7 ms·

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-car

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

makeitdouble 4y ago
Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution. It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple. Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight... > essentially limitless oh well
- bboygravity 4y ago
  Counterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country. So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    France has the same energy price rises as the rest of Europe last year, since so many of their reactors weren't working. Most of them are also aging. Their average prices are only a little below the EU average. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      France is one of Europe's top energy exporters, despiting consuming a significant amount of energy itself. Domestic energy prices levelling with prices in neighboring countries, while energy exports rise, is what you'd expect with a country that has a relative abundance of energy along with free trade with neighboring countries.
    - bboygravity 4y ago
      Sure, when you convert energy you need to do maintenance and keep things up to date and if you don't do that bad things happen. That goes for all methods of energy conversion. How does that have anything to do with the discussion about energy conversion types methods and their pros / cons?
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I'd take your point if French were massively (like 90%) in favor of more nuclear, and saw it as their main energy source for the future centuries. That's definitely not the case [exit: a poll mandated from a nuclear power organisation puts it at 50% of people seeing nuclear plants as a positive asset for the country: https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-quel-regard-portent-les-francais-sur-le-nucleaire-39f1e822-2f43-11ec-a84f-a30e5f8a83f2 https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-... ] You can then think what you want of the French people and why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you, but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of it if given the time/choice.
jandrese 4y ago
Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima? I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?
    - jimmydorry 4y ago
      Those power plants wouldn't have been allowed to be built... so yes? With the modern regulatory environment, those three nuclear power plants would never have melted down (because they wouldn't exist).
      - iopq 4y ago
        But you can't both have cheap nuclear and the current regulations since they are in conflict. But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety
        pfdietz 4y ago
        Molten salt reactors might provide superior safety (the thorium is irrelevant to that). However, they also would likely imply higher operating costs, because now instead of being sealed in fuel elements your fuel is flowing through a larger part of your reactor, and volatile fission products are escaping into the off gas and have to be trapped in another system (which will have to be cooled to prevent melting). So you now have complex systems that are too radioactive for anyone to touch for maintenance. Reactor structural elements are also now exposed to more neutron radiation as well.
kelnos 4y ago
After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriously high.)
- bunabhucan 4y ago
  >Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly ... >And I live in California, This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)
  - bombela 4y ago
    I have had around 13 power outages this week. I live right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Most of the charges from PG&E are indeed the grid charges, the rest is supposedly a mandatory green energy. This is depressing.
    - NetOpWibby 4y ago
      Fellow SV resident (does Cupertino count?) and my eyes water when I look at my energy bill. Then I lose power for two days and learn that people REALLY dislike PG&E. And I thought National Grid was bad.
      - LoganDark 4y ago
        Let's put all our power lines up in the air, they said. It'll be fine, they said. While other countries have stable and reliable power in the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any act of nature. I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it—even just move to any other country.
- deleted 4y ago
iopq 4y ago
First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built. Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term solution.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps, and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to ignore that. > we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are several alternatives already.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life of millions/billions of years. With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth, nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit resources beyond Earth.
  - 4y ago
eru 4y ago
I agree that nuclear power would have been great. However it's no deficiency of planning. It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  That's like a project manager blaming the missing of deadlines on "the opinion of certain people in the company and the bureaucracy within the company". Not sure if that would fly.
  - eru 4y ago
    Not sure that analogy holds. No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Better not to build one than building a nuclear power plant and then just not turning it on. Zwentendorf was such a disaster.
paganel 4y ago
I don't think it's cheap, at least current costs of building new nuclear tell us that.
- concordDance 4y ago
  And why do you think current ones cost 4x as much as 80s ones even after you adjust for inflation and power output?
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Well, construction is a lot safer now. The death rate of construction workers has fallen by a factor of 5 since the 1960s in the US. It's possible those lower construction costs were at least in part due to a cavalier disregard for worker safety.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      It'd be valuable to determine the additional lives lost due to increased energy costs from these higher construction standards, and the lives saved from these standards. My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost. But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Another possibility is that the US simply isn't building as much these days, and heavy construction might have lost economies of scale. The Baumol Effect is another possible contributor. Renewable construction is not of the same kind, especially PV. Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.) Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Uranium and expensive plant resources are much too valuable to waste on this application. Buy some solar panels and do your hobby/discretionary computing using the much cheaper and unlimited power from our sun.
fundad 4y ago
Watts per unit of fuel are cheap but only to the power companies who mark it up. We’re in the middle of Record gouging in energy and food and you think a power company won’t gouge you? They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.

makeitdouble 4y ago

Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution. It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple. Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight... > essentially limitless oh well

bboygravity 4y ago
Counterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country. So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
- Symbiote 4y ago
  France has the same energy price rises as the rest of Europe last year, since so many of their reactors weren't working. Most of them are also aging. Their average prices are only a little below the EU average. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    France is one of Europe's top energy exporters, despiting consuming a significant amount of energy itself. Domestic energy prices levelling with prices in neighboring countries, while energy exports rise, is what you'd expect with a country that has a relative abundance of energy along with free trade with neighboring countries.
  - bboygravity 4y ago
    Sure, when you convert energy you need to do maintenance and keep things up to date and if you don't do that bad things happen. That goes for all methods of energy conversion. How does that have anything to do with the discussion about energy conversion types methods and their pros / cons?
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I'd take your point if French were massively (like 90%) in favor of more nuclear, and saw it as their main energy source for the future centuries. That's definitely not the case [exit: a poll mandated from a nuclear power organisation puts it at 50% of people seeing nuclear plants as a positive asset for the country: https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-quel-regard-portent-les-francais-sur-le-nucleaire-39f1e822-2f43-11ec-a84f-a30e5f8a83f2 https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-... ] You can then think what you want of the French people and why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you, but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of it if given the time/choice.

jandrese 4y ago

Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.

Georgelemental 4y ago
It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.
- kelnos 4y ago
  You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima? I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?
  - jimmydorry 4y ago
    Those power plants wouldn't have been allowed to be built... so yes? With the modern regulatory environment, those three nuclear power plants would never have melted down (because they wouldn't exist).
    - iopq 4y ago
      But you can't both have cheap nuclear and the current regulations since they are in conflict. But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Molten salt reactors might provide superior safety (the thorium is irrelevant to that). However, they also would likely imply higher operating costs, because now instead of being sealed in fuel elements your fuel is flowing through a larger part of your reactor, and volatile fission products are escaping into the off gas and have to be trapped in another system (which will have to be cooled to prevent melting). So you now have complex systems that are too radioactive for anyone to touch for maintenance. Reactor structural elements are also now exposed to more neutron radiation as well.

kelnos 4y ago

After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriously high.)

bunabhucan 4y ago
>Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly ... >And I live in California, This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)
- bombela 4y ago
  I have had around 13 power outages this week. I live right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Most of the charges from PG&E are indeed the grid charges, the rest is supposedly a mandatory green energy. This is depressing.
  - NetOpWibby 4y ago
    Fellow SV resident (does Cupertino count?) and my eyes water when I look at my energy bill. Then I lose power for two days and learn that people REALLY dislike PG&E. And I thought National Grid was bad.
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      Let's put all our power lines up in the air, they said. It'll be fine, they said. While other countries have stable and reliable power in the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any act of nature. I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it—even just move to any other country.
deleted 4y ago

iopq 4y ago

First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built. Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term solution.

ekianjo 4y ago
> Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps, and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to ignore that. > we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are several alternatives already.
ETH_start 4y ago
>>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life of millions/billions of years. With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth, nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit resources beyond Earth.
- 4y ago

eru 4y ago

I agree that nuclear power would have been great. However it's no deficiency of planning. It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.

bboygravity 4y ago
That's like a project manager blaming the missing of deadlines on "the opinion of certain people in the company and the bureaucracy within the company". Not sure if that would fly.
- eru 4y ago
  Not sure that analogy holds. No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.
Akronymus 4y ago
Better not to build one than building a nuclear power plant and then just not turning it on. Zwentendorf was such a disaster.

paganel 4y ago

I don't think it's cheap, at least current costs of building new nuclear tell us that.

concordDance 4y ago
And why do you think current ones cost 4x as much as 80s ones even after you adjust for inflation and power output?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Well, construction is a lot safer now. The death rate of construction workers has fallen by a factor of 5 since the 1960s in the US. It's possible those lower construction costs were at least in part due to a cavalier disregard for worker safety.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    It'd be valuable to determine the additional lives lost due to increased energy costs from these higher construction standards, and the lives saved from these standards. My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost. But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Another possibility is that the US simply isn't building as much these days, and heavy construction might have lost economies of scale. The Baumol Effect is another possible contributor. Renewable construction is not of the same kind, especially PV. Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.) Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

Uranium and expensive plant resources are much too valuable to waste on this application. Buy some solar panels and do your hobby/discretionary computing using the much cheaper and unlimited power from our sun.

fundad 4y ago

Watts per unit of fuel are cheap but only to the power companies who mark it up. We’re in the middle of Record gouging in energy and food and you think a power company won’t gouge you? They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.