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I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we inves

I am still quite confused on the scientific consensus: Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy? Both at the same time? Does anyone know?

preisschild 4mo ago
Government should tax / provide incentives based on negative externalities such as environmental impact and let the free market decide https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20... I think a low carbon mix will result in the cheapest, most reliable and cleanest energy grid.
datakan 4mo ago
Both at the same time. I don't see how putting all our eggs in a single basket benefits us.
bevekspldnw 4mo ago
When it comes to avoiding the worst impacts of the current catastrophic path we’re on, “nothing will work, but everything might”. Do it all.
- pfdietz 3mo ago
  Nuclear is not on a trajectory to do more than supply a minor amount of world energy. A (say) 10% nuclear, 90% renewable world is not an easier challenge than a 100% renewable world -- the intermittency/seasonality issues aren't eased by having 10% nuclear running as baseload, and keeping it as backup makes its cost per kWh explode. Nuclear really has to go big (supply most of the world's energy) or go home. But supplying most of the world's energy means burner reactors are inadequate -- there isn't enough cheap uranium. Burner microreactors have even worse neutron economy, so this argument applies even more so to them.
  - fssys 3mo ago
    nuclear takes longer to come online though vs renewables can be very quick, so it makes sense to do both as a short-long term strategy
    - pfdietz 3mo ago
      As the renewables quickly come online, they push down their experience curves and get cheaper, and the residual demand is increasingly intermittent. Both these considerations mean the economic environment will get worse for nuclear over time. I think this is why there's a rather frantic online push for nuclear: it's now or never for the nuclear bros.
Tade0 4mo ago
China does: all of the above, where it makes sense. Renewables and batteries to keep your AC, workplace EV charger, stove, pool heater and (since recently) green ammonia producer going, nuclear to prevent e.g. aluminium smelters from seizing up. Also the cheapest way to make renewables work 24/7 is to build HVDC lines - they cost as much as a highway per unit length and even undersea cables would deploy for less and faster than equivalent nuclear. The total length of HVDC lines just in China is currently more than 40k km, so they've literally deployed enough of them to wrap around the globe.
- api 3mo ago
  China is also still building coal and has passed Europe and will (if they don’t change course) soon pass the US and Canada and the other big ones on a per capita emitter basis. They already passed everyone as top emitter in an absolute sense. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Not saying they’re not also building renewables and nuclear, but it seems like the policy is more “build anything and everything to satisfy demand” than a focused effort. BTW: if you look at US emissions, the data center bubble hasn’t had much if any effect. They are still trending down. There’s reasons to dislike that industry but I’m sick of the mindless echo chamber doom on that issue. They’re not that significant in the grand scheme of things.
  - atwrk 3mo ago
    Coal is already shrinking in the China (in absolute terms, not just as share of production) [1], and share of wind + solar is already larger than in the US [2], so I doubt China will ever reach US proportions in CO2 emissions per capita. An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3]. [1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=China&chart=trend&date=2025-01-01&date_from=2020-01-01&temporal_res=yearly https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... [2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=United+States&chart=trend&date=2025-01-01&date_from=2020-01-01&temporal_res=yearly https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... [3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/ https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/
sehansen 4mo ago
If your location already has a well-run nuclear energy sector (Finland, Sweden, South Korea): invest in nuclear energy. If you don't: stick to renewables. And it also depends on what you mean by "we". As a Dane, I don't think us Danish taxpayers should invest in nuclear energy, but I'm perfectly happy that private Danish investors invest in Seaborg/Saltfoss and Copenhagen Atomics.
pfdietz 3mo ago
Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav Smil. But Smil used this argument to massively mispredict how solar would be go in the market. We don't hear him much anymore. Nuclear advocates increasingly resort to conspiracy theoretic reasoning to explain away the failure of their technology to compete. This should be a red flag.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  > The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry. We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.
  - pfdietz 3mo ago
    We don't actually know how much that cost France, sine it was mixed in with their military nuclear effort. French auditors threw up their hands trying to figure out the actual costs. What we do know is their attempt to build more NPPs now has gone spectacularly tits up, with costs completely out of control. This should make one view their earlier efforts with great suspicion. Have they become much worse, or were earlier problems concealed?
    - rayiner 3mo ago
      Costs are out of control due to nuclear regulation.
      - pfdietz 3mo ago
        This is the conspiracy theory reasoning I was talking about. Nuclear is wonderful, but a global omnipotent green conspiracy has hobbled it. Or, maybe, it really is complicated and needs regulation to keep it sufficiently safe in a world where corners are always cut.
krunck 3mo ago
next generation nuclear energy = fusion
- pfdietz 3mo ago
  Fusion's main accomplishment will likely be to make fission look cheap in comparison, due to fundamental issues of power density in the nuclear island. Why make a huge complex low power density radioactive thing when you can make a much smaller simpler high power density radioactive thing?
rayiner 3mo ago
That's a political and economic question, not a scientific one. Science can provide input information, but the decision involves weighing all sorts of facts and considerations outside the scope of science.
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo ago
  Exactly. Waiting for a scientific consensus on a question that is very clearly not posed as a scientific question is oddly cultish
api 3mo ago
Both. We should be investing in all non carbon emitting sources and we should have been doing it since the 1970s when we figured out pretty conclusively that this would be a problem. Instead we had right wing fossil fuel shills on one shoulder and unscientific woo woo greens on the other, the net effect being that we kept burning more carbon. We still have them, Trump with “beautiful coal” and greens now opposing even solar power and batteries, but climate change is no longer possible to ignore. Some still manage it but those people are nuts. If we hadn’t stopped improving nuclear we’d probably have emitted half the CO2 we have. It would have become cheaper and safer and more scalable and then when China industrialized they would have copied that instead of burning so much coal. France with its nearly zero carbon grid is the existence proof. It wasn’t until the 2010s that solar and wind became grid scale in a big enough way to matter. That was too slow. Whether someone is at least open to nuclear power is my litmus test for whether they take climate change seriously. I do. If we hit 600, 800, 1000 ppm CO2, which is possible if the world keeps developing on the back of fossil fuels, we are entering existential risk territory. Earth has had those CO2 levels before, and higher, but our species was not alive then. We already passed the FAFO threshold for ppm CO2 and now we will FO. But that’s not X-risk yet. I’m talking about the next threshold, which may start around 600 but really kicks in near 1000. This is where you actually start asphyxiating. You get lowered IQ and impaired judgement to a small degree, but across the globe at a time when we really don’t need it.
tech_ken 3mo ago
It's more of an engineering call than something that can be purely determined from inductive reasoning. I think most engineers working in the space would say "both" are needed, but partisans exist on both sides.
nsonha 3mo ago
We're gonna need portable energy storage regardless of energy source, it's battery vs fuel. There is no such things as battery vs atomic core.

preisschild 4mo ago

Government should tax / provide incentives based on negative externalities such as environmental impact and let the free market decide https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20... I think a low carbon mix will result in the cheapest, most reliable and cleanest energy grid.

datakan 4mo ago

Both at the same time. I don't see how putting all our eggs in a single basket benefits us.

bevekspldnw 4mo ago

When it comes to avoiding the worst impacts of the current catastrophic path we’re on, “nothing will work, but everything might”. Do it all.

pfdietz 3mo ago
Nuclear is not on a trajectory to do more than supply a minor amount of world energy. A (say) 10% nuclear, 90% renewable world is not an easier challenge than a 100% renewable world -- the intermittency/seasonality issues aren't eased by having 10% nuclear running as baseload, and keeping it as backup makes its cost per kWh explode. Nuclear really has to go big (supply most of the world's energy) or go home. But supplying most of the world's energy means burner reactors are inadequate -- there isn't enough cheap uranium. Burner microreactors have even worse neutron economy, so this argument applies even more so to them.
- fssys 3mo ago
  nuclear takes longer to come online though vs renewables can be very quick, so it makes sense to do both as a short-long term strategy
  - pfdietz 3mo ago
    As the renewables quickly come online, they push down their experience curves and get cheaper, and the residual demand is increasingly intermittent. Both these considerations mean the economic environment will get worse for nuclear over time. I think this is why there's a rather frantic online push for nuclear: it's now or never for the nuclear bros.

Tade0 4mo ago

China does: all of the above, where it makes sense. Renewables and batteries to keep your AC, workplace EV charger, stove, pool heater and (since recently) green ammonia producer going, nuclear to prevent e.g. aluminium smelters from seizing up. Also the cheapest way to make renewables work 24/7 is to build HVDC lines - they cost as much as a highway per unit length and even undersea cables would deploy for less and faster than equivalent nuclear. The total length of HVDC lines just in China is currently more than 40k km, so they've literally deployed enough of them to wrap around the globe.

api 3mo ago
China is also still building coal and has passed Europe and will (if they don’t change course) soon pass the US and Canada and the other big ones on a per capita emitter basis. They already passed everyone as top emitter in an absolute sense. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Not saying they’re not also building renewables and nuclear, but it seems like the policy is more “build anything and everything to satisfy demand” than a focused effort. BTW: if you look at US emissions, the data center bubble hasn’t had much if any effect. They are still trending down. There’s reasons to dislike that industry but I’m sick of the mindless echo chamber doom on that issue. They’re not that significant in the grand scheme of things.
- atwrk 3mo ago
  Coal is already shrinking in the China (in absolute terms, not just as share of production) [1], and share of wind + solar is already larger than in the US [2], so I doubt China will ever reach US proportions in CO2 emissions per capita. An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3]. [1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=China&chart=trend&date=2025-01-01&date_from=2020-01-01&temporal_res=yearly https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... [2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=United+States&chart=trend&date=2025-01-01&date_from=2020-01-01&temporal_res=yearly https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... [3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/ https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

sehansen 4mo ago

If your location already has a well-run nuclear energy sector (Finland, Sweden, South Korea): invest in nuclear energy. If you don't: stick to renewables. And it also depends on what you mean by "we". As a Dane, I don't think us Danish taxpayers should invest in nuclear energy, but I'm perfectly happy that private Danish investors invest in Seaborg/Saltfoss and Copenhagen Atomics.

pfdietz 3mo ago

Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav Smil. But Smil used this argument to massively mispredict how solar would be go in the market. We don't hear him much anymore. Nuclear advocates increasingly resort to conspiracy theoretic reasoning to explain away the failure of their technology to compete. This should be a red flag.

rayiner 3mo ago
> The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry. We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.
- pfdietz 3mo ago
  We don't actually know how much that cost France, sine it was mixed in with their military nuclear effort. French auditors threw up their hands trying to figure out the actual costs. What we do know is their attempt to build more NPPs now has gone spectacularly tits up, with costs completely out of control. This should make one view their earlier efforts with great suspicion. Have they become much worse, or were earlier problems concealed?
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    Costs are out of control due to nuclear regulation.
    - pfdietz 3mo ago
      This is the conspiracy theory reasoning I was talking about. Nuclear is wonderful, but a global omnipotent green conspiracy has hobbled it. Or, maybe, it really is complicated and needs regulation to keep it sufficiently safe in a world where corners are always cut.

krunck 3mo ago

next generation nuclear energy = fusion

pfdietz 3mo ago
Fusion's main accomplishment will likely be to make fission look cheap in comparison, due to fundamental issues of power density in the nuclear island. Why make a huge complex low power density radioactive thing when you can make a much smaller simpler high power density radioactive thing?

rayiner 3mo ago

That's a political and economic question, not a scientific one. Science can provide input information, but the decision involves weighing all sorts of facts and considerations outside the scope of science.

mohamedkoubaa 3mo ago
Exactly. Waiting for a scientific consensus on a question that is very clearly not posed as a scientific question is oddly cultish

api 3mo ago

Both. We should be investing in all non carbon emitting sources and we should have been doing it since the 1970s when we figured out pretty conclusively that this would be a problem. Instead we had right wing fossil fuel shills on one shoulder and unscientific woo woo greens on the other, the net effect being that we kept burning more carbon. We still have them, Trump with “beautiful coal” and greens now opposing even solar power and batteries, but climate change is no longer possible to ignore. Some still manage it but those people are nuts. If we hadn’t stopped improving nuclear we’d probably have emitted half the CO2 we have. It would have become cheaper and safer and more scalable and then when China industrialized they would have copied that instead of burning so much coal. France with its nearly zero carbon grid is the existence proof. It wasn’t until the 2010s that solar and wind became grid scale in a big enough way to matter. That was too slow. Whether someone is at least open to nuclear power is my litmus test for whether they take climate change seriously. I do. If we hit 600, 800, 1000 ppm CO2, which is possible if the world keeps developing on the back of fossil fuels, we are entering existential risk territory. Earth has had those CO2 levels before, and higher, but our species was not alive then. We already passed the FAFO threshold for ppm CO2 and now we will FO. But that’s not X-risk yet. I’m talking about the next threshold, which may start around 600 but really kicks in near 1000. This is where you actually start asphyxiating. You get lowered IQ and impaired judgement to a small degree, but across the globe at a time when we really don’t need it.

tech_ken 3mo ago

It's more of an engineering call than something that can be purely determined from inductive reasoning. I think most engineers working in the space would say "both" are needed, but partisans exist on both sides.

nsonha 3mo ago

We're gonna need portable energy storage regardless of energy source, it's battery vs fuel. There is no such things as battery vs atomic core.