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Either the world accepts that nuclear energy along with wind and solar is part of the solution to climate change, or we will be forced into geoengineering solut
by BenFranklin100 3y ago
Either the world accepts that nuclear energy along with wind and solar is part of the solution to climate change, or we will be forced into geoengineering solutions. We may have already reached that point.
- jonathankoren 3y agoWe’re past the point that nuclear can help. We broke the planet. But hey. “Needs more study.” and academics are living large, unlike the poor billionaires.
- RandomLensman 3y ago[flagged]
- nequo 3y agoIt came broken in the mail?
- RandomLensman 3y agoIt broke many times throughout its history. There is just zero evidence that we cannot adjust, mitigate, prevent etc. - otherwise we might as well do nothing because we are all doomed anyway.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoYou say zero evidence. Would you like to review a graph of global CO2 emissions over the last 30 years?
- RandomLensman 3y agoIrrelevant to what humans can do. If anything speaks to human geoengineering ability.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoBullshit. It clearly shows humans unwillingness to engage with the problem, with no evidence as of yet to support the notion that this will change in any meaningful way at any arbitrary future date. It certainly does not demonstrate any latent ability to curb the problems created by elevated greenhouse gas emissions.
- RandomLensman 3y agoThat is just unhappiness with how and when it's tackled not that it won't be tackled.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoI mean if you want to proceed from a faith-based position that's a personal choice. Personally I'll start believing in bigfoot 2 seconds after I see one.
- RandomLensman 3y agoI have honestly no idea how that relates to my post. There are enormous amounts of money flowing into net zero, for example. There are people working on fusion, there is more thought given to geoengineering - to name just a couple of things.
- jonathankoren 3y agoWe’ve been 20 years away from fusion for 80 years now. Maybe someday, sure. But saying fusion is going to save us is foolish. We can’t wait that long
- RandomLensman 3y agoIt will be part of the saving. Investment in fusion was and is still tiny compared to fossil fuel or fission.
- nequo 3y agoI read your comment as meaning that humans are not responsible for climate change. But now I think you meant that humans may be responsible but they can fix it. Well, all I can say is that I hope that they can.
- saltymug76 3y agoDon't feed the shill/troll people.
- RandomLensman 3y agoIn order to break the planet a lot more is necessary. We created some problems but the planet is far from broken.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoThe planet will be fine. People, animals, plants in many countries will be fucked though.
- RandomLensman 3y agoI don't share that pessimistic outlook. Lots of things already happening.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoThis is defeatist and also not true. We adopt nuclear, invest in carbon capture technologies, and employ geoengineering strategies as needed until fusion comes online. This is a solvable technical problem with significant political hurdles.
- czbond 3y agoThank you for being optimistic and realistic concurrently. We need more people to have such approaches to the topic.
- jonathankoren 3y agoOptimism != realistic. Optimism is what got us in this mess.
- jonathankoren 3y agoDude. Nuclear takes decades to build, and that’s IF you can even build it. There’s zero appetite for it in the US or even formerly nuclear happy Europe. We’re literally decommissioning more reactors than we build. Carbon capture doesn’t work. Even if you did manage to capture it from a coal plant, that’s not enough. You have to suck it from the air, and a scalable technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, we’d need massive amounts of power to do it, because you’re literally up against the second law of thermodynamics. And even if you did have all that stuff today, you’d have to deploy it faster than exponential growth! I’m aorry, but you can’t just yell, “SCIENCE!” and expect it work. It ain’t magic, and the clock has expired. If we listened 50 years ago, and started then, yeah, maybe we’d be in a fighting chance. It’s sure as hell like we didn’t know that check was coming due. Now acting like we can just reverse a century and a half of exponential growth in a weekend is naïve at best, and “thoughts and prayers” level of “fuck you” at worst.
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoBetter to do something (build nuclear) than do nothing (cry on twitter).
- Dalewyn 3y agoHumanity has not "broken" the planet; to argue such is the epitome of conceit. We are not special nor powerful. Humanity is just one of many lifeforms the planet had, has, and will have over the course of its vast existence transcending any human sense of time.
- jonathankoren 3y agoWe can all take comfort in your wise words that a ball of rock will still be here even after the planet has become literally unlivable for humans across vast swaths of previously populated areas, and the planet violent has undergone a completely predictable and preventable ecological collapse. Yes. Very wise.
- kouru225 3y agoAs with all things I feel like a little from column A, a little from column B
- bell-cot 3y agoQuip: But when the patient's temp is high enough, everyone in the ER knows that you gotta go straight to the ice-water bath. How many square miles of solar reflector could each Starship launch carry to a stable-ish region near the Earth-Sun L1 point?
- adrianN 3y agoReflectors act as solar sails and hence need a fuel supply to stay put.
- bell-cot 3y agoThey need active guidance systems. Being solar sails - with a competent design, they can be trimmed (small portions of the sails moved with electric motors to adjust the forces from the sun) for station-keeping.
- adrianN 3y agoI'm not sure how you'd trim solar sails so that the sun doesn't push them to a more distant orbit. I don't think sailing against the solar wind is possible.
- adrianN 3y agoThere are lots of nuclear reactors being built world wide currently. The problem is that it takes forever to build nuclear reactors and we would need twenty times as much nuclear as we have right now just to replace coal. An additional twenty times as much as we have now to replace oil. And an additional fifteen times as much as we have right now to replace gas. Nuclear is not particularly cheap either.
- Krssst 3y agoThat's why you build non-dispatchable renewables at the same time. NREs can help quickly reduce emissions when there's wind/sun, and when nuclear reactors are online you can finally bury the coal plants that were running during windless nights.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoRenewables still have a grid level storage issue. Having enough nuclear as a backbone would be the best we can do right now until battery tech catches up
- adrianN 3y ago"Right now" is incompatible with nuclear. It takes at least a decade to build a nuclear power plant. By that time we can have a lot of hydrogen storage and electrolysis.
- gcoakes 3y agoAre those real numbers? Also, do you mean additive or multiplicative (i.e.: 20 + 20 + 15 vs. 20 * 20 * 15).
- adrianN 3y agoWe have about 2500TWh/a of nuclear worldwide. 42000TWh/a coal, 48000TWh/a oil, and 38000TWh/a gas. Give or take a few thousand TWh.
- 3y ago
- lostlogin 3y agoBased on the tweet (is that what we call them?), wouldn’t super crappy oil burning power stations be a temporary solution? What a time to be alive.
- ido 3y agoWhy not both?
- rgmerk 3y agoNew nuclear energy, at least in the places where most of the HN readership is concentrated, has very little to contribute as an incremental solution to climate change. Now that Vogtle 3 & 4 are complete or almost so, there is essentially no new nuclear power plants under construction in the United States. Europe? The long-delayed Flamanville 3 and Hinkley Point C1 and C2. Canada? Nothing. Australia? Nothing. There won't be any additional new nuclear plants built in any of those regions before 2040 (which is only 17 years away) We will have to almost completely decarbonize our electricity grids by 2035-2040 if the world is going to get net zero by 2050 (which is probably not enough to avoid the need for geoengineering anyway).