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Who cares? If solar is cheap people can build solar. That isn't a particularly controversial idea. When coal was cheaper coal plants got built, when gas was che

by roenxi 2y ago

Who cares? If solar is cheap people can build solar. That isn't a particularly controversial idea. When coal was cheaper coal plants got built, when gas was cheaper people built gas plants. When solar is cheap we can build solar farms. The issue is that nuclear has the potential to to shift society's energy costs 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper and we're explicitly retarding its progress by policy. Apparently only because of irrational beliefs.

kragen 2y ago
hmm, so, if i get a 360-watt solar module for 30 dollars and set it up someplace with a 30% capacity factor (like in the north of argentina where it's sunny) it will produce an average of 110 watts, which is 950 kilowatt hours per year. if i demand a 10% return on my investment, i'm getting 950 kilowatt hours for 3 dollars, which is 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour this is already better than wholesale electrical prices, which average about 4¢ per kilowatt hour, but of course that involves all kinds of auxiliary equipment and batteries and whatnot. so let's assume generously that you're saying that nuclear energy has the potential to produce electricity for a wholesale price of 0.004¢ per kilowatt hour, which would be 2 orders of magnitude cheaper why would you think that it has that potential? you cited crawford and devanney, but they don't say anything that even suggests that they think that. at the extreme they think that you can get those same 360 watts from nuclear power for 360 dollars. what are you basing your estimate on?
- roenxi 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac... - the difference in energy density from coal to uranium alone is absurd, let alone if we have some breakthrough that taps in to a more exotic substance. It isn't that much harder to mine these fuels, the only problem is that we haven't really squeezed down the cost of building those honking great plants and focused on making the whole supply chain cheap. We're talking potentials like 6 orders of magnitude improvement over coal (which is currently competitive enough to run an industrial society). We should be giving the nuclear industry as many opportunities as possible to achieve breakthroughs, not limiting it.
  - kragen 2y ago
    yes, clearly that is correct when it comes to spacecraft, where what matters is energy density; voyager 1 would not be transmitting to us today if it were powered by kerosene or solar panels. but, here on earth, operating power plants is generally not an expense in proportion to how much their fuel weighs. only about half of the cost of a coal power plant is the coal; the other half is the plant, with its spinning electromagnets, parsons turbines, deionized supercritical steam circuit, cooling towers, and so on. as long as you're using nuclear power as an alternative way to drive steam through the coal-plant machinery, the best you can do is knock the cost down by a factor of about 2, which is 0.3 orders of magnitude rather than 2+ also, by the way, if you can come up with a heat engine that's cheaper by one or more orders of magnitude, you can compete with photovoltaic power plants using not just nuclear energy but also concentrating solar and geothermal. that would be a huge boon
    - roenxi 2y ago
      > but, here on earth... Well, yeah. If you assume we keep doing everything the same as we do right now, we'll get similar results to what we are getting right now. You've put your finger on the core issue with that paragraph, but I suspect not in the way you intended. What you're not dealing with is that the likelihood we figure out alternative ways of doing things is extremely high. Or it would be if we didn't have a brain-dead regulatory state in the West that blocks us from doing things differently. We're talking a fuel source where we can fit the energy equivalent of 10 trains of coal into an 2L ice cream container - assuming no improvements from using Uranium. There aren't any laws of physics saying it has to be expensive to turn that into useful energy. We haven't really tested any part of the industrial supply chain to see how low costs can go. And any ideas the academics are having aren't being put in to the practice - or at least they weren't until the best and brightest over in China started getting involved. Hopefully it works out. Not to mention that, as you point out, nuclear is also a technically superior form of energy in a bunch of specific applications where weight and volume are factors.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i agree!
- loeg 2y ago
  There's a big handwave at "an average of 110 watts." There will be periods where it generates 0. Does that line up with demand? How will you satisfy demand at night? Solving that is the majority of the costs of solar/wind. The cost of the panels is almost insignificant.
  - kragen 2y ago
    currently the cost of the panels and balance of plant, not batteries, is the majority of the costs of solar power. the panels have historically been about ⅓ and are edging up past ½ of the total. batteries are not insignificant but also not overwhelming. obviously the amount of battery needed is dependent on demand patterns see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725765 for me trying to quantify this better

by roenxi 2y ago

kragen 2y ago

hmm, so, if i get a 360-watt solar module for 30 dollars and set it up someplace with a 30% capacity factor (like in the north of argentina where it's sunny) it will produce an average of 110 watts, which is 950 kilowatt hours per year. if i demand a 10% return on my investment, i'm getting 950 kilowatt hours for 3 dollars, which is 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour this is already better than wholesale electrical prices, which average about 4¢ per kilowatt hour, but of course that involves all kinds of auxiliary equipment and batteries and whatnot. so let's assume generously that you're saying that nuclear energy has the potential to produce electricity for a wholesale price of 0.004¢ per kilowatt hour, which would be 2 orders of magnitude cheaper why would you think that it has that potential? you cited crawford and devanney, but they don't say anything that even suggests that they think that. at the extreme they think that you can get those same 360 watts from nuclear power for 360 dollars. what are you basing your estimate on?

roenxi 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_nuclear_reac... - the difference in energy density from coal to uranium alone is absurd, let alone if we have some breakthrough that taps in to a more exotic substance. It isn't that much harder to mine these fuels, the only problem is that we haven't really squeezed down the cost of building those honking great plants and focused on making the whole supply chain cheap. We're talking potentials like 6 orders of magnitude improvement over coal (which is currently competitive enough to run an industrial society). We should be giving the nuclear industry as many opportunities as possible to achieve breakthroughs, not limiting it.
- kragen 2y ago
  yes, clearly that is correct when it comes to spacecraft, where what matters is energy density; voyager 1 would not be transmitting to us today if it were powered by kerosene or solar panels. but, here on earth, operating power plants is generally not an expense in proportion to how much their fuel weighs. only about half of the cost of a coal power plant is the coal; the other half is the plant, with its spinning electromagnets, parsons turbines, deionized supercritical steam circuit, cooling towers, and so on. as long as you're using nuclear power as an alternative way to drive steam through the coal-plant machinery, the best you can do is knock the cost down by a factor of about 2, which is 0.3 orders of magnitude rather than 2+ also, by the way, if you can come up with a heat engine that's cheaper by one or more orders of magnitude, you can compete with photovoltaic power plants using not just nuclear energy but also concentrating solar and geothermal. that would be a huge boon
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > but, here on earth... Well, yeah. If you assume we keep doing everything the same as we do right now, we'll get similar results to what we are getting right now. You've put your finger on the core issue with that paragraph, but I suspect not in the way you intended. What you're not dealing with is that the likelihood we figure out alternative ways of doing things is extremely high. Or it would be if we didn't have a brain-dead regulatory state in the West that blocks us from doing things differently. We're talking a fuel source where we can fit the energy equivalent of 10 trains of coal into an 2L ice cream container - assuming no improvements from using Uranium. There aren't any laws of physics saying it has to be expensive to turn that into useful energy. We haven't really tested any part of the industrial supply chain to see how low costs can go. And any ideas the academics are having aren't being put in to the practice - or at least they weren't until the best and brightest over in China started getting involved. Hopefully it works out. Not to mention that, as you point out, nuclear is also a technically superior form of energy in a bunch of specific applications where weight and volume are factors.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i agree!
loeg 2y ago
There's a big handwave at "an average of 110 watts." There will be periods where it generates 0. Does that line up with demand? How will you satisfy demand at night? Solving that is the majority of the costs of solar/wind. The cost of the panels is almost insignificant.
- kragen 2y ago
  currently the cost of the panels and balance of plant, not batteries, is the majority of the costs of solar power. the panels have historically been about ⅓ and are edging up past ½ of the total. batteries are not insignificant but also not overwhelming. obviously the amount of battery needed is dependent on demand patterns see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725765 for me trying to quantify this better