4 ms·

>we do not have an industrial level of excess energy If only there was some turnkey design we could build that produces utterly massive amounts of energy with

by qball 3y ago

>we do not have an industrial level of excess energy If only there was some turnkey design we could build that produces utterly massive amounts of energy with a few grams of fuel that can also be continually recycled based on physical principles understood for over a century. Fortunately for environmentalists, no such solution exists. Could you imagine how much of a socioeconomic disaster it would be if we printed a trillion dollars to build hundreds of gigawatts of excess generating capacity to just run carbon capture directly (and desalinization once we're done with that)? Besides, we would never print a trillion dollars to save 0.01 quality-adjusted-life-years across the world population. The bill for that is just too high.

therealdrag0 3y ago
Your comment excites me for a moment. Could we effectively have made US carbon neutral with stimulus money alone?! Then I looked up a few numbers. At 20Bil a pop, 5Tril only gets you 250 reactors. US already has ~100 reactors, but that’s only 8% of our energy usage. So 2.5x that gets us fully off coal and 1/4 of our natural gas, and it doesn’t touch our oil usage at all. So we’d still be 50% fossilized. Sad. This is Napkin math of course. But this shows how dang large a project we have left to do… [0] Some numbers from here https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and-statistics.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...
munk-a 3y ago
There's a fair amount of snark there but I would agree that environmentalists being against nuclear energy is one of the most unfortunate impediments to a sane climate change in modern years - the constant lobbying and sheer economic force of fossil fuel companies has definitely had a stronger negative impact but everyone I meet someone who associates with environmentalism that is anti-nuke I want to bop them over the head. I even formally lived in Vermont where Vermont Yankee made an absolute mess of running a responsible and clean plant (releasing a lot of very bad stuff into local water supplies) and yet all those released carcinogens are still not nearly to the level you can expect from good ol' coal power (even if you use a brillo pad on the coal first). That all said - the amount of power we'd need for carbon sequestration with our current technological prowess dwarfs what we're producing at the moment and would require a massive investment in human and material capital that I don't believe the US (at least) is willing to deal with. The only nation that I'd really hold my breath here for is France which, while it has some significant issues itself, it has a strong advantage in having a workforce that is actually trained to operate and care for nuclear plants.

by qball 3y ago

therealdrag0 3y ago

Your comment excites me for a moment. Could we effectively have made US carbon neutral with stimulus money alone?! Then I looked up a few numbers. At 20Bil a pop, 5Tril only gets you 250 reactors. US already has ~100 reactors, but that’s only 8% of our energy usage. So 2.5x that gets us fully off coal and 1/4 of our natural gas, and it doesn’t touch our oil usage at all. So we’d still be 50% fossilized. Sad. This is Napkin math of course. But this shows how dang large a project we have left to do… [0] Some numbers from here https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and-statistics.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...

munk-a 3y ago

There's a fair amount of snark there but I would agree that environmentalists being against nuclear energy is one of the most unfortunate impediments to a sane climate change in modern years - the constant lobbying and sheer economic force of fossil fuel companies has definitely had a stronger negative impact but everyone I meet someone who associates with environmentalism that is anti-nuke I want to bop them over the head. I even formally lived in Vermont where Vermont Yankee made an absolute mess of running a responsible and clean plant (releasing a lot of very bad stuff into local water supplies) and yet all those released carcinogens are still not nearly to the level you can expect from good ol' coal power (even if you use a brillo pad on the coal first). That all said - the amount of power we'd need for carbon sequestration with our current technological prowess dwarfs what we're producing at the moment and would require a massive investment in human and material capital that I don't believe the US (at least) is willing to deal with. The only nation that I'd really hold my breath here for is France which, while it has some significant issues itself, it has a strong advantage in having a workforce that is actually trained to operate and care for nuclear plants.