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Henry Ford is reputed to have said that if he had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses. I feel that nuclear proponents are stuck arguin
by derriz 3y ago
Henry Ford is reputed to have said that if he had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses.
I feel that nuclear proponents are stuck arguing for "faster horses". For the last 300 years or so, humans have harnessed energy by finding a heat source (initially burning wood, then coal, then oil/gas) and boiling a tank of water to produce steam, the pressure of which can be turned into useful mencanical energy. By adding generator, we electrified the world. Nuclear, whether fission or even fusion may be a "faster horse" - hotter cheaper fuel - but it just replaces the heat source - the rest is still largely steam-age technology.
Solar and wind on the other hand bypass generating heat completely and in solar's case, bypass even the mechanical aspect. Furthermore, their cost is determined by the cost of mass manufacture, not the supply of coal or relatively rare radioactive fuels, nor the construction of complex large plant. This is the revolution and this is why all thermal based generation is in a death spiral (although natural gas will survive longer than the rest) while solar and wind generation is growing literally exponentially.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> this is why all thermal based generation is in a death spiral (although natural gas will survive longer than the rest) while solar and wind generation is growing literally exponentially You’re extrapolating the early learning curve to a mature industry. That ignores the law of diminishing returns. Anyone arguing we can monosource our power is missing fundamental aspects of grid management and the state of technology.
- LargeTomato 3y agoYour argument is that spinning a dynamo with steam is the equivalent of "faster horses"? That's completely nonsequitor. It's literally so absurd I don't even know where to begin.
- derriz 3y agoI assume it's that I expressed myself poorly. Let me state the analogy directly. Consider the problems as analogous in term of technological advancement: generating electricity and travelling/getting from A to B. The tendency is to look at the current/historical solution and try to think of improvements to it. But this way of thinking is blind to complete disruption in terms of technology. Early 20th century horse travel could have been improved with faster horses. Current thermal generation (heat engine/steam based) could be improved with more efficient/cheaper sources of heat - such as nuclear fission (and fusion). The advent of the cheap automobile, despite limitations compared to horses in some respects, made having faster horses irrelevant. While removing completely the heat-engine component of electricity generation (wind) and even the mechanical component (solar and batteries) and using mass production (factories) and being cheaper has made improvements to thermal generation irrelevant. This conclusion is supported by how the generation mix is changing over the last 10 years or so. More than 80% of new generation and storage capacity added globally in that period has been renewable. Attempting to make thermal competitive is folly at this stage. The technology is in the process of being displaced by a newer simpler cheaper set of technologies.
- LargeTomato 3y agoThere are a lot of ways to capture energy. Nuclear, chemical, etc. Summing everything other than Wind and Solar as "thermal generation" is really, really reductive. It's so reductive that it strikes me as absurd. I don't usually get into conversations like this on HN with people who make these comments but yours truly made me laugh out loud. Is geothermal resigned to the graveyard because it uses steam? Is fusion power a fools errand because it uses steam?