4 ms·

> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025 By the time they are ready they will have contributed so many ca

> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025 By the time they are ready they will have contributed so many carbon emissions, that they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back. But by the time they are commissioned (~2036), solar + battery + solar-made hydrocarbons will have made them uneconomic, and solar would have made far fewer emissions. Furthermore, they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about. Investing in nuclear is like willingly tying a brick to your foot, severely limiting your investment options. They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.

XorNot 6mo ago
Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical. Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.
- triceratops 6mo ago
  > Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical. "Predictions are hard, especially about the future".
- marcosdumay 6mo ago
  Of course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever. You won't burn them in your truck, though. That's an almost certainty. But whatever use they still get when we end transitioning to solar will be met by synthetic hydrocarbons, there's no point on keeping the entire oil production and distribution industries when you can just make a bit of it near the point of use.
- pfdietz 6mo ago
  I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.
- JuniperMesos 6mo ago
  Airplane fuel seems like a use case that's likely to be economical even if most of the rest of the economy is no longer using fossil fuels as a source of power. Batteries are heavy and that matters a lot in an airplane. Not to mention all the petrochemical uses of oil. > Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again. > —CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Strategy Session
ziotom78 6mo ago
> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%. > solar would have made far fewer emissions Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar. > they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it. > They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built. I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890408000575 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

XorNot 6mo ago

Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical. Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.

triceratops 6mo ago
> Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical. "Predictions are hard, especially about the future".
marcosdumay 6mo ago
Of course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever. You won't burn them in your truck, though. That's an almost certainty. But whatever use they still get when we end transitioning to solar will be met by synthetic hydrocarbons, there's no point on keeping the entire oil production and distribution industries when you can just make a bit of it near the point of use.
pfdietz 6mo ago
I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.
JuniperMesos 6mo ago
Airplane fuel seems like a use case that's likely to be economical even if most of the rest of the economy is no longer using fossil fuels as a source of power. Batteries are heavy and that matters a lot in an airplane. Not to mention all the petrochemical uses of oil. > Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again. > —CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Strategy Session

ziotom78 6mo ago

> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%. > solar would have made far fewer emissions Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar. > they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it. > They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built. I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890408000575 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy