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Nuclear fission could do direct power output, we just have criminally crippled the industry which resulted in serious underfunding and thus lack of research for

Nuclear fission could do direct power output, we just have criminally crippled the industry which resulted in serious underfunding and thus lack of research for the past 70 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion Solar by itself can’t replace power generation needs no matter how cheap panels get without batteries. They can only offset some demand (same for wind). And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can. The best time to have built a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. There just simply isn’t an alternative right now to drastically increasing fission capacity. China is doing it too. We have no excuse in the West aside from protecting oil interests. The expense and time to build are not intractable issues - we just don’t do it enough to have economies of scale at play. Same goes for waste - without a double sided market nuclear is more expensive than it needs to be and legislation is blocking the second side of the market for spent fuel, which unlike fossil fuel emissions isn’t waste and can be reused for lots of applications instead of being buried in the ground (+ can be reused in breeder reactors)

KennyBlanken 3y ago
The nuclear industry has had trillions of dollars worth of subsidies thrown at it for coming up on a century and it has done nothing but get more expensive. We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind.
- ewweezdsd 3y ago
  The problem with solar and wind is that you also need to build sufficient storage infra for those days when it's cloudy and not windy.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    That's about the same price as nuclear. That's not because storage had a mystery breakthrough in price you missed, it's just that nuclear is that expensive.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Source? Subsidies are hard to define and measure of course & even harder to compare across technologies, but renewables have definitely seen a trillion dollars worth of subsidies already (it was getting $200 billion a year since 2016 & that's not when subsidies started). According to [1] we get more energy output for every $ invested in nuclear than we do wind or solar. > We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind. I guess me and you disagree in that I view nuclear as proven, safe [2] & highly distributable (the Candian nuclear reactor is in many countries). There's a lot of FUD around nuclear & a not insignificant amount of it is funded by oil companies because they recognize how big a threat nuclear is to them [3]. It's aided by the fact that there may be legitimate security concerns although it's really hard to separate that from fear mongering to maintain the current status quo world order based around oil. > Wind: In an average year, nobody would die. A death rate of 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour means every 25 years, a single person would die; Nuclear: In an average year, nobody would die – only every 33 years would someone die. Solar: In an average year, nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die. So nuclear sits roughly between solar & wind in terms of deaths to generate said power & this includes all nuclear accidents (& of course single large scale events distort the typical deaths observed whereas solar & wind are baseline deaths that doesn't really change with improved tech as it does with nuclear). There's no safer, cheaper & as scalable a technology to wean off of fossil fuels. I wish there were & it would be nice if solar & wind were that, but they're not. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/energy-subsidies.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=4d841a1e7453 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
  - jmyeet 3y ago
    If there are two things I've learned from these discussions it's that: 1. Nuclear advocates always talk about capital costs of building nuclear plants but never operational costs because the LCOE of nuclear fission energy is terrible and incrasing [1] 2. Nuclear advocates like to talk about deaths because that's highly favorable to nuclear rather than, say, clean up costs. Nuclear disasters get hand-waved away even though we've had multiple of them despite there only being ~700 nuclear plants built. Chernobyl is hand-waved away because USSR. But what about Fukushima? Japan is a developed and regulated country. Tsunamis happen. So far $82 billion has been spent on the Fukushima clean up with no end in sight [2]. The final cost will probably exceed $1 trillion and take decades, maybe a century or more. The site requires active cooling still, which is where all the continaminated wastewater comes from, and the technology to clean up the core does not exist with no viable plan in sight. And that's from one nuclear power incident. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [2]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...
tambourine_man 3y ago
There are many large scale energy storage solutions. Nuclear is not the only carbon-free alternative for baseload.
ben_w 3y ago
> Solar by itself can’t replace power generation needs no matter how cheap panels get without batteries. They can only offset some demand (same for wind). Not so. While my following suggestion is a fantasy from the POV of geopolitics, from the purely technical perspective it's dead simple to wrap the planet in a 1Ω wire that hooks up all the major deserts so that at least one of them is in daylight at any given moment. It's a square meter cross section of aluminium costing a few hundred billion dollars at current prices, not that current prices are the real cost anyway as that would take several years of current global output. But on paper it's fine. > And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can. Right now, sure. But that fast ramp-up is very fast, and once we have enough for cars, it's fairly straightforward to just reuse the worn down car batteries for another few thousand cycles in static power storage before they get fully recycled.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

The nuclear industry has had trillions of dollars worth of subsidies thrown at it for coming up on a century and it has done nothing but get more expensive. We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind.

ewweezdsd 3y ago
The problem with solar and wind is that you also need to build sufficient storage infra for those days when it's cloudy and not windy.
- ben_w 3y ago
  That's about the same price as nuclear. That's not because storage had a mystery breakthrough in price you missed, it's just that nuclear is that expensive.
vlovich123 3y ago
Source? Subsidies are hard to define and measure of course & even harder to compare across technologies, but renewables have definitely seen a trillion dollars worth of subsidies already (it was getting $200 billion a year since 2016 & that's not when subsidies started). According to [1] we get more energy output for every $ invested in nuclear than we do wind or solar. > We can't afford to pour more money into maybes when we have proven, simple, extremely safe, highly distributable technologies like solar and wind. I guess me and you disagree in that I view nuclear as proven, safe [2] & highly distributable (the Candian nuclear reactor is in many countries). There's a lot of FUD around nuclear & a not insignificant amount of it is funded by oil companies because they recognize how big a threat nuclear is to them [3]. It's aided by the fact that there may be legitimate security concerns although it's really hard to separate that from fear mongering to maintain the current status quo world order based around oil. > Wind: In an average year, nobody would die. A death rate of 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour means every 25 years, a single person would die; Nuclear: In an average year, nobody would die – only every 33 years would someone die. Solar: In an average year, nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die. So nuclear sits roughly between solar & wind in terms of deaths to generate said power & this includes all nuclear accidents (& of course single large scale events distort the typical deaths observed whereas solar & wind are baseline deaths that doesn't really change with improved tech as it does with nuclear). There's no safer, cheaper & as scalable a technology to wean off of fossil fuels. I wish there were & it would be nice if solar & wind were that, but they're not. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/energy-subsidies.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=4d841a1e7453 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
- jmyeet 3y ago
  If there are two things I've learned from these discussions it's that: 1. Nuclear advocates always talk about capital costs of building nuclear plants but never operational costs because the LCOE of nuclear fission energy is terrible and incrasing [1] 2. Nuclear advocates like to talk about deaths because that's highly favorable to nuclear rather than, say, clean up costs. Nuclear disasters get hand-waved away even though we've had multiple of them despite there only being ~700 nuclear plants built. Chernobyl is hand-waved away because USSR. But what about Fukushima? Japan is a developed and regulated country. Tsunamis happen. So far $82 billion has been spent on the Fukushima clean up with no end in sight [2]. The final cost will probably exceed $1 trillion and take decades, maybe a century or more. The site requires active cooling still, which is where all the continaminated wastewater comes from, and the technology to clean up the core does not exist with no viable plan in sight. And that's from one nuclear power incident. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [2]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...

tambourine_man 3y ago

There are many large scale energy storage solutions. Nuclear is not the only carbon-free alternative for baseload.

ben_w 3y ago

> Solar by itself can’t replace power generation needs no matter how cheap panels get without batteries. They can only offset some demand (same for wind). Not so. While my following suggestion is a fantasy from the POV of geopolitics, from the purely technical perspective it's dead simple to wrap the planet in a 1Ω wire that hooks up all the major deserts so that at least one of them is in daylight at any given moment. It's a square meter cross section of aluminium costing a few hundred billion dollars at current prices, not that current prices are the real cost anyway as that would take several years of current global output. But on paper it's fine. > And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can. Right now, sure. But that fast ramp-up is very fast, and once we have enough for cars, it's fairly straightforward to just reuse the worn down car batteries for another few thousand cycles in static power storage before they get fully recycled.