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I'm not a fan of his Gaia theory but many years May his books made me change my mind about nuclear energy. May he rest in peace.

tcgv 4y ago
I find the debate over nuclear energy an interesting topic. From the information and evidence provided by the Environmentalists for Nuclear [1], from which Loelock was a member, I find it hard to understand why there's still so much opposition to nuclear energy. I'm not sure if I'm missing something (I'm open minded for valid arguments/evidence on either side) or if it's just that lobby and disinformation campaigns to preserve the status quo in favor of fossil fuel companies are really effective in turning the masses against nuclear energy (which would be very sad with respect to our potential to evolve as a civilization). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear
- pfsalter 4y ago
  I think it's mostly down to Chernobyl and the cold war. Speaking to people in their 60's (anecdotally) they seem to overestimate the risks of nuclear power and underestimate climate change. This is probably because there's such strong visual evidence for problems with the former. I'd also say that fossil fuels are very simple to understand; burn thing, generate power. Nuclear is much more 'magic'. And I don't doubt that the fossil fuel lobby is drastically larger than the nuclear power one, just so much more money in it
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  I think one basic argument against nuclear is that it can't produce energy as cheaply as renewables (and nuclear energy is getting more expensive while renewables are getting cheaper). If we had decided to invest heavily in nuclear 20 years ago, we might not be in the mess we're in now, but it's probably too late for nuclear to help now. Look at Flamanville unit 3, for example. They started building it in 2007, and it still isn't producing power (in fact just this year they announced more delays to its start date). Even if we abandoned all concerns about where they were built, and started building a load of them today, they probably wouldn't all be ready until after 2040 because there probably isn't enough spare capacity in skilled nuclear engineers to parallelise their production. By that time, batteries and power-to-gas could be cheaply supplying reliable energy to a grid that's over-provisioned with renewables, without having to worry about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years or proliferation risks.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Except we have been saying the same thing for 20-30 years. And when you actually look at the costs of wind/solar (although maybe solar thermal might be useful, but for various reasons its been abandoned) they aren't as cheap as the cost to install them because they have external costs which never get accounted for. Starting with the fact that the cheapest way to build them is to build a KW of wind/solar and match it with a KW of natural gas. When you start looking at overbuilding them to supply some kind of energy storage, or to meet even their nameplate capacity 100% of the time on average they suddenly become a lot more expensive. I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies of how much it actually costs to build a KW of energy using particular technologies in various countries, and it turns out that those numbers, can be summarized as: Nuke plants are expensive because we want them to be, they aren't as expensive in countries (South Korea, China, etc) where random people don't (or cant) sue to stop construction even when the reactors are the exact same technology being proposed in the US/Europe (because they parent company doing the design and construction is frequently US/European) Followed by, wind farm's aren't cheap, and the prices only go up when you start talking about offshore and on the tops of mountain ranges. So, its no surprise that people who just want cheap energy will continue to pick carbon sources. Some people look at this differently, There are fundamental laws around energy density which tend to inform the economics (aka dig a ton a uranium and process it, or dig 10T to extract Neodymium, Lithium, etc and then built something that has 1/1000000th the energy density). So, one can claim wind/solar are cheaper and getting cheaper, but its like comparing apples to oranges, there is a reason places like TX, which have a world leading level of wind installed, also have some of the dirtiest power around. Sorta the computer equivalent of building ones datacenter around the raw price/perf of a given CPU/SoC, while ignoring every other variable. Then wondering why the HW ends up costing more per unit perf (cause maybe the motherboards cost more) and why the energy bill is eating your lunch (cause the cores are running at some extreme clock rate, and burning power). Finally, to summarize, you simply cannot hand wave the largest problem with wind/solar away, which is the fact that they are not on demand dispatchable. To get reliable power of of them easily adds a good 10x cost multiplier or more if your not willing to use a carbon source as a backup. So, basically standing around yelling wind and solar, is the same as asking for more carbon. And using wind+solar+NG is cleaner than just NG along, but it actually costs just as much as Nukes built in countries without regulatory bodies setup to stop the construction of Nuke plants. Despite the fact that even plants built 50 years ago are the safest form of energy production in existence (safer than wind for sure) when measured by deaths per MWh.
zahma 4y ago
Why aren’t you a fan of the Gaia Theory? It isn’t really much of a theory. The Earth adapts to our foolishness and outsized impact. It will survive in some condition or another even if life as we know it is extinct.
- retrac 4y ago
  > The Earth adapts This right here is where I get tripped up. Let's imagine we find out that Mars has no life, and we start mining it in the future. Would it also be fair to say that "Mars adapts" to that? If so, what does "adapt" really mean here? Does a rock adapt to being broken up? So I figure you mean life on the Earth (as we know it, or not). Adapt in the sense of evolution. Living systems adapt by replicating, varying, and having some of the variations being selected against, among other mechanisms. If the Earth is a single meta-organism or something like that, it has never been selected against, has never replicated, and has a population of one. How much of ordinary biology translates to an organism that strange? I guess it often seems like a metaphor being conflated with a theory, to me.
  - munch117 4y ago
    In the Gaia book, Lovelock talks at length about all these challenges that life on earth has met. All these chances the earth had to become lifeless and barren, or at least barren of intelligent life. When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle). It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming. I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Lovelock ultimately agreed with you. From The Guardian: > Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life." https://archive.ph/I3dog https://archive.ph/I3dog

tcgv 4y ago

I find the debate over nuclear energy an interesting topic. From the information and evidence provided by the Environmentalists for Nuclear [1], from which Loelock was a member, I find it hard to understand why there's still so much opposition to nuclear energy. I'm not sure if I'm missing something (I'm open minded for valid arguments/evidence on either side) or if it's just that lobby and disinformation campaigns to preserve the status quo in favor of fossil fuel companies are really effective in turning the masses against nuclear energy (which would be very sad with respect to our potential to evolve as a civilization). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear

pfsalter 4y ago
I think it's mostly down to Chernobyl and the cold war. Speaking to people in their 60's (anecdotally) they seem to overestimate the risks of nuclear power and underestimate climate change. This is probably because there's such strong visual evidence for problems with the former. I'd also say that fossil fuels are very simple to understand; burn thing, generate power. Nuclear is much more 'magic'. And I don't doubt that the fossil fuel lobby is drastically larger than the nuclear power one, just so much more money in it
dane-pgp 4y ago
I think one basic argument against nuclear is that it can't produce energy as cheaply as renewables (and nuclear energy is getting more expensive while renewables are getting cheaper). If we had decided to invest heavily in nuclear 20 years ago, we might not be in the mess we're in now, but it's probably too late for nuclear to help now. Look at Flamanville unit 3, for example. They started building it in 2007, and it still isn't producing power (in fact just this year they announced more delays to its start date). Even if we abandoned all concerns about where they were built, and started building a load of them today, they probably wouldn't all be ready until after 2040 because there probably isn't enough spare capacity in skilled nuclear engineers to parallelise their production. By that time, batteries and power-to-gas could be cheaply supplying reliable energy to a grid that's over-provisioned with renewables, without having to worry about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years or proliferation risks.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Except we have been saying the same thing for 20-30 years. And when you actually look at the costs of wind/solar (although maybe solar thermal might be useful, but for various reasons its been abandoned) they aren't as cheap as the cost to install them because they have external costs which never get accounted for. Starting with the fact that the cheapest way to build them is to build a KW of wind/solar and match it with a KW of natural gas. When you start looking at overbuilding them to supply some kind of energy storage, or to meet even their nameplate capacity 100% of the time on average they suddenly become a lot more expensive. I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies of how much it actually costs to build a KW of energy using particular technologies in various countries, and it turns out that those numbers, can be summarized as: Nuke plants are expensive because we want them to be, they aren't as expensive in countries (South Korea, China, etc) where random people don't (or cant) sue to stop construction even when the reactors are the exact same technology being proposed in the US/Europe (because they parent company doing the design and construction is frequently US/European) Followed by, wind farm's aren't cheap, and the prices only go up when you start talking about offshore and on the tops of mountain ranges. So, its no surprise that people who just want cheap energy will continue to pick carbon sources. Some people look at this differently, There are fundamental laws around energy density which tend to inform the economics (aka dig a ton a uranium and process it, or dig 10T to extract Neodymium, Lithium, etc and then built something that has 1/1000000th the energy density). So, one can claim wind/solar are cheaper and getting cheaper, but its like comparing apples to oranges, there is a reason places like TX, which have a world leading level of wind installed, also have some of the dirtiest power around. Sorta the computer equivalent of building ones datacenter around the raw price/perf of a given CPU/SoC, while ignoring every other variable. Then wondering why the HW ends up costing more per unit perf (cause maybe the motherboards cost more) and why the energy bill is eating your lunch (cause the cores are running at some extreme clock rate, and burning power). Finally, to summarize, you simply cannot hand wave the largest problem with wind/solar away, which is the fact that they are not on demand dispatchable. To get reliable power of of them easily adds a good 10x cost multiplier or more if your not willing to use a carbon source as a backup. So, basically standing around yelling wind and solar, is the same as asking for more carbon. And using wind+solar+NG is cleaner than just NG along, but it actually costs just as much as Nukes built in countries without regulatory bodies setup to stop the construction of Nuke plants. Despite the fact that even plants built 50 years ago are the safest form of energy production in existence (safer than wind for sure) when measured by deaths per MWh.

zahma 4y ago

Why aren’t you a fan of the Gaia Theory? It isn’t really much of a theory. The Earth adapts to our foolishness and outsized impact. It will survive in some condition or another even if life as we know it is extinct.

retrac 4y ago
> The Earth adapts This right here is where I get tripped up. Let's imagine we find out that Mars has no life, and we start mining it in the future. Would it also be fair to say that "Mars adapts" to that? If so, what does "adapt" really mean here? Does a rock adapt to being broken up? So I figure you mean life on the Earth (as we know it, or not). Adapt in the sense of evolution. Living systems adapt by replicating, varying, and having some of the variations being selected against, among other mechanisms. If the Earth is a single meta-organism or something like that, it has never been selected against, has never replicated, and has a population of one. How much of ordinary biology translates to an organism that strange? I guess it often seems like a metaphor being conflated with a theory, to me.
- munch117 4y ago
  In the Gaia book, Lovelock talks at length about all these challenges that life on earth has met. All these chances the earth had to become lifeless and barren, or at least barren of intelligent life. When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle). It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming. I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Lovelock ultimately agreed with you. From The Guardian: > Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life." https://archive.ph/I3dog https://archive.ph/I3dog