7 ms·

Sure, but the point is that they hardly caused a revolution in energy storage. If fuel cells didn't exist, for the average person life would be exactly the sam

Sure, but the point is that they hardly caused a revolution in energy storage. If fuel cells didn't exist, for the average person life would be exactly the same. Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out. I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.

jacquesm 3y ago
Fuel cells are just another transformer like the dynamo, or any kind of motor. They turn one kind of energy into another and in the context of hydrogen (which you could produce out of water using electricity as a means of storing energy) it serves to reverse the storage step. This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have, it is at best a quantitative change (and hopefully an improvement). Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude. > Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire. Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities with coal (as well as some obviously differences). But this thread isn't about coal vs nuclear. Frankly, if you don't actually see the difference between the relative importance of superconductors vs copper wire and nuclear vs coal then I really don't think I have anything to say that will interest you. Suffice to say that nuclear didn't change the world all that much (except in a weapons sense) but superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Even if true I still don't think it would be in time to help us address some of the more urgent problems we are facing. Neither does nuclear. And come to think of it: if this tech is real (big if) then it will actually probably cause a revolution in nuclear as well because it would allow for nuclear power to be transmitted the world over without the non-proliferation headaches associated with shipping reactors to various countries. It wouldn't solve the waste problem (though there are some interesting reactor designs now) and it won't happen overnight but it would make a difference.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > superconductors ... have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Energy storage and distribution alone can affect all three of your examples and they are very trivial ones. Then there is medicine, possibly a better shot at fusion and so on. Better electric cars are at the bottom of my wish list (because they're still cars). But yes, those too (much lighter but more powerful motors means you can do away with the drive train completely and it would also allow you to get rid of the brakes) assuming the superconductivity can be maintained in strong magnetic fields (not a given).
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        okay, could you be more spesific - what kind of improvement can we expect in storage? Is the improvement measurable - like will I be able to buy more kilowathours of storage per dollar?
        jacquesm 3y ago
        You'll be able to buy more KWh of storage per dollar (but likely not initially) and it will be relatively dense compared to current - pun intended - options and very likely have a much higher number of cycles (because there is no chemical cycle, just electron movement). The 'if only we had a room temperature superconductor' list of inventions that got temporarily shelved is longer than my arm, the words 'game changer' were never more applicable. If it is replicated. If it can manufactured competitively. If it (or a variation) works at higher current densities.
  - legulere 3y ago
    Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source. They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      >Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source. Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy).
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        When presenting working experimental nuclear reactors Helion is not the company that I would use as my example. They are borderline scammy and given their lack of progress they seem to be stuck in the moving the goalposts phase for a long long time now. I wouldn't bet on them ever completing a working reactor that produces net power.
        midoridensha 3y ago
        Maybe, but my point is that it does seem to be possible to generate electricity directly from nuclear reactions, without going through a thermal cycle (making heat, creating steam, using that to turn a turbine). I think there's some other experimental process that promises to do this with fission.
arcticbull 3y ago
> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build. Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear. Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2] Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium. There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3] [1] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/energy/energy-resources/Why_Account_for_the_Full_Costs_of_Energy2.pdf https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/fi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla... [3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit?
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    > Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit? Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it. "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
paulddraper 3y ago
> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build. That's not a technical issue though. Cost efficiency of nuclear energy has actually declined over time...which, unless science is devolving, should tell you something hinky is happening.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  The reason is pretty obvious and doesn't require any kind of conspiracy. Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong. The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disable them if a false positive happens even once and costs them money. For this reason nuclear has a LOT of regulation and red tape. It has far more than any other kind of energy, because even though the risk of accident is low the outcome of an accident is worse than any other kind of energy except hydro. Hydro has fewer things that can go wrong that are cheaper to check however, so regulations there tend to not be as expensive.
  - bbojan 3y ago
    > The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail. The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      Molten salt reactors manage to be expensive for perfectly normal engineering reasons though. The salt is highly corrosive, meaning you need tons and tons of extremely expensive piping that can withstand extremely high temperatures and extremely corrosive environments. There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough to run, but it isn't. Also I should mention, part of what makes them passively safe is there is a plug at the bottom that melts if the reactor overheats. This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
throwawaymobule 3y ago
Fusion, specifically, is meant to be the one 'too cheap to meter'. The thought being it'd be ready soon, and grouping both kinds of nuclear together worked as better branding for getting govt. funding.

jacquesm 3y ago

Fuel cells are just another transformer like the dynamo, or any kind of motor. They turn one kind of energy into another and in the context of hydrogen (which you could produce out of water using electricity as a means of storing energy) it serves to reverse the storage step. This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have, it is at best a quantitative change (and hopefully an improvement). Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude. > Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire. Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities with coal (as well as some obviously differences). But this thread isn't about coal vs nuclear. Frankly, if you don't actually see the difference between the relative importance of superconductors vs copper wire and nuclear vs coal then I really don't think I have anything to say that will interest you. Suffice to say that nuclear didn't change the world all that much (except in a weapons sense) but superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Even if true I still don't think it would be in time to help us address some of the more urgent problems we are facing. Neither does nuclear. And come to think of it: if this tech is real (big if) then it will actually probably cause a revolution in nuclear as well because it would allow for nuclear power to be transmitted the world over without the non-proliferation headaches associated with shipping reactors to various countries. It wouldn't solve the waste problem (though there are some interesting reactor designs now) and it won't happen overnight but it would make a difference.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > superconductors ... have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Energy storage and distribution alone can affect all three of your examples and they are very trivial ones. Then there is medicine, possibly a better shot at fusion and so on. Better electric cars are at the bottom of my wish list (because they're still cars). But yes, those too (much lighter but more powerful motors means you can do away with the drive train completely and it would also allow you to get rid of the brakes) assuming the superconductivity can be maintained in strong magnetic fields (not a given).
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        okay, could you be more spesific - what kind of improvement can we expect in storage? Is the improvement measurable - like will I be able to buy more kilowathours of storage per dollar?
        jacquesm 3y ago
        You'll be able to buy more KWh of storage per dollar (but likely not initially) and it will be relatively dense compared to current - pun intended - options and very likely have a much higher number of cycles (because there is no chemical cycle, just electron movement). The 'if only we had a room temperature superconductor' list of inventions that got temporarily shelved is longer than my arm, the words 'game changer' were never more applicable. If it is replicated. If it can manufactured competitively. If it (or a variation) works at higher current densities.
- legulere 3y ago
  Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source. They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    >Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source. Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy).
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      When presenting working experimental nuclear reactors Helion is not the company that I would use as my example. They are borderline scammy and given their lack of progress they seem to be stuck in the moving the goalposts phase for a long long time now. I wouldn't bet on them ever completing a working reactor that produces net power.
      - midoridensha 3y ago
        Maybe, but my point is that it does seem to be possible to generate electricity directly from nuclear reactions, without going through a thermal cycle (making heat, creating steam, using that to turn a turbine). I think there's some other experimental process that promises to do this with fission.

arcticbull 3y ago

> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build. Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear. Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2] Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium. There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3] [1] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/energy/energy-resources/Why_Account_for_the_Full_Costs_of_Energy2.pdf https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/fi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla... [3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

olddustytrail 3y ago
Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit?
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit? Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it. "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

paulddraper 3y ago

> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build. That's not a technical issue though. Cost efficiency of nuclear energy has actually declined over time...which, unless science is devolving, should tell you something hinky is happening.

Turskarama 3y ago
The reason is pretty obvious and doesn't require any kind of conspiracy. Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong. The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disable them if a false positive happens even once and costs them money. For this reason nuclear has a LOT of regulation and red tape. It has far more than any other kind of energy, because even though the risk of accident is low the outcome of an accident is worse than any other kind of energy except hydro. Hydro has fewer things that can go wrong that are cheaper to check however, so regulations there tend to not be as expensive.
- bbojan 3y ago
  > The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail. The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    Molten salt reactors manage to be expensive for perfectly normal engineering reasons though. The salt is highly corrosive, meaning you need tons and tons of extremely expensive piping that can withstand extremely high temperatures and extremely corrosive environments. There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough to run, but it isn't. Also I should mention, part of what makes them passively safe is there is a plug at the bottom that melts if the reactor overheats. This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.

throwawaymobule 3y ago

Fusion, specifically, is meant to be the one 'too cheap to meter'. The thought being it'd be ready soon, and grouping both kinds of nuclear together worked as better branding for getting govt. funding.