro-gas or at least ambivalent, like how Sierra Club's "whoops, we got caught" response to taking millions of dollars from the oil companies waxes poetic about the need to "look beyond coal, oil, and gas, and focus on clean, efficient energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal" but doesn't mention the word "nuclear" anywhere at all: https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sierra-club-and-natural-gas.html https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sier... I'd expect them to proudly mention nuclear in the past tense considering Sierra Club successfully killed the nuclear generating station that would have supplied me here in the Bay Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- rob74 6y ago
  To be fair, I don't think the Sierra Club are the only ones who think building a nuclear power plant two miles from the San Andreas Fault isn't a particularly good idea...
  - Lammy 6y ago
    The possibility of seismic activity isn't automatically dangerous. I feel confident that if we can engineer skyscrapers to withstand shaking that we can engineer an isolated reactor vessel too, and a reactor shutdown only takes three seconds: https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-reactor-trip-and-how-does-it-protect-the-plant/ https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea...
aksss 6y ago
> one of the reason gas became so popular? It got cheap and transportable. Gas is hard to transport until liquified, and having that process makes all the difference. Also, fracking - the reason the US has achieved energy independence, and that gas is so cheap.
wiz21c 6y ago
> series of memorable accidents well to me, oil spills are just a as memorable and way more frequent...
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  We don't run many power plants on oil.
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    Yes you're right, it's only for chemistry which brings its own trouble too (where were those little plastic particles last time I checked ? in my own body :-)). Oh and cars also... (just making fun of you a bit, your point is good anyway)
- wmiel 6y ago
  There are victims of coal / natural gas pollution and climate change as well, it's just not that spectacular. Nuclear kills when there's unlikely accident, fossil fuels kill when everything goes according to the plan.
xwolfi 6y ago
In France, where nuclear is 80% of the electricity (we really played big the game of "oh but we care about nuclear tech for civilian use only" while irradiating Tahiti for military testings). I like nuclear myself: it's a military technology so the more we know as a country the more we'll be able to sell around as consultants, it's much cleaner for the atmosphere when it works (but yeah failures are horrifying), there is hope the waste materials will one day be reused, and it can be switched on or off more easily than solar (at night) or wind (at rest). But I heard it's very very VERY expensive and barely profitable on output gain alone (but VERY profitable as a military lab I suppose to have all those nuclear tech people), it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks that at least in 200 years we won't all be dead due to fossil fuel abuse, and it's hard to convince a younger, less objective part of the population who jump at "not renewable = not good". If with 1Kg of antimatter we could generate 200 years of Paris light, maybe we don't care if it's renewable. In fact, renewable just means "very very very long lasting" since the sun is dying and the earth is slowing down anyway :D
- realusername 6y ago
  You're living in the 70s, modern plants cannot be repurposed for military use and also have no physical way to blow up.
  - bildung 6y ago
    Well the French plants are from the 70s.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    That does not change the fact that the French plants were built in part for plutonium production, in the 1970s.
- DharmaPolice 6y ago
  >it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks Is that actually happening?
7952 6y ago
These discussion are always unfair against every power source. Each has different properties that make naïve comparison difficult. In the real world power stations have to exist within an economic, political, and technical ecosystem. If a particular approach is delivering value then the argument is rather mute.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Nuclear power is just unpopular because politicians can’t make money out of it. Due to its inherent risk, nuclear power plants require close government inspection which makes it a bit harder to cheat.
- addicted 6y ago
  Nuclear only survives when politicians go out of their way to push it. Nuclear is unpopular because it competes for the same pool of money as gas, oil, solar, wind, etc do and there is no, or a very narrow band, of investors whose priorities align with the benefits nuclear provides. They need to prioritize environmental friendliness enough to eliminate the fossil fuel options. Then they need to be willing to put in massive sums of money in one shot, without seeing any returns for many years, to even beginning to choose nuclear, and then they need to find a reason why they would pick nuclear over solar/wind in a world which is over 80% fossil fuel so baseload electricity is not even close to being a concern. And if their particular region has baseload energy concerns, they need to choose the long term option of nuclear over the quicker solar/wind + battery option which even if it is slightly more expensive isnt by much. The only places where nuclear has gone forward are areas where politicians have pushed for it despite it being more expensive than other renewable alternatives. Examples are in the UK, and even there the plants are delayed, and are gonna be more expensive than originally planned even when the original price was already more than competing renewables.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    It's true for classical nuclear reactors as far as I can tell. But in recent years there had been many advances wrt. other kinds of nuclear reactors which often promise less (or even much less) risc, upfront cost, start/stop times and generally smaller size. This kind of "small" nuclear reactors can have the potential to be in some cases the best choice. Anyway best would be of politician let this play out fairly by not pushing any specific technology but just pushing "climate-friendly" energy while punishing (separately) both "climate-unfriendly", "environmental-unfriendly" technology. (Nuclear is climate-friendly but environmental or better human unfriendly).
WoahNoun 6y ago
Modern gas turbines can be converted to hydrogen or hydrogen/gas blends. The idea is to use gas now then convert to hydrogen when commercial, renewable hydrogen is available. One idea is to use renewables to do hydrolysis and effectively use hydrogen as a battery. The US energy segment has decreased CO2 emissions in the last decade and switching from coal to gas is a big part of the reason.
- pydry 6y ago
  Fracking increased the release of methane at the same time, which is a much more potent contributor to global warming. The switch to natural gas reduced CO2 output but made global warming worse at the same time. It's quite an achievement.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Hydrogen isn't an energy source it's an energy storage mechanism. You create hydrogen from other sources. Most commercially available hydrogen comes from natural gas already. So you're wasting a ton of energy by converting the natural gas to hydrogen and then burning it again. Hydrogen is just another form of battery.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    If you convert natural gas to hydrogen, you can sequester the CO2 produced. The hydrogen production facility can operate 24/7, with the hydrogen stored and only being used when necessary. In this way, natural gas could continue to back up renewables (or back up renewables + short term storage) without CO2 emission, at a capital cost per kW far below nuclear plants. (The same argument applies to "green hydrogen"; which would be chosen would depend on economics.)
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Pet peeve: hydrolysis a chemical reaction where water is used to break apart two other things (like, say, amino acids). The use of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen is electrolysis.
macspoofing 6y ago
>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. One of the major reasons for that is that there is a misconception that renewables (solar and wind specifically) can actually replace fossil fuels. In other words, that we have better options than nuclear. We're going to lose a few decades before we realize that that won't work.
- baybal2 6y ago
  >I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. Very fairly. Nuclear will always be many times more expensive than equivalent power hydrocarbon powerplant. It's not because of any manufacturing intricacies, but largely from just the material cost. It's not possible to "science it out" how to make ultra reliable pressure vessels with less steel, and metalworking, and large industrial building with less cement. Nuclear reactors are fairly dumb industrial implements, basically very huge, and expensive water boilers. The biggest advantage of nuclear is very cheap fuel, and fuel logistics. Nuclear fuel is cheaper than even coal. The price of transporting coal also makes not a small part of its cost. 40-50 years, that advantage was what pushed nuclear power to prominence. Now, the cost of fuel, and its transport is not considered that significant, and nuclear lost this advantage. Costs of some fuels actually went down as extraction scaled up, and itself became cheaper. Transport costs also went down. Power plants got more efficient. To regain this advantage, nuclear plants need to produce many times more electricity, and heat for their cost. This is why I was always telling people that scale is what is the real problem for nuclear now. Four, and up to ten+ gigawatt reactors is what will make difference for nuclear.
  - 7952 6y ago
    Delivering 4GW in a single project would certainly set it apart. Perhaps the sweet spot for nuclear is not the traditional 1GW level. Although that would create a very large single point of failure that would need peakers/batteries/pumped hydro to backup on failure. An interesting project would be to stick a 5GW reactor in the middle of the North Sea and run export cables to all the surrounding countries. Build near an old oil well for hydrogen storage and include a thermal hydrogen generator.
konjin 6y ago
>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?" Not just that, every other power source is rated on only the damage it does when producing power. By comparison nuclear is held to the standard that everything from mining to decommission needs to be taken into account. By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. This is treated as a joke. Somehow we imagine that solar panels of the end of their 10 year life span just fall apart into pixie dust and ignore how environmentally damaging they really are. The average coal plant releases more nuclear waste in a near than the all but the three worst nuclear accidents. The list goes on an on.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. Utility scale solar, which is dominating because it's much cheaper, installs modules at ground level.
  - konjin 6y ago
    I hope one day we are as lackadaisical about deaths from home nuclear as home solar.

legulere 6y ago

Germany had 46% renewables and 10% gas for electricity production in 2019. The United States have 40% of electricity production from gas. Renewables have nothing to do with the high use of gas in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

fuoqi 6y ago
Don't forget that Germany is part of the same grid or have HVDC links with other European countries such as France (70% nuclear power), Norway (near 100% hydro, not only generation but also storage), and Poland (72% coal), so you you should not take Germany in isolation in such discussions.
- lispm 6y ago
  The majority of electricity is not imported. Germany is a net exporter of electricity.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    The point is: they can rely on their neighbors as a kind of safety net for times when renewables output is not sufficient. And the Norway hydro-storage potential also plays a huge role here, it allows Germany to have less domestic storage and gas peak plants, thus preventing the electricity cost from soaring even higher (which is already the highest in the EU).
    - lispm 6y ago
      Right, that's also the plan. There is also a grid in the North Sea which will be extended, to exchange electricity from the offshore wind production. There will be more lines to Norway. Germany will have their own storage systems in the North, etc.
Aachen 6y ago
That's great but there's 84% to go after you have 100% renewable electricity production. At 50% green electricity, that means 92% of energy consumption was generated from fossil fuels on demand. We (I live in Germany) have more than 92% of the road ahead of us, since we will need to expend more and more effort to find suitable places for all this energy production and storage. There is no storage to speak of at the moment, which makes sense because Germany isn't even getting close to having a significant portion of its energy generated without emitting carbon. If we could take a shortcut and generate some 10% with a small amount of land use and variability, that would be a huge win. Cost and the time needed to build are downsides, but from my perspective unavoidable. This will not happen in the next ~2-3 generations (say, a century) because of the ridiculous amount of misinformation about safety being spread in Germany, but other countries don't have that issue so there's still hope to cut corners elsewhere. At best, this is a stop-gap solution, I really don't care if people want to phase out nuclear fission. But then let's do that after we approach 90% renewable energy, not when we approach 90% fossil fuels as Germany currently is doing. We have bigger problems and can't afford to be so picky.

threatripper 6y ago

> we could be using nuclear instead of gas Nuclear power plants are best run at full capacity all the time. If you want to replace gas peaker plants with nuclear then you need to build up enough nuclear capacity to replace all other intermittent electricity producers. If you have that capacity then you could as well run them at full power all the time and you'd need nothing else. Nuclear displaces every other power source. Currently Nuclear is factored into the base load because that's the easiest one to produce and we don't have enough nuclear power anyways. Gas on the other hand is the cheapest one to provide power on demand. Therefore if you have limited production capacity the demand for gas plants that are mostly on standby will only go up.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Gas plants are also best run all the time in advanced combined cycle plants. Nuclear often in the US already has backing of very large pumped hydro storage facilities. So no, you don’t need enough nuclear to replace all peakers.
roenxi 6y ago
Ignoring the economics for a second, the persepctive in play when someone says "replace gas with nuclear" should be: 1) If solar is deployed, gas/batteries/something has to be deployed as well to deal with nighttime. 2) So the 'replacement' of nuclear is steady power that replaces some solar panels, some gas for a net improvement, technically speaking. Of course, the main argument against that is whether the economics plays out. I find it humorous that I'm taking the side of technical excellence and the pro-solar people are saying "who cares, lets just follow the economics". There was a decade where those positions were mostly reversed when it was coal v solar.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Also solar is made primarily in China. It's cheap currently but when the inevitable cold war happens with China and the USA those solar panels may not be nearly as cheap or reliably sourced. Sure we can make our own but it would take a decade or more to ramp up.
6y ago

Lammy 6y ago

> Natural gas has actually steadily gained market share. Strangely even some environmental groups seem to be pro-gas or at least ambivalent, like how Sierra Club's "whoops, we got caught" response to taking millions of dollars from the oil companies waxes poetic about the need to "look beyond coal, oil, and gas, and focus on clean, efficient energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal" but doesn't mention the word "nuclear" anywhere at all: https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sierra-club-and-natural-gas.html https://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2012/02/the-sier... I'd expect them to proudly mention nuclear in the past tense considering Sierra Club successfully killed the nuclear generating station that would have supplied me here in the Bay Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

rob74 6y ago
To be fair, I don't think the Sierra Club are the only ones who think building a nuclear power plant two miles from the San Andreas Fault isn't a particularly good idea...
- Lammy 6y ago
  The possibility of seismic activity isn't automatically dangerous. I feel confident that if we can engineer skyscrapers to withstand shaking that we can engineer an isolated reactor vessel too, and a reactor shutdown only takes three seconds: https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-reactor-trip-and-how-does-it-protect-the-plant/ https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2012/12/28/what-is-a-rea...

aksss 6y ago

> one of the reason gas became so popular? It got cheap and transportable. Gas is hard to transport until liquified, and having that process makes all the difference. Also, fracking - the reason the US has achieved energy independence, and that gas is so cheap.

wiz21c 6y ago

> series of memorable accidents well to me, oil spills are just a as memorable and way more frequent...

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
We don't run many power plants on oil.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  Yes you're right, it's only for chemistry which brings its own trouble too (where were those little plastic particles last time I checked ? in my own body :-)). Oh and cars also... (just making fun of you a bit, your point is good anyway)
wmiel 6y ago
There are victims of coal / natural gas pollution and climate change as well, it's just not that spectacular. Nuclear kills when there's unlikely accident, fossil fuels kill when everything goes according to the plan.

xwolfi 6y ago

In France, where nuclear is 80% of the electricity (we really played big the game of "oh but we care about nuclear tech for civilian use only" while irradiating Tahiti for military testings). I like nuclear myself: it's a military technology so the more we know as a country the more we'll be able to sell around as consultants, it's much cleaner for the atmosphere when it works (but yeah failures are horrifying), there is hope the waste materials will one day be reused, and it can be switched on or off more easily than solar (at night) or wind (at rest). But I heard it's very very VERY expensive and barely profitable on output gain alone (but VERY profitable as a military lab I suppose to have all those nuclear tech people), it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks that at least in 200 years we won't all be dead due to fossil fuel abuse, and it's hard to convince a younger, less objective part of the population who jump at "not renewable = not good". If with 1Kg of antimatter we could generate 200 years of Paris light, maybe we don't care if it's renewable. In fact, renewable just means "very very very long lasting" since the sun is dying and the earth is slowing down anyway :D

realusername 6y ago
You're living in the 70s, modern plants cannot be repurposed for military use and also have no physical way to blow up.
- bildung 6y ago
  Well the French plants are from the 70s.
- pjc50 6y ago
  That does not change the fact that the French plants were built in part for plutonium production, in the 1970s.
DharmaPolice 6y ago
>it's hard to argue with someone whose children are born disfigured today because of waste leaks Is that actually happening?

7952 6y ago

These discussion are always unfair against every power source. Each has different properties that make naïve comparison difficult. In the real world power stations have to exist within an economic, political, and technical ecosystem. If a particular approach is delivering value then the argument is rather mute.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Nuclear power is just unpopular because politicians can’t make money out of it. Due to its inherent risk, nuclear power plants require close government inspection which makes it a bit harder to cheat.

addicted 6y ago
Nuclear only survives when politicians go out of their way to push it. Nuclear is unpopular because it competes for the same pool of money as gas, oil, solar, wind, etc do and there is no, or a very narrow band, of investors whose priorities align with the benefits nuclear provides. They need to prioritize environmental friendliness enough to eliminate the fossil fuel options. Then they need to be willing to put in massive sums of money in one shot, without seeing any returns for many years, to even beginning to choose nuclear, and then they need to find a reason why they would pick nuclear over solar/wind in a world which is over 80% fossil fuel so baseload electricity is not even close to being a concern. And if their particular region has baseload energy concerns, they need to choose the long term option of nuclear over the quicker solar/wind + battery option which even if it is slightly more expensive isnt by much. The only places where nuclear has gone forward are areas where politicians have pushed for it despite it being more expensive than other renewable alternatives. Examples are in the UK, and even there the plants are delayed, and are gonna be more expensive than originally planned even when the original price was already more than competing renewables.
- dathinab 6y ago
  It's true for classical nuclear reactors as far as I can tell. But in recent years there had been many advances wrt. other kinds of nuclear reactors which often promise less (or even much less) risc, upfront cost, start/stop times and generally smaller size. This kind of "small" nuclear reactors can have the potential to be in some cases the best choice. Anyway best would be of politician let this play out fairly by not pushing any specific technology but just pushing "climate-friendly" energy while punishing (separately) both "climate-unfriendly", "environmental-unfriendly" technology. (Nuclear is climate-friendly but environmental or better human unfriendly).

WoahNoun 6y ago

Modern gas turbines can be converted to hydrogen or hydrogen/gas blends. The idea is to use gas now then convert to hydrogen when commercial, renewable hydrogen is available. One idea is to use renewables to do hydrolysis and effectively use hydrogen as a battery. The US energy segment has decreased CO2 emissions in the last decade and switching from coal to gas is a big part of the reason.

pydry 6y ago
Fracking increased the release of methane at the same time, which is a much more potent contributor to global warming. The switch to natural gas reduced CO2 output but made global warming worse at the same time. It's quite an achievement.
mlindner 6y ago
Hydrogen isn't an energy source it's an energy storage mechanism. You create hydrogen from other sources. Most commercially available hydrogen comes from natural gas already. So you're wasting a ton of energy by converting the natural gas to hydrogen and then burning it again. Hydrogen is just another form of battery.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  If you convert natural gas to hydrogen, you can sequester the CO2 produced. The hydrogen production facility can operate 24/7, with the hydrogen stored and only being used when necessary. In this way, natural gas could continue to back up renewables (or back up renewables + short term storage) without CO2 emission, at a capital cost per kW far below nuclear plants. (The same argument applies to "green hydrogen"; which would be chosen would depend on economics.)
pfdietz 6y ago
Pet peeve: hydrolysis a chemical reaction where water is used to break apart two other things (like, say, amino acids). The use of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen is electrolysis.

macspoofing 6y ago

>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. One of the major reasons for that is that there is a misconception that renewables (solar and wind specifically) can actually replace fossil fuels. In other words, that we have better options than nuclear. We're going to lose a few decades before we realize that that won't work.

baybal2 6y ago
>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. Very fairly. Nuclear will always be many times more expensive than equivalent power hydrocarbon powerplant. It's not because of any manufacturing intricacies, but largely from just the material cost. It's not possible to "science it out" how to make ultra reliable pressure vessels with less steel, and metalworking, and large industrial building with less cement. Nuclear reactors are fairly dumb industrial implements, basically very huge, and expensive water boilers. The biggest advantage of nuclear is very cheap fuel, and fuel logistics. Nuclear fuel is cheaper than even coal. The price of transporting coal also makes not a small part of its cost. 40-50 years, that advantage was what pushed nuclear power to prominence. Now, the cost of fuel, and its transport is not considered that significant, and nuclear lost this advantage. Costs of some fuels actually went down as extraction scaled up, and itself became cheaper. Transport costs also went down. Power plants got more efficient. To regain this advantage, nuclear plants need to produce many times more electricity, and heat for their cost. This is why I was always telling people that scale is what is the real problem for nuclear now. Four, and up to ten+ gigawatt reactors is what will make difference for nuclear.
- 7952 6y ago
  Delivering 4GW in a single project would certainly set it apart. Perhaps the sweet spot for nuclear is not the traditional 1GW level. Although that would create a very large single point of failure that would need peakers/batteries/pumped hydro to backup on failure. An interesting project would be to stick a 5GW reactor in the middle of the North Sea and run export cables to all the surrounding countries. Build near an old oil well for hydrogen storage and include a thermal hydrogen generator.

konjin 6y ago

>I keep thinking discussions are stacked against nuclear unfairly. It's almost as if there are two different arenas to compete: (1) fossil fuels, which is by definition unsexy and ugly, but grandfathered simply because "we need them" now, and (2) everything else, who has to compete against each other on the criteria of "Fine, so we do have fossil fuels, what now?" Not just that, every other power source is rated on only the damage it does when producing power. By comparison nuclear is held to the standard that everything from mining to decommission needs to be taken into account. By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. This is treated as a joke. Somehow we imagine that solar panels of the end of their 10 year life span just fall apart into pixie dust and ignore how environmentally damaging they really are. The average coal plant releases more nuclear waste in a near than the all but the three worst nuclear accidents. The list goes on an on.

pfdietz 6y ago
> By that metric solar kills more people per kwh by the simple fact that installing it means walking on high unsecured places that you fall down from. Utility scale solar, which is dominating because it's much cheaper, installs modules at ground level.
- konjin 6y ago
  I hope one day we are as lackadaisical about deaths from home nuclear as home solar.