15 ms·

Finally folks are overcoming their fear of the spicy rocks. Once we get to economical seawater extraction of Uranium, we'll have virtually unlimited renewable

Finally folks are overcoming their fear of the spicy rocks. Once we get to economical seawater extraction of Uranium, we'll have virtually unlimited renewable energy. [1] [1] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extract-uranium-seawater-nuclear-power https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...

pvaldes 5y ago
Once or if?
throw82473751 5y ago
i_am_proteus 5y ago
It might be abundant and clean, but it's not renewable, and like every energy source, nuclear has associated capital and operational costs.
- nightski 5y ago
  By that definition I don't think there is such a thing as renewable yet considering you need storage/batteries for just about any "renewable" energy source out there. Energy will always cost us something imho.
  - mattferderer 5y ago
    One alternative approach to storage/batteries is trying to provide over 100% of the average daily demand of electricity. Excess electricity could be priced lower. Consumers & industries could use those cheaper hours for certain tasks. This is already done in many areas. Run your dishwasher, charge your car, etc. at night. Which leads me to think storage/batteries is not the issue & that manufacturing, installation & infrastructure is. I also imagine getting land permits, regulations, politics, etc. is also a huge factor.
    - Paradigma11 5y ago
      Are there any simulations done on actual historical weather data on how much you need for that to work. I would be far less sceptical about massive deployment of renewables if somebody could point me to a study that shows: Given this grid, this amount of wind, solar and storage in that areas and the historical weather data of the last 30 years it would have resulted in this amount of overproduction, blackouts....
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      Not all energy uses can be shifted. IT infrastructure, the pumps delivering plumbing to your house, streetlights, HVAC, all needs to be running at all times. Furthermore, if shifting energy demand is the plan, then renewables need to factor in the cost of shifting that energy demand into the equation.
  - nanomonkey 5y ago
    Gasification of woody biomass waste streams (walnut shells, wood chips, corn stover, bigasse) is quite renewable, and can be run 24/7 regardless of weather. The CO2 emmitted comes from the atmosphere and therefore is cyclical in nature (thus sustainable). If you take biochar into account the carbon generation is actually negative, as you have carbon left over that can be used for other things or put back into the soil in a form that is stable for thousands of years and beneficial to the soil quality for life.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  It's renewable in the sense that there's a massive geological reservoir which replenishes the uranium dissolved in the seawater. There's 4 billion tons dissolved right now in the ocean (enough to run 1,000 reactors for 100,000 years) but that is replaced as it's extracted. [1] It's about as renewable as solar, which is to say, we will eventually run out - but at that point the heat death of the universe is a more pressing concern. [1] https://cna.ca/2016/07/27/theres-uranium-seawater-renewable/ https://cna.ca/2016/07/27/theres-uranium-seawater-renewable/
  - 7952 5y ago
    The distinction is that wind/solar arrive for free without any effort. That just isn't true of nuclear fuel. I don't think that is a problem particularly. More that "renewable" is the wrong word.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I don’t understand what you mean by “arrive for free”. We have to capture it. It is not free of any externalities.
      - Forgeties79 5y ago
        You don’t have to produce/extract/manufacture anything to make the wind blow or the sun shine. We capture them as they are. Edit: let’s see how many people will continue to ignore other comments to get the same point in I guess.
        appletrotter 5y ago
        You don't have to produce/extract/manufacture anything to make the ocean hold uranium for us.
        akvadrako 5y ago
        You don't have to build anything to make uranium radiate. That's a pointless argument and unrelated to "renewable", which means it won't get used up.
- cm2187 5y ago
  By that standard, solar isn’t renewable either, since the sun is decaying. Nuclear is renewable in human civilisation time scale.
  - OscarCunningham 5y ago
    Well it depends on the course of human civilisation. If we wipe ourselves out in WWIII then we won't run out of coal. If we continue to grow exponentially then we will quickly run out of solar.
- e2le 5y ago
  By that logic, solar isn't renewable because it'll "run out" in 5 billion years.
  - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
    Nuclear will run out much, much faster, though, particularly when it comes to uranium we actually know how to extract economically. People's proposals for things like extracting uranium from seawater have not even reached the prototyping stage--we don't even know if it's possible to do at the scale required to support modern civilization--but people are already willing to treat it as a done deal. It's one of the reasons I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about nuclear as many people here. For some reason, people seem very quick to point out at extremely minor problems with solar, which is technically pretty much already there and which we know can work, and has improved by leaps and bounds in a short amount of time, or argue that it can't work because of the storage problem (even though we already know how to build big batteries--pumped storage isn't sexy, but it works and can be produced at scale without requiring exotic materials or anything like that). But those same people are happy to use as-yet-unrealized technological leaps to deflect concerns about the sustainability and expense of nuclear power, even though nuclear power is a much older and better-understood technology and many of the breakthroughs being cited (like thorium breeder reactors etc.) have been studied and promised for decades without significant progress.
    - Turing_Machine 5y ago
      > Nuclear will run out much, much faster, though, particularly when it comes to uranium we actually know how to extract economically. With breeder reactors there is enough economically usable fuel to last billions-with-a-b of years.
      - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
        As I mentioned in my post, people are very quick to bring up breeder reactors, despite the fact that no commercial prototypes that can recycle fuel to that degree actually exist. I have nothing against nuclear power as a short-term stopgap to deal with climate change, but we should stick to technology that actually exists if we're talking about using it as a primary power source into the indefinite future.
- asciimov 5y ago
  Nothing is truly renewable as entropy gets us all in the end. Now maybe someone or something will answer "The Last Question" one day and solve that problem. I wager we wont be around to see it.
andy_ppp 5y ago
Doesn’t Australia have enough Uranium to power the world several times over?
- adventured 5y ago
  Most likely the US, Canada and Australia each have enough uranium to power the world (we know for certain that Canada and Australia do, their known deposits are massive). The US doesn't even bother to look for uranium deposits, it has no intention of aggressively mining for it domestically.
  - hardolaf 5y ago
    France has enough known deposits to power all of the world for the next 20 years if we switched to 100% nuclear, worldwide today.
- weberer 5y ago
  Are you talking about several years? Decades?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    Lets first consider all Uranium in Earth's crust, about 65 trillion tons. So given, - 65e15 kg = Uranium in Earth's crust - 709000 = 709,000 MJ/kg energy density of natural U² - 500e12 MJ = 500 million TJ annual global energy usage - 92e6 = 65e15 × 709e3 / 500e12 So 92 million years. Australia has about 1.7e9 kg of reserves at current prices¹. That comes to 2.4 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium [2] https://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/ https://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/
KarlKemp 5y ago
The availability of uranium really isn't the problem. And I know the tech community loves thinking of themselves as supremely rational scientists immune to the follies of emotions. But no actual physicist (or physician) thinks a fear of radioactivity is something that needs to be overcome. Those that work with such material respect the inherent danger. They try to overcome the danger, using a bit of fear to stay concentrated (and get the funding). Declaring your willingness to install a mini-reactor in your garden shed, as sometimes happens in these discussions, is the hallmark of scientism. Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency. Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude. But tech bros are emotional: they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties. Nuclear power is not a technology of the future, it is just a technology of a future, specifically the future of the 1960s or so. It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  This argument sounds rational but isn't. It ignores some huge problems - fossil fuels have been subsidised for decades. They will obviously appear to be cheaper than nuclear which is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario. Wind and solar are also subsidised - by electricity consumers. Their volatility has a price that is currently absorbed by the grid and is ultimately paid for by you and I.
- mbbutler 5y ago
  This is the best comment in the thread and it's somehow being downvoted. Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.
scythe 5y ago
It's important to remember that Cohen's renewable argument applies only to breeder reactors. Other types of nuclear reactors are not sufficiently efficient to be "renewable" (which Cohen uses to mean "lasting as long as the Sun"). Still, nuclear is a huge step forward over combustion-based generation.
bliteben 5y ago
"unlimited"? no it will just be limited by the next thing. At current rates we are what 400 years out from using all the energy that reaches earth from the Sun. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=26 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=26 I definitely would argue we need improved nuclear power even if just for improving space exploration, but we also need to accept that our whole current way of thinking with regards to growth is doomed and we cannot just innovate our way out of it without at least changing the rules.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > our whole current way of thinking with regards to growth is doomed Having to find extraterrestrial and/or extrasolar sources of power four hundred years from now is far from doom.
  - bliteben 5y ago
    or just drastically slow our increase in energy usage. Further in the same ridiculous analogy that book points out if we built Dyson spheres around every star in the Milky Way we could get along for 2500 years at our current energy consumption growth rates. Doomed is not really the right word you are correct, because it just won't happen, we will meet the limit of physics and realize we can't keep increasing our energy usage even if we wanted to. But our desire to have GDP monotonically increasing is doomed for sure.
planetsprite 5y ago
>Once we make X economical, we will have all the Y we want True for like 99% of things that could ever exist. The big question is is it possible, and is that really the only hurdle. IMO Uranium extraction isn't the bottleneck to nuclear power, building and maintaining the plants is.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I think it's actually false 99% of the time, because as soon as we get Y for cheap, we start consuming it more, and we are back to not having enough Y.
  - nxmnxm99 5y ago
    Correct. We'll all be driving nuclear jet aircraft in 70 years as global uranium reserves deplete.
    - FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
      can't we use many different things for nuclear though?(and uranium is just the most efficient?) +in 70 years we'd probably have fusion
      - aidenn0 5y ago
        > can't we use many different things for nuclear though?(and uranium is just the most efficient?) Strictly speaking, U-235 is the only fissile isotope of any element that is found in any significant amounts in nature. However, breeder reactors can also be useful. The only two starter points I'm aware of in nature for significant energy extraction are U-238 and Th-232. U-238 breeder reactors are politically complicated because they can relatively easily be used to generate significant amounts of Plutonium which is usable in bombs. Th-232 reactors have technical hurdles that are probably surmountable; specifically the neutron economy is significantly tighter than U-238 breeder reactors (this is why you often see liquid-salt reactors proposed for Th; chemically separating the decay products gives plenty of breathing room in the neutron economy). The U-233 it generates is also usable in bombs, but since it will tend to also generate U-232, which is both difficult to work with and easy to detect, it's considered less of a proliferation risk. This all misses my original point though. At any point in the first half of the 20th century we had enough oil to last us for centuries at then-present day usage. Yet here we are.
croes 5y ago
Does your assessment of nuclear energy include incompetent and bad people? We don't fear that russian rockets hit WEC.
- yodelshady 5y ago
  I don't fear that. I *know* that the money I've given to a gas company to cover periods of low wind and solar in the last twelve months has funded those rockets, and the emissions have turned fertile ground into desert, the latter being if anything more lethal. That is a cold certainty. And I came off a conference call on battery tech today. So let me say this: anyone who says batteries will replace that blood money is a liar.
  - mixermachine 5y ago
    What was told on the conference call?
    - yodelshady 5y ago
      Optimised current cells, next-gen cells, and next-next-gen cells are all projected for similar price per kWh (one that makes any storage approach more than "buy us time to spin up a burner" impossible). For the record, that's now what I've heard from: private market analysts, government strategists, and scientists. As always, please show me a credible plan that says otherwise. I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong.
  - Bud 5y ago
    So you were "on a conference call" and that makes you universally more able to assess current and near-future battery tech better than everyone else in the world combined, and also able to read their minds so as to discern whether they are "liars"? Those are extraordinary claims. I'd require a bit more support.
    - yodelshady 5y ago
      My sources have been two large private investment firms, a government agency, and a university research group. None thought that 5% of my countries' GDP - an amount easily enough to fund a permanent comparable nuclear output with the second most inefficient funding structure ever devised - could, at any point in the conceivable future, cover the energy shortfall this week in batteries, even the scientists who are typically financially optimistic. This week has been a 99th-percentile week at worst, more likely 95th.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
"Fear of spicy rocks" is an odd way of saying "one of the highest costs per GW/hr and rising despite almost a century of enormously subsidized R&D, and oh by the way, it's also a major pain in the ass to operate and decommission and there's also all this toxic waste....which catches on fire if you don't cool it for months/years first..." Wind turbines and solar are cheaper and getting cheaper every year and they don't have anywhere near the myriad of problems nuclear does. That's why we had 30GW of renewables deployed in 2021 in the US, while 5GW of nuclear shut down in the same time period. We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it, with wind and solar. Because it's cheaper and easier. Investors, industry, and governments consider "what is the way forward for generation?" solved and are focusing on energy storage and grid modernization. You know what nobody has said in the history of mankind? "Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?" "Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!" "That country developing wind power generation will politically destabilize the entire region." "It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates." "Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"* (By the way, more than ten years later, there is still a no-entry zone approximately half the size of Tokyo.)
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  My understanding is that both wind and solar can't just placed anywhere, while a nuclear reactor can. A nuclear reactor is also more efficient in terms of GW per surface area. >We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it That's a rather odd metric, don't you think? "We haven't added or removed a single reactor, and we added a wind turbine. We're adding infinitely-many wind turbines for every reactor we're losing!" >"Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?" The same can't be said for, say, hydroelectric dams. Those are arguably even more dangerous than nuclear plants. >"Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!" Oh, no. Now all they need to do is separate the uranium from the graphite in the fuel pellets and enrich it in centrifuges and figure out how to build nuclear bombs. >"It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates." I really don't think that's true of Chernobyl. >"Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"* You need to evacuate because there was a tsunami and flooding. Look up how many people died as a result of the tsunami and as a result of the nuclear accident.
eunos 5y ago
Cost is said about 10x higher than land based Uranium extraction. However uranium cost proportion of nuclear energy cost is rather low (10%).
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  but is uranium cost is 10% and you suddenly make it 10x as expensive, didn't you just essentially almost double the cost of the enterprise as a whole? say current costs: $10 is my uranium cost $90 is the rest total = $100 ocean extracted uranium: $100 is my new uranium cost $90 (as before) total = $190
  - eunos 5y ago
    I think the idea is that hoping that scaling seawater uranium extraction will drive down the cost further.
jollybean 5y ago
? In the meantime there's plenty of Uranium in Canada and Australia (and Russia) just 'sitting there', and so there's no need for complicated extraction.
andbberger 5y ago
someone watches wtypp
downrightmike 5y ago
Probably easier to just process all the fallout of the fukushima black bag piles

pvaldes 5y ago

Once or if?

throw82473751 5y ago

i_am_proteus 5y ago

It might be abundant and clean, but it's not renewable, and like every energy source, nuclear has associated capital and operational costs.

nightski 5y ago
By that definition I don't think there is such a thing as renewable yet considering you need storage/batteries for just about any "renewable" energy source out there. Energy will always cost us something imho.
- mattferderer 5y ago
  One alternative approach to storage/batteries is trying to provide over 100% of the average daily demand of electricity. Excess electricity could be priced lower. Consumers & industries could use those cheaper hours for certain tasks. This is already done in many areas. Run your dishwasher, charge your car, etc. at night. Which leads me to think storage/batteries is not the issue & that manufacturing, installation & infrastructure is. I also imagine getting land permits, regulations, politics, etc. is also a huge factor.
  - Paradigma11 5y ago
    Are there any simulations done on actual historical weather data on how much you need for that to work. I would be far less sceptical about massive deployment of renewables if somebody could point me to a study that shows: Given this grid, this amount of wind, solar and storage in that areas and the historical weather data of the last 30 years it would have resulted in this amount of overproduction, blackouts....
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    Not all energy uses can be shifted. IT infrastructure, the pumps delivering plumbing to your house, streetlights, HVAC, all needs to be running at all times. Furthermore, if shifting energy demand is the plan, then renewables need to factor in the cost of shifting that energy demand into the equation.
- nanomonkey 5y ago
  Gasification of woody biomass waste streams (walnut shells, wood chips, corn stover, bigasse) is quite renewable, and can be run 24/7 regardless of weather. The CO2 emmitted comes from the atmosphere and therefore is cyclical in nature (thus sustainable). If you take biochar into account the carbon generation is actually negative, as you have carbon left over that can be used for other things or put back into the soil in a form that is stable for thousands of years and beneficial to the soil quality for life.
arcticbull 5y ago
It's renewable in the sense that there's a massive geological reservoir which replenishes the uranium dissolved in the seawater. There's 4 billion tons dissolved right now in the ocean (enough to run 1,000 reactors for 100,000 years) but that is replaced as it's extracted. [1] It's about as renewable as solar, which is to say, we will eventually run out - but at that point the heat death of the universe is a more pressing concern. [1] https://cna.ca/2016/07/27/theres-uranium-seawater-renewable/ https://cna.ca/2016/07/27/theres-uranium-seawater-renewable/
- 7952 5y ago
  The distinction is that wind/solar arrive for free without any effort. That just isn't true of nuclear fuel. I don't think that is a problem particularly. More that "renewable" is the wrong word.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I don’t understand what you mean by “arrive for free”. We have to capture it. It is not free of any externalities.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      You don’t have to produce/extract/manufacture anything to make the wind blow or the sun shine. We capture them as they are. Edit: let’s see how many people will continue to ignore other comments to get the same point in I guess.
      - appletrotter 5y ago
        You don't have to produce/extract/manufacture anything to make the ocean hold uranium for us.
      - akvadrako 5y ago
        You don't have to build anything to make uranium radiate. That's a pointless argument and unrelated to "renewable", which means it won't get used up.
cm2187 5y ago
By that standard, solar isn’t renewable either, since the sun is decaying. Nuclear is renewable in human civilisation time scale.
- OscarCunningham 5y ago
  Well it depends on the course of human civilisation. If we wipe ourselves out in WWIII then we won't run out of coal. If we continue to grow exponentially then we will quickly run out of solar.
e2le 5y ago
By that logic, solar isn't renewable because it'll "run out" in 5 billion years.
- Jweb_Guru 5y ago
  Nuclear will run out much, much faster, though, particularly when it comes to uranium we actually know how to extract economically. People's proposals for things like extracting uranium from seawater have not even reached the prototyping stage--we don't even know if it's possible to do at the scale required to support modern civilization--but people are already willing to treat it as a done deal. It's one of the reasons I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about nuclear as many people here. For some reason, people seem very quick to point out at extremely minor problems with solar, which is technically pretty much already there and which we know can work, and has improved by leaps and bounds in a short amount of time, or argue that it can't work because of the storage problem (even though we already know how to build big batteries--pumped storage isn't sexy, but it works and can be produced at scale without requiring exotic materials or anything like that). But those same people are happy to use as-yet-unrealized technological leaps to deflect concerns about the sustainability and expense of nuclear power, even though nuclear power is a much older and better-understood technology and many of the breakthroughs being cited (like thorium breeder reactors etc.) have been studied and promised for decades without significant progress.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    > Nuclear will run out much, much faster, though, particularly when it comes to uranium we actually know how to extract economically. With breeder reactors there is enough economically usable fuel to last billions-with-a-b of years.
    - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
      As I mentioned in my post, people are very quick to bring up breeder reactors, despite the fact that no commercial prototypes that can recycle fuel to that degree actually exist. I have nothing against nuclear power as a short-term stopgap to deal with climate change, but we should stick to technology that actually exists if we're talking about using it as a primary power source into the indefinite future.
asciimov 5y ago
Nothing is truly renewable as entropy gets us all in the end. Now maybe someone or something will answer "The Last Question" one day and solve that problem. I wager we wont be around to see it.

andy_ppp 5y ago

Doesn’t Australia have enough Uranium to power the world several times over?

adventured 5y ago
Most likely the US, Canada and Australia each have enough uranium to power the world (we know for certain that Canada and Australia do, their known deposits are massive). The US doesn't even bother to look for uranium deposits, it has no intention of aggressively mining for it domestically.
- hardolaf 5y ago
  France has enough known deposits to power all of the world for the next 20 years if we switched to 100% nuclear, worldwide today.
weberer 5y ago
Are you talking about several years? Decades?
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Lets first consider all Uranium in Earth's crust, about 65 trillion tons. So given, - 65e15 kg = Uranium in Earth's crust - 709000 = 709,000 MJ/kg energy density of natural U² - 500e12 MJ = 500 million TJ annual global energy usage - 92e6 = 65e15 × 709e3 / 500e12 So 92 million years. Australia has about 1.7e9 kg of reserves at current prices¹. That comes to 2.4 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium [2] https://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/ https://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/

KarlKemp 5y ago

The availability of uranium really isn't the problem. And I know the tech community loves thinking of themselves as supremely rational scientists immune to the follies of emotions. But no actual physicist (or physician) thinks a fear of radioactivity is something that needs to be overcome. Those that work with such material respect the inherent danger. They try to overcome the danger, using a bit of fear to stay concentrated (and get the funding). Declaring your willingness to install a mini-reactor in your garden shed, as sometimes happens in these discussions, is the hallmark of scientism. Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency. Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude. But tech bros are emotional: they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties. Nuclear power is not a technology of the future, it is just a technology of a future, specifically the future of the 1960s or so. It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.

eldaisfish 5y ago
This argument sounds rational but isn't. It ignores some huge problems - fossil fuels have been subsidised for decades. They will obviously appear to be cheaper than nuclear which is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario. Wind and solar are also subsidised - by electricity consumers. Their volatility has a price that is currently absorbed by the grid and is ultimately paid for by you and I.
mbbutler 5y ago
This is the best comment in the thread and it's somehow being downvoted. Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.

scythe 5y ago

It's important to remember that Cohen's renewable argument applies only to breeder reactors. Other types of nuclear reactors are not sufficiently efficient to be "renewable" (which Cohen uses to mean "lasting as long as the Sun"). Still, nuclear is a huge step forward over combustion-based generation.

bliteben 5y ago

"unlimited"? no it will just be limited by the next thing. At current rates we are what 400 years out from using all the energy that reaches earth from the Sun. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=26 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=26 I definitely would argue we need improved nuclear power even if just for improving space exploration, but we also need to accept that our whole current way of thinking with regards to growth is doomed and we cannot just innovate our way out of it without at least changing the rules.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> our whole current way of thinking with regards to growth is doomed Having to find extraterrestrial and/or extrasolar sources of power four hundred years from now is far from doom.
- bliteben 5y ago
  or just drastically slow our increase in energy usage. Further in the same ridiculous analogy that book points out if we built Dyson spheres around every star in the Milky Way we could get along for 2500 years at our current energy consumption growth rates. Doomed is not really the right word you are correct, because it just won't happen, we will meet the limit of physics and realize we can't keep increasing our energy usage even if we wanted to. But our desire to have GDP monotonically increasing is doomed for sure.

planetsprite 5y ago

>Once we make X economical, we will have all the Y we want True for like 99% of things that could ever exist. The big question is is it possible, and is that really the only hurdle. IMO Uranium extraction isn't the bottleneck to nuclear power, building and maintaining the plants is.

aidenn0 5y ago
I think it's actually false 99% of the time, because as soon as we get Y for cheap, we start consuming it more, and we are back to not having enough Y.
- nxmnxm99 5y ago
  Correct. We'll all be driving nuclear jet aircraft in 70 years as global uranium reserves deplete.
  - FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
    can't we use many different things for nuclear though?(and uranium is just the most efficient?) +in 70 years we'd probably have fusion
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      > can't we use many different things for nuclear though?(and uranium is just the most efficient?) Strictly speaking, U-235 is the only fissile isotope of any element that is found in any significant amounts in nature. However, breeder reactors can also be useful. The only two starter points I'm aware of in nature for significant energy extraction are U-238 and Th-232. U-238 breeder reactors are politically complicated because they can relatively easily be used to generate significant amounts of Plutonium which is usable in bombs. Th-232 reactors have technical hurdles that are probably surmountable; specifically the neutron economy is significantly tighter than U-238 breeder reactors (this is why you often see liquid-salt reactors proposed for Th; chemically separating the decay products gives plenty of breathing room in the neutron economy). The U-233 it generates is also usable in bombs, but since it will tend to also generate U-232, which is both difficult to work with and easy to detect, it's considered less of a proliferation risk. This all misses my original point though. At any point in the first half of the 20th century we had enough oil to last us for centuries at then-present day usage. Yet here we are.

croes 5y ago

Does your assessment of nuclear energy include incompetent and bad people? We don't fear that russian rockets hit WEC.

yodelshady 5y ago
I don't fear that. I *know* that the money I've given to a gas company to cover periods of low wind and solar in the last twelve months has funded those rockets, and the emissions have turned fertile ground into desert, the latter being if anything more lethal. That is a cold certainty. And I came off a conference call on battery tech today. So let me say this: anyone who says batteries will replace that blood money is a liar.
- mixermachine 5y ago
  What was told on the conference call?
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    Optimised current cells, next-gen cells, and next-next-gen cells are all projected for similar price per kWh (one that makes any storage approach more than "buy us time to spin up a burner" impossible). For the record, that's now what I've heard from: private market analysts, government strategists, and scientists. As always, please show me a credible plan that says otherwise. I would be extremely happy to be proven wrong.
- Bud 5y ago
  So you were "on a conference call" and that makes you universally more able to assess current and near-future battery tech better than everyone else in the world combined, and also able to read their minds so as to discern whether they are "liars"? Those are extraordinary claims. I'd require a bit more support.
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    My sources have been two large private investment firms, a government agency, and a university research group. None thought that 5% of my countries' GDP - an amount easily enough to fund a permanent comparable nuclear output with the second most inefficient funding structure ever devised - could, at any point in the conceivable future, cover the energy shortfall this week in batteries, even the scientists who are typically financially optimistic. This week has been a 99th-percentile week at worst, more likely 95th.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

"Fear of spicy rocks" is an odd way of saying "one of the highest costs per GW/hr and rising despite almost a century of enormously subsidized R&D, and oh by the way, it's also a major pain in the ass to operate and decommission and there's also all this toxic waste....which catches on fire if you don't cool it for months/years first..." Wind turbines and solar are cheaper and getting cheaper every year and they don't have anywhere near the myriad of problems nuclear does. That's why we had 30GW of renewables deployed in 2021 in the US, while 5GW of nuclear shut down in the same time period. We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it, with wind and solar. Because it's cheaper and easier. Investors, industry, and governments consider "what is the way forward for generation?" solved and are focusing on energy storage and grid modernization. You know what nobody has said in the history of mankind? "Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?" "Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!" "That country developing wind power generation will politically destabilize the entire region." "It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates." "Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"* (By the way, more than ten years later, there is still a no-entry zone approximately half the size of Tokyo.)

deadbeeves 5y ago
My understanding is that both wind and solar can't just placed anywhere, while a nuclear reactor can. A nuclear reactor is also more efficient in terms of GW per surface area. >We're replacing nuclear power generation capacity six times faster than we're losing it That's a rather odd metric, don't you think? "We haven't added or removed a single reactor, and we added a wind turbine. We're adding infinitely-many wind turbines for every reactor we're losing!" >"Oh fuck, that crazy dictator is shooting his tanks at that wind farm! Will this cause a nation-scale disaster?" The same can't be said for, say, hydroelectric dams. Those are arguably even more dangerous than nuclear plants. >"Oh fuck, terrorists are trying to steal old solar panels!" Oh, no. Now all they need to do is separate the uranium from the graphite in the fuel pellets and enrich it in centrifuges and figure out how to build nuclear bombs. >"It's so sad that thirty years after that solar farm fire disaster, kids within hundreds of miles from it still have significantly higher cancer rates." I really don't think that's true of Chernobyl. >"Oh fuck, that tsunami damaged that wind farm, we need to evacuate people from thousands of square kilometers of area around it and not allow fishing anywhere near it"* You need to evacuate because there was a tsunami and flooding. Look up how many people died as a result of the tsunami and as a result of the nuclear accident.

eunos 5y ago

Cost is said about 10x higher than land based Uranium extraction. However uranium cost proportion of nuclear energy cost is rather low (10%).

stjohnswarts 5y ago
but is uranium cost is 10% and you suddenly make it 10x as expensive, didn't you just essentially almost double the cost of the enterprise as a whole? say current costs: $10 is my uranium cost $90 is the rest total = $100 ocean extracted uranium: $100 is my new uranium cost $90 (as before) total = $190
- eunos 5y ago
  I think the idea is that hoping that scaling seawater uranium extraction will drive down the cost further.

jollybean 5y ago

? In the meantime there's plenty of Uranium in Canada and Australia (and Russia) just 'sitting there', and so there's no need for complicated extraction.

andbberger 5y ago

someone watches wtypp

downrightmike 5y ago

Probably easier to just process all the fallout of the fukushima black bag piles