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It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the

It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the last 70 years.

deepfriedchokes 1y ago
The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. Nuclear doesn’t make sense economically compared to things like solar and batteries.
- SecretDreams 1y ago
  > things like solar and batteries. Magnets too - let's just go magnets everywhere. Reality is solar isn't viable everywhere. And it's not optimal to put it in places where you use the sun to grow food. We should follow a holistic approach. * Wind where it's windy. * Solar where it's sunny - ideally on buildings/away from farms. * Hydro where possible. * Nuclear where it makes sense, i.e. stable geography, low occurence of natural disasters, lots of land. * Some natty gas plants for overflow - not saying commission new ones or prioritize natty, but it's sensible to utilize existing peaked plants. I'm not a big fan of large scale battery storage solutions, but they can work sometimes. I think they're more sensible for residential/commercial use and, when paired with solar, can really help add robustness to the grid. But, for mega energy storage, I think hydro based solutions are more sensible.
  - djmips 1y ago
    Why doesn't Geothermal make your list?
    - SecretDreams 1y ago
      Great question! Mostly, because I forgot. Second, it's pretty expensive for the gains you get - I'd rather favour it for use in heat pumps; but it makes sense for some regions.
  - Certhas 1y ago
    What do you base all these claims on? Plenty of papers show Solar + wind + storage is viable practically everywhere. Also there is a ton of research on planning energy systems and what technology mixes make sense. This stuff has to be economical. Energy costs are measured in percentage of GDP. Simply liking nuclear doesn't make it viable. Especially in a world with PV meaning you can't sell energy during the day. There really is only one macro fact that will shape the energy system of the future: The price of PV modules is now effectively zero in rich countries. Everything else has to be judged by how well it complements/makes use of free energy during daylight hours. The geopolitical implications of this haven't even begun to be explored.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      The (subsidized, market dumped) price of cells may be low at the moment, but the price of storage, land and artificial inertia isn't. You can absolutely sell non-PV power during the day. Big power consumers sign contracts for predictable and reliable supply.
      - Certhas 1y ago
        PV is not heavily subsidized compared to other energy carriers, and the learning rate has been extremely consistent for a long time. LCOE takes some of the system costs into account, but it's of course true. And your second sentence is not how energy markets actually work. Of course I make a contract for reliable supply, but I don't contract with an individual power plant. I contract with an energy company and that buys from the cheapest supplier mix (aka merit order). The long term contracts for base load run for years, but those, too will eventually have to adpat to the reality of abundant cheap daylight energy. My main point with PV isn't about the system we have right now. It's that we are in the first days of a new system structured around the new technological reality that only recently emerged. Until very recently nobody, even the optimists, expected PV to get that cheap that fast. It will take decades for the repercussions of this phase transition to shake out. The issue is, due to climate change we don't have decades.
    - SecretDreams 1y ago
      Energy independence and a mix of technologies isn't just about cost. It's about redundancy and how you're positioning yourself to handle various unexpected events. You don't want a state primarily on solar if you get a super cell darkening the sky for a week. You want a mix of renewables, but you don't strictly want to rely on the food graces of mother nature at all times. Boiling things down to just price is a very simplistic view.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    Back when all my precious data was on floppy disk and hard drives, I HATED magnets. Now I am more ambivalent.
- Nifty3929 1y ago
  I haven't seen any data that backs that up based on general principals. Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements - however well founded. Also, remember that nuclear, unlike solar, has a lot of room for improvement still, both in how it's done, and how it's regulated. Solar has already been tremendously optimized, while nuclear has not. The cost argument seems to be advances by the same people who impose or support the additional operational requirements, and who also just have a philosophical aversion to nuclear power. There are hundreds of nuclear power plants already in operation, many decades old. There have been only a very small number of minor accidents (3 come to mind: Chernobyl, Three mile island and Fukushima), in which only a few dozen people were killed. Nuclear, even using old technology, has proven to be far safer and better for the environment than any scalable alternative, including solar. New designs are even safer.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    > Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements Indeed. Once there was a wonderfully efficient, economical nuclear reactor design, better thermal efficiency than PWRs, could be refueled during operation, considerably cheaper to build… However, nobody is THAT keen to build more Chernobyls. (The RBMK design really was quite impressive, provided you weren’t too concerned about, well, safety.) The economics of nuclear energy are difficult, today. So much of the cost is upfront that getting the investment is problematic; unless you have a guaranteed price per kWh, it really is a huge gamble.
  - peer2pay 1y ago
    Calling Chernobyl a minor accident is insane. We are lucky it wasn’t worse but even then most of Europes forests are still polluted from the fallout. People directly killed during the incident is not a great indicator of incident severity when we're talking about environmental pollutants. Nobody died from installing asbestos insulation yet here we are.
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    Nuclear has had a century almost to hone its craft. I'm a lftr fanboy, but nuclear had its time to optimize. I can't believe you're calling Chernobyl "minor". Go take a vacation there if you disagree. Anyway, nuclear is not cost competitive in the real world, imo it never will be with solid fuel, nor will it be safe. Certainly not with standards like yours.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Why do we have to be constrained by economics unlike the navy? The state within the state has access to nuclear powered ships so it is just a question of widening that capability to the members of the state living outside the walls of the keep. Not a matter of establishing precedent or anything. That part is done and long proven. The federal government even has experience managing water and power for entire geographical regions today.
- timewizard 1y ago
  > The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. In what way is it not? It has a budget and a mission. Economics are a huge part of their existence. Far more is spent on health care every year over the Navy.
  - qnleigh 1y ago
    I think it's more that the Navy isn't constrained by Nimby's and anti-nuclear lobbyists.
  - mmooss 1y ago
    The US Navy has other, very high priorities to balance against cost - national security, global security, freedom, peace, trade, the lives of billions, the lives of its own personnel. The US military may the largest budget of any organization in the world. At the same time, they invest in those mobile nuclear reactors only for specific needs: attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines, and aircraft supercarriers. They calculate that the benefit of effectively unlimited fuel supply is worth the cost for those ships. The submarines can stay submerged for months at a time and have extensive range, and the carriers can move through the ocean, displacing 100,000 tons of water, to anywhere on the globe without worrying about the logisitcs of the enormous amount of fossil fuel it would require.
- Rury 1y ago
  > The Navy isn’t constrained by economics And solar less so than nuclear. Nuclear receives only ~1-3% of energy subsidies in the US [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...
pmontra 1y ago
Many countries would have to buy nuclear fuel from other countries much like they do for gas and oil. On the other side very few countries can build their own solar panels so it seems the same sort of problem. However if you accept to depend from potential hostile countries at least solar panels don't do much harm when they fail and it takes very little effort to install the equivalent amount of power of a nuclear power plant. If we only could all get along and have a global power grid with always 12 hours of sunshine on it.
- devmor 1y ago
  Until we solve the storage problem, the manufacture of batteries required to store solar power at night and during other low generation times is actively doing harm even without failing. I don’t think this invalidates your point but I do think it is incredibly important to recognize that environmental harm done slowly over time is no less impactful than that done by a disaster.
- fallingknife 1y ago
  Unfortunately the arrangement of the continents would require undersea transmission lines for this. Would be an interesting future where the Bering Strait is the most valuable real estate on Earth for the American-Euraisian grid connection. But more likely we would build fusion reactors or get over our nuclear phobia before building something like that.
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  Most country that can invest a few hundred million can build their own solar panels that will be significantly cheaper than existing and future fossil fuel prices. It's just those panels will be 2x+ the price of those produced in China. So can't compete in the free market.
- bmacho 1y ago
  You can do solar energy with mirrors (the ancient Greeks were able to produce that) and steam turbine/stirling generator.
  - 1y ago
grepfru_it 1y ago
Solve the waste problem and you solve nuclear. Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) I used to have a neighbor who worked for the DOE, all of the viable solutions are blocked by people who don’t want it in their backyard. Can’t really move forward until that is solved..
- fallingknife 1y ago
  Burying the waste is an excellent solution. We are currently dealing with the much more dangerous problem of hydrocarbon combustion waste by releasing it into the atmosphere.
  - grepfru_it 1y ago
    It’s an equally bad solution. Let’s learn from our mistakes yeah? :D
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  >Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    This was one of the Soviet Union’s proposed use for Energia (a super-heavy launcher which flew precisely twice before the Soviet Union collapsed). In practice, there would be, ah, challenges; no launcher ever built is reliable enough that anyone would be particularly comfortable with _launching large amounts of high-level nuclear waste_ with it.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though. Would you want a RUD of nuclear waste in the atmosphere? That's the key thing with sending stuff to space, we are nowhere near close enough in terms of reliability and cost to what would be needed to send the stuff away.

It's incredible the lengths humanity is willing to go to avoid adopting nuclear energy - despite the US navy driving mobile reactors millions of miles over the last 70 years.

deepfriedchokes 1y ago

The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. Nuclear doesn’t make sense economically compared to things like solar and batteries.

SecretDreams 1y ago
> things like solar and batteries. Magnets too - let's just go magnets everywhere. Reality is solar isn't viable everywhere. And it's not optimal to put it in places where you use the sun to grow food. We should follow a holistic approach. * Wind where it's windy. * Solar where it's sunny - ideally on buildings/away from farms. * Hydro where possible. * Nuclear where it makes sense, i.e. stable geography, low occurence of natural disasters, lots of land. * Some natty gas plants for overflow - not saying commission new ones or prioritize natty, but it's sensible to utilize existing peaked plants. I'm not a big fan of large scale battery storage solutions, but they can work sometimes. I think they're more sensible for residential/commercial use and, when paired with solar, can really help add robustness to the grid. But, for mega energy storage, I think hydro based solutions are more sensible.
- djmips 1y ago
  Why doesn't Geothermal make your list?
  - SecretDreams 1y ago
    Great question! Mostly, because I forgot. Second, it's pretty expensive for the gains you get - I'd rather favour it for use in heat pumps; but it makes sense for some regions.
- Certhas 1y ago
  What do you base all these claims on? Plenty of papers show Solar + wind + storage is viable practically everywhere. Also there is a ton of research on planning energy systems and what technology mixes make sense. This stuff has to be economical. Energy costs are measured in percentage of GDP. Simply liking nuclear doesn't make it viable. Especially in a world with PV meaning you can't sell energy during the day. There really is only one macro fact that will shape the energy system of the future: The price of PV modules is now effectively zero in rich countries. Everything else has to be judged by how well it complements/makes use of free energy during daylight hours. The geopolitical implications of this haven't even begun to be explored.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    The (subsidized, market dumped) price of cells may be low at the moment, but the price of storage, land and artificial inertia isn't. You can absolutely sell non-PV power during the day. Big power consumers sign contracts for predictable and reliable supply.
    - Certhas 1y ago
      PV is not heavily subsidized compared to other energy carriers, and the learning rate has been extremely consistent for a long time. LCOE takes some of the system costs into account, but it's of course true. And your second sentence is not how energy markets actually work. Of course I make a contract for reliable supply, but I don't contract with an individual power plant. I contract with an energy company and that buys from the cheapest supplier mix (aka merit order). The long term contracts for base load run for years, but those, too will eventually have to adpat to the reality of abundant cheap daylight energy. My main point with PV isn't about the system we have right now. It's that we are in the first days of a new system structured around the new technological reality that only recently emerged. Until very recently nobody, even the optimists, expected PV to get that cheap that fast. It will take decades for the repercussions of this phase transition to shake out. The issue is, due to climate change we don't have decades.
  - SecretDreams 1y ago
    Energy independence and a mix of technologies isn't just about cost. It's about redundancy and how you're positioning yourself to handle various unexpected events. You don't want a state primarily on solar if you get a super cell darkening the sky for a week. You want a mix of renewables, but you don't strictly want to rely on the food graces of mother nature at all times. Boiling things down to just price is a very simplistic view.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Back when all my precious data was on floppy disk and hard drives, I HATED magnets. Now I am more ambivalent.
Nifty3929 1y ago
I haven't seen any data that backs that up based on general principals. Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements - however well founded. Also, remember that nuclear, unlike solar, has a lot of room for improvement still, both in how it's done, and how it's regulated. Solar has already been tremendously optimized, while nuclear has not. The cost argument seems to be advances by the same people who impose or support the additional operational requirements, and who also just have a philosophical aversion to nuclear power. There are hundreds of nuclear power plants already in operation, many decades old. There have been only a very small number of minor accidents (3 come to mind: Chernobyl, Three mile island and Fukushima), in which only a few dozen people were killed. Nuclear, even using old technology, has proven to be far safer and better for the environment than any scalable alternative, including solar. New designs are even safer.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > Most of the cost is in artificially-imposed operational requirements Indeed. Once there was a wonderfully efficient, economical nuclear reactor design, better thermal efficiency than PWRs, could be refueled during operation, considerably cheaper to build… However, nobody is THAT keen to build more Chernobyls. (The RBMK design really was quite impressive, provided you weren’t too concerned about, well, safety.) The economics of nuclear energy are difficult, today. So much of the cost is upfront that getting the investment is problematic; unless you have a guaranteed price per kWh, it really is a huge gamble.
- peer2pay 1y ago
  Calling Chernobyl a minor accident is insane. We are lucky it wasn’t worse but even then most of Europes forests are still polluted from the fallout. People directly killed during the incident is not a great indicator of incident severity when we're talking about environmental pollutants. Nobody died from installing asbestos insulation yet here we are.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Nuclear has had a century almost to hone its craft. I'm a lftr fanboy, but nuclear had its time to optimize. I can't believe you're calling Chernobyl "minor". Go take a vacation there if you disagree. Anyway, nuclear is not cost competitive in the real world, imo it never will be with solid fuel, nor will it be safe. Certainly not with standards like yours.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Why do we have to be constrained by economics unlike the navy? The state within the state has access to nuclear powered ships so it is just a question of widening that capability to the members of the state living outside the walls of the keep. Not a matter of establishing precedent or anything. That part is done and long proven. The federal government even has experience managing water and power for entire geographical regions today.
timewizard 1y ago
> The Navy isn’t constrained by economics. In what way is it not? It has a budget and a mission. Economics are a huge part of their existence. Far more is spent on health care every year over the Navy.
- qnleigh 1y ago
  I think it's more that the Navy isn't constrained by Nimby's and anti-nuclear lobbyists.
- mmooss 1y ago
  The US Navy has other, very high priorities to balance against cost - national security, global security, freedom, peace, trade, the lives of billions, the lives of its own personnel. The US military may the largest budget of any organization in the world. At the same time, they invest in those mobile nuclear reactors only for specific needs: attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines, and aircraft supercarriers. They calculate that the benefit of effectively unlimited fuel supply is worth the cost for those ships. The submarines can stay submerged for months at a time and have extensive range, and the carriers can move through the ocean, displacing 100,000 tons of water, to anywhere on the globe without worrying about the logisitcs of the enormous amount of fossil fuel it would require.
Rury 1y ago
> The Navy isn’t constrained by economics And solar less so than nuclear. Nuclear receives only ~1-3% of energy subsidies in the US [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...

pmontra 1y ago

Many countries would have to buy nuclear fuel from other countries much like they do for gas and oil. On the other side very few countries can build their own solar panels so it seems the same sort of problem. However if you accept to depend from potential hostile countries at least solar panels don't do much harm when they fail and it takes very little effort to install the equivalent amount of power of a nuclear power plant. If we only could all get along and have a global power grid with always 12 hours of sunshine on it.

devmor 1y ago
Until we solve the storage problem, the manufacture of batteries required to store solar power at night and during other low generation times is actively doing harm even without failing. I don’t think this invalidates your point but I do think it is incredibly important to recognize that environmental harm done slowly over time is no less impactful than that done by a disaster.
fallingknife 1y ago
Unfortunately the arrangement of the continents would require undersea transmission lines for this. Would be an interesting future where the Bering Strait is the most valuable real estate on Earth for the American-Euraisian grid connection. But more likely we would build fusion reactors or get over our nuclear phobia before building something like that.
abdullahkhalids 1y ago
Most country that can invest a few hundred million can build their own solar panels that will be significantly cheaper than existing and future fossil fuel prices. It's just those panels will be 2x+ the price of those produced in China. So can't compete in the free market.
bmacho 1y ago
You can do solar energy with mirrors (the ancient Greeks were able to produce that) and steam turbine/stirling generator.
- 1y ago

grepfru_it 1y ago

Solve the waste problem and you solve nuclear. Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) I used to have a neighbor who worked for the DOE, all of the viable solutions are blocked by people who don’t want it in their backyard. Can’t really move forward until that is solved..

fallingknife 1y ago
Burying the waste is an excellent solution. We are currently dealing with the much more dangerous problem of hydrocarbon combustion waste by releasing it into the atmosphere.
- grepfru_it 1y ago
  It’s an equally bad solution. Let’s learn from our mistakes yeah? :D
Ylpertnodi 1y ago
>Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!) Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  This was one of the Soviet Union’s proposed use for Energia (a super-heavy launcher which flew precisely twice before the Soviet Union collapsed). In practice, there would be, ah, challenges; no launcher ever built is reliable enough that anyone would be particularly comfortable with _launching large amounts of high-level nuclear waste_ with it.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though. Would you want a RUD of nuclear waste in the atmosphere? That's the key thing with sending stuff to space, we are nowhere near close enough in terms of reliability and cost to what would be needed to send the stuff away.