Former Google VP Starts a Company Promising Clean and Safe Nuclear Energy
bloomberg.com
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Here in the real world, you have to measure options against other real world options. The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal. Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There's lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we're talking about anywhere from 50-200% more. Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year, WHEN IT'S WORKING PROPERLY. That's the bar nuclear, and any other alternative baseload power source, has to beat. It doesn't have to failure proof, it doesn't have to have zero deaths. It just has to be significantly better than the alternatives.
Refusing to consider a power source unless it has zero deaths, zero radiation, zero side effects for all time, is living in a fantasy world. It's the paradigm promoted by the fossil fuel industry, and bought hook line and sinker by the dumber end of the environmentalist movement. And it keeps us from ever decreasing our power generation carbon footprint.
Sure, but... will this be the same in 10 years? 20? 50? Within merely the past 3 years, the amount of battery energy storage has expanded by a few orders of magnitude.
Because when you build a nuclear power plant, it takes a minimum of a decade to go from on paper to operation, and the operational life, which pays off the capex at the beginning, is hopefully, at least 50.
Nuclear power isn't agile. It has poor reactivity to future market changes. It costs billions to get up and running, and isn't modular. You can't commission it in 100MW increments. A solar power plant requires a dozen handy men and a couple of electrical engineers to maintain, a nuclear power plant requires a few dozen nuclear engineers. Solar power doesn't have publicly socialized decommissioning or waste storage costs.
I'm not trying to tell you nuclear doesn't have a future. What I am saying, with the likes of Tesla Energy and the rise in solar + battery storage, is that the energy grid is in for turbulent times in the next few decades. This makes the economics of nuclear questionable - we don't know if it is going to be economically viable in a few decades.
If I had $10b? I wouldn't touch the nuclear energy sector, personally.
Nuclear power stations are extremely modular, there are at least twenty of them circling australian waters as I type. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that.
These issues are not technical, they are political, and rooted in irrational bullshit propagated by stupid and irresponsible people.
Can I ask what specific requirements surrounding the development and operation around nuclear plants constitutes red tape in your opinion? My understanding is that most of the regulations concerning operation are in place to ensure the possibility of a disaster is minimized to nil.
> These issues are not technical, they are political
As expressed in my above comment, I would argue that nuclear power's problems are neither technical nor political, but nearly totally economic in nature. It's on the losing side of current trends.
We are past the point where we can entertain fictions like "economics" and "trends" and treat them like they were carved from the gaze of Kek on the buttoks of the whore of Babylon, towering over the trembling spirit of powerless men. Seriously "trends" "economics" wtf does that even mean ?
Chernobyl's second reactor is happily churning away in the middle of a wildlife paradise. If that is what the world's worst nuclear disaster has come to then I think we can have a good hard look at why a nuclear plant costs tens of billions of dollars, the majority costs sunk into compliance. Compliance required and inspired by irrational fears.
Would there be some shitty days for people and things outside the containment wall? You bet! But there wouldn't be any shitty nuclear days. In fact, I suspect radioactivity release would be worse with a coal plant crash as it would release the nasty stuff that we do manage to scrub out of the exhaust.
To be fair, submarines are an entirely different use case compared to public energy grid generation. The former requires high power density with low weight. Coal and solar don't tend to deliver that underwater. Nuclear is indeed one of the top choices for a submarine. The economic point I'm making isn't applicable twenty thousand leagues under the sea.
But it is applicable for conventional energy grid generation, and it performs poorly compared to solar and battery storage, so much so that the world is currently building several large nuclear power plant's worth of capacity annually with solar alone.
As you might guess, highly enriched uranium is trivial to make "dirty bombs" out of and a small step away from actual fission bombs. So it's avoided like plague in nuclear engineering unless it's absolutely performance critical and will be used in a highly secure place - like naval submarines & aircraft carriers.
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf
In addition, I think that pragmatism requires us to acknowledge that nuclear has too much of an image problem for it to be a serious contender for new investment in many countries. That investment will come up against all sorts of political and social pushback. Such pushback could blow out the time to build a new plant yet again, compounding your point about renewables/storage progress that occurs in the meantime. Germany is shutting down its few nuclear plants in favour of new coal ones. If that doesn't demonstrate an image problem, I don't know what does. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation.
I think those countries that have succeeded with nuclear power over the last few decades have done well, and should continue. Electricity prices in France are very cheap compared to Germany (I've lived in both places recently), and their emissions from power generation are tiny compared to their neighbours: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/el... . I wish my country, Australia, had jumped on board with nuclear decades ago. We have the uranium, we have the space, and we have a horrid attachment to coal that we need to be rid of.
But for countries like Australia without an existing nuclear apparatus, its difficult to justify the investment when there are much more politically acceptable places for that money to go, with much quicker results. Places which are rapidly decreasing in cost, and are part of an industry currently undergoing massive research and investment across the world, guaranteeing further improvements.
The flip side for me, though, is that even 50 years from now when renewables and storage are prevalent and fantastic, we will still need some form of base load power. We don't want it to be coal. But then, how many governments bother planning for the long term future these days? Mine sure as hell doesn't.
That's a cop out or a serious mark against democracy. Energy is fundamental to civilization. Making the wrong move in this domain can put a society at a permanent disadvantage to others. If nuclear is indeed a better option, the pragmatic path is to pitch the evidence.
A) Nuclear power is not available to all countries
B) No country operates in isolation. so e.g. if Australia decided to convert 100% to nuclear energy but other countries opposed it, they could impose sanctions (e.g.)
More broadly, I can think of two notable examples from the past twelve months where strong democracies made insanely bad decisions despite strong evidence suggesting they shouldn't.
From an Australian perspective, we've had multiple long-term initiatives implemented by a government only to have the opposition rail against them (and eventually, repeal them) for no real reason beyond party differentiation. Long term projects often can't survive election cycles.
With renewables and storage we seem to have an active industry with broad support across the populace, and the only real political differentiation involved is at what pace to set. Having something we can actually do right now seems wiser than trying to get something off the ground which has a strong chance of going nowhere.
Yes, our democracies are quite broken. We need to try and make progress regardless, because we can't sit and wait around until they're working better.
It is way easier to commit attacks using chemical weapons or anthrax or conventional bombs, or to set off a dirty bomb with imported radioactive material than to breach a western European nuclear plant.
Unless you happen to be one of the recent terrorists who committed attacks in Europe, and be employed in a nuclear powerplant.
Then things can quickly go wrong.
One of my primary concerns with nuclear power is that it's very much dependent on the actual order of things carrying on as usual, meaning stable Governments, skilled technicians available etc. What would have happened if Syria (a secular state until not that long ago) had had civilian nuclear plants? Answer: they would most probably have fallen under the hands of either ISIS or an Al-Qaida offshoot. We had the same issue after the Soviet Union collapsed. Had the political uncertainty and power vacuum continued for much longer into the '90s then nobody knows what could have happened to their civil nuclear plants.
Is this a serious question? Conventional weapons are a lot less deadly if captured by the wrong people compared to nuclear-based installations.
The point I'm aiming at is that nuclear weapons are (still) something expensive, hard to make, and useful only for nation states with large military budgets. Going for dirty bombs would be a better strategy for terrorists.
The second point I'm aiming at is that nuclear is not as scary as Hollywood seems to have made us believe.
> The point I'm aiming at is that nuclear weapons are (still) something expensive, hard to make, and useful only for nation states with large military budgets.
The fissile material is quite expensive, and requires a state-level actor's resources or cooperation to create or obtain. You're not going to take fuel directly out of a reactor and use it in a proper bomb. If that's the point you were trying to make, okay.
On the other hand, a simple bomb is not difficult to make given the necessary, weapons-grade material. I cannot even imagine why you think a terrorist organization would not find such a device useful.
Coal isn't like this. If you stop needing power, you stop feeding it coal, and the machinery can sit there idle, doing no further harm.
I'm not a coal-booster, but I absolutely see the concern about regime change and commitment to the safety of a nuclear installation. Between Trump and Brexit, how confident are we that even first world nations are capable of taking on the long term responsibility for such a project?
Extremely.
IANANS (..Not a Nuclear Scientist ) but this seems like a feature, not a bug.
While Solar and other renewables are pretty awesome and we should continue investing in them, I also think it makes a LOT of sense to invest in nuclear energy, get off dirty coal completely (e.g. France) and then transition from Nuclear to other sources as and when they become available. Because right now the biggest greenhouse gas emissions (AFAIK) are from coal power plants and vehicles; the latter we seem to have a promising solution (electric vehicles).
At this point safety is a non issue with nuclear it just needs dramatically lower costs or somewhat lower costs and vastly increased flexibility. The problem is heat engines cool down when you stop producing power and they both have huge thermal loads vs natural gas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
If you read the article you'll see that this company plans to produce modular reactors starting at only 5 MW.
Many of the innovative new nuclear startups, like ThorCon and Terrestrial Energy have similar plans. Also, since the plan is to mass produce standardized reactors a whole lot of the regulatory burden associated with the current approach of "one off" construction is avoided.
"A solar power plant requires a dozen handy men and a couple of electrical engineers to maintain, a nuclear power plant requires a few dozen nuclear engineers."
The next generation of modular nuclear reactors will require few or no specialists constantly on site. They also don't require water cooling, so siting options are much more flexible.
"Solar power doesn't have publicly socialized decommissioning or waste storage costs."
Solar power does have externalities having to do with mining, processing and manufacturing. Also, solar requires large tracts of land at utility scale, is intermittent, and unsuitable at higher latitudes. It is currently a good bit more expensive than nuclear will be once modular reactors are being produced.
Solar has significant downsides.
If we were rational we'd be saying that it's currently too safe and too expensive and we should be compromising on safety to get an overall benefit (through reduced CO2 emissions and reduced radiation from burning coal).
I think at this point it's just considered a dirty word and is probably unrecoverable. If we can make fusion work then the benefit won't just be that it's better but that it's a new brand. There'll still be nuclear waste (you can't prevent radioactivation when you have neutrons), but it'll fusion waste rather than nuclear waste.
People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that.
You raise an important point: human irrationality is as real as climate change. And probably more challenging.
We might more quickly tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling human irrationality.
It's a shame that more of the best and brightest minds don't enter the (messy)fields of behavioral science - where progress is much less impressive of late than in technology IMHO.
I don't fully understand this argument: A well-maintained nuclear power plant emits next to no radioactivity (compared to the natural background), so a coal plant that emits even a huge factor more radioactivity is still negligible.
I feel like the absolute number (x times more radioactive than nuclear) is really not helpful, if one of the numbers is (just as an example) 0.0001% of natural background, and the other is 0.001% of it.
The point is that even if you see these failures as inevitable going forwards, coal is the larger radiation threat too, even though the radiation threat from coal is tiny compared to the vast numbers of dead due to respiratory illnesses caused by coal.
Peak was near 60% in late 80's and it's dropped 30%. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392. Current issue is it's more expencive than wind and not viable as peaking power, just like Nuclear making this a non starter.
Natural gas is the primary fossil fuel alternative, and it burns clean.
Are there some really blatant and easy to digest articles explaining coal? Eg, 800,000 deaths sounds big, and while i don't agree with my coworker, i assume those deaths are far more subtle and debatable. To be clear, i'm not trying to defend coal, i just want to provide him with some clear and irrefutable evidence.
Maybe that is due to some fault in the way non-nuclear liability is calculated. Or, just maybe, the environmental and economic destruction that happens when nuclear plants suffer major malfunctions, especially when their operation is extended past the initial designed lifespan, is so large it is impossible to insure in a way that makes economic sense.
Umm... source? Clean Air Task Force puts U.S. deaths at 13K/year.[1]
Obviously the concern with nuclear is not that it needs to achieve "zero deaths". That is a straw man argument. It's Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. and waste.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
I think there's two reasons for this:
1. People trust the familiar.
2. An event with a plane is likely to be catastrophic.
Both of th set factors work against nuclear power too. Between Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, no one is going to trust it or want it in their backyard. That's a problem because nuclear plants need water and that puts them near people.
Then add in distrust of companies to run them properly, th spent fuel storage problem and this logistics chain that creates the opportunity for malfeasance (i.e. Terrorists getting their hand on materials for a dirty bomb) and its almost I,possible.
So it doesn't matter what coal does or doesn't do, people are used to it and catastrophic failure scenarios are greatly diminished.
Renewable sourc s that create fuel you can use elsewhere are currently cost prohibitive (i.e. It's more expensiv than drilling for oil or digging up coal) but the cost is co,king down. This provides a ceiling on just how expensive traditional power generation can get.
The important facts that are left unsaid are: when current nuclear goes bad it goes VERY bad indeed; the intermittent powers sources of wind and solar are much less intermittent in aggregate when their geographical dispersion is large enough; the costs of both solar and wind are declining rapidly while nuclear costs are not; widely distributed storage batteries will be come more common as their price continues to decrease and the grid will strengthen in proportion.
Solar and wind have the added important advantage that capacity can be added incrementally whereas nuclear is one huge, wildly expensive project at a time.
I'm not against nuclear in principle. The problem is not, as stated, the unreasonable condition that it has to be 100% safe. The problem is that the risks have to be reasonably limited when something does go wrong. Nuclear fails that requirement.
If there was not a viable alternative to nuclear then sure, nuclear would be a necessity. As it is, nuclear's viability window has closed, at least for now.
When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations. Even Chernobyl wasn't that bad (compare to e.g. hydroelectric dam failures).
As for solar power, I hope what you say is true; I still wonder what's their EROI and real carbon footprint, when you correct for the subsidies (which are fine as means to get solar running, but not fine for calculations of impact on climate and energy security).
Doesn't that imply to some degree that the "isn't that bad" is because we have people to stop it from going really bad when it goes bad? I can't help but feel what's missing from the assessment is the various levels of failures of each technology, how much intervention is required if any to keep it to that failure level, and how likely that failure level is. We're all talking about probability of outcomes but we still seem to be leaving out essential information.
The space factor is also at play when you look at geographical dispersion. It's one thing for Australia or the US to have enough solar and wind farms around the country where conditions vary, but what about the UK? A cloudy winter with hardly any sun means they are left with wind, and a day with little wind across a geographical area the size of the UK is not uncommon. It has happened for some lengthy periods, in fact: http://euanmearns.com/flat-calm-across-the-uk/. No storage solutions proposed so far have the longevity needed for the odd extended calm+dark spell.
Europe is at least fortunate enough to have an international electricity market across its internal borders to help manage this, but that largely works because of France's nuclear plants. It is the largest electricity exporter in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
What if the nuclear facility were surrounded by a human-forbidden nature preserve the size of the equivalently producing solar/wind farm?
For this reason, people vastly outweigh the risks of nuclear meltdown, terrorist attack, plane crash, child abduction, etc. So people are easily swayed to oppose nuclear development by fossil-fuel lobbying.
Since the government must give approval for nuclear plants, their development becomes a political issue, replete with fear-mongering and NIMBYism.
You're citing facts and calling for a balance of risk / reward for energy production, which is noble and should convince the HN crowd. But the reality of nuclear power is that it's political, and facts and politics do not cross paths very often :-)
The way to change public opinion is through education, so I suggest every go and watch Pandora's Promise, which is an excellent documentary about nuclear power.
I think a lot of people have irrational fear about nuclear and nothing short of a miracle will change that.
Completely overlooked is the number of accidents prevented because of the technology.
Just recently when the guy in Florida was killed while the car was driving under autopilot there was news story after news story about the dangers of it, how it should be outlawed.
To have it 'their way' we could never permit self driving cars until there was a 0% chance of malfunction or accident.
That would be like outlawing seatbelts because on 0.1% of crashes they might cause more injury.
Thankfully reason mostly prevailed in the car "autopilot" battle.
Hopefully reason will eventually prevail in the nuclear power battle.
Nuclear weapons are the only stupid reason why we will leave many unsolvable nuclear waste problems to our children - because of psychotic war-fetishists and primitive anti-social whoriticians.
Luckily the discussions are already won around the globe: renewable energy is the future, no matter how retarded any government will be that US citizens choose to lead "their country".
Of course old school lobbyists that have siphoned billions of dollars selling a failed and plain stupid technology will not just disappear, they will do everything to keep their positions selling their old ideas as "new and clean" and will be an extremely annoying obstacle to human progress for a long time, unfortunately.
But every initiative from these old greedy hateful minority will produce an even stronger impulse of reaction by the open-minded and peace-loving young people that are working hard to establish renewable energy systems around the world.
The time of the anti-social egoist-monkey has gone in most parts of the world.
Most energy development "in the real world" is financially driven. This applies even when other political objectives exist. The uncertainty in costs of nuclear are a serious issue that makes renewables seem like the pragmatic solution.
That kind of phrasing always bothers me. It's not a matter of belief, it's science.
I'd wager a climate change doubter has no faith crisis when relying on relativity to get an acurate GPS location for their Uber.
It also potentially engages people who continue to think it's a subject of belief. That may provide an opportunity to educate them.
Unless you have performed all of the science yourself, all the way "down to the turtles," belief--faith--is involved. You have faith that the chain of science is complete, that each person along the chain has done their part correctly, and that nothing significant has been omitted.
It's especially a matter of belief if you are relying on computer models--nay, the claims about computer models. You trust that these models were written by people with integrity, who would not adjust them to achieve a desired outcome, and who are competent enough to do it correctly. Or do you have access to the source code, and a huge cluster to run it on? If you take these claims at face value, that's faith--by definition.
2) This CO2 does not magically disappear. We can measure it.
3) We know how CO2 interacts with infrared radiation. You can test it yourself with an FTIR machine.
This is all extremely simple. The computer models are just about getting some precision about the broad cause and effect which is utterly obvious to anyone who knows a little physics.
Because anthropogenic CO2 is a tiny fraction of oceanogenic CO2. It's like sneezing into the wind: it does not change the direction of the wind.
We are breaking the equilibrium.
What equilibrium? Equilibrium would imply a stable climate, but the climate has been changing for millions of years, long before humans arrived. Are you saying that the climate wouldn't change without humans?
Really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink
> Oceans are at present CO2 sinks, and represent the largest active carbon sink on Earth, absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air.
Next time you want to equivocate, at least try something that can't be falsified by ten seconds of Googling.
| | | Sources | |
| Gas (million metric tons of gas) | Natural | Human-Made | Total |
|----------------------------------+---------+------------+---------|
| Carbon Dioxide | 770,000 | 23,100 | 793,100 |
So I found your table in Table 3 of here:
http://www2.bren.ucsb.edu/~keller/courses/esm202/DOE_US_GHG2...
And you seemed to have cut off two more columns:
Absorption | Annual Increase in Gas in the Atmosphere
-----------------------------------------------------
781,400 | 11,700
I cut them off because they are irrelevant. My point remains: anthropogenic CO2 emissions are approximately 3% of natural emissions. Natural variation in natural emissions utterly dwarfs human emissions. Were the climate so sensitive to +/- 3%, we would not even exist today, because the climate would have gone to an extreme and stayed there millions of years ago. This is a very simple matter of scale and historical data that grossly exceeds human timescales. To think that human CO2 emissions are breaking the planet is ludicrous.
If it were simple there would be one model. There are dozens upon dozens.
There is a consensus that some global warming is happening, there really isn't a consensus on how much other than fairly large ranges calculated by the IPCC.
One is ideological and almost by definition cannot be observed. The other one involves things that can be observed where our faith is our trust of the well credentialed individuals who observe them.
You can choose not to have faith in the second one, but that doesn't make it not real.
What you're saying if you're denying global warming is that you don't trust the thousands upon thousands of trained scientists observing it. That doesn't make it not true whether you believe in it or not.
well credentialed individuals who observe them...You can choose not to have faith in the second one, but that doesn't make it not real...thousands upon thousands of trained scientists...
So, we could quibble over numbers, but there are two problems:
1. You're relying on argument from authority. How is this any different from an ancient person trusting the word of a priest? How is a scientist walking in and saying, "My computer model shows x, therefore it is so" different from an ancient priest walking in and saying, "The gods told me x, therefore it is so"? From the perspective of a non-scientist or non-priest, there is no difference; you cannot verify their claims. If you believe them, you operate on faith.
2. As the history of science testifies, science makes many missteps. For all your talk of credentials, one would think you'd give credence to some of the most credentialed scientists in history, who pointed out that science is not a matter of consensus, that only one correct dissent is required to disprove any hypothesis. Given that, how many dissenting scientists do you require to conclude that the matter is not settled beyond debate? There are many highly credentialed scientists who do dissent on this matter.
denying global warming
Finally, this is muddled thinking. The phrase "denying global warming" is both vague and loaded. Besides, isn't the correct term "climate change"?
The rigor of science says that climate change (global warming) is a real thing. Call it whatever you want.
> I simply believe that science is put to a much higher rigor and standard than any religion or philosophy out there, period. You obviously don't believe that.
Your claim is too general to be useful. What kind of science? Carried out by whom? Under what circumstances?
What I believe is simple: 1) Science is carried out by humans; 2) Humans are fallible; therefore 3) Science is fallible. This is supported by even articles posted here on HN recently, which discuss the corruption of the peer review process.
Tell me, do you honestly believe that science is infallible? That we can trust whatever any scientist says about anything? Or do you believe that if the percentage of scientists that claims x is greater than 50% then it must be so? Or some other arbitrary percentage? That would be simply illogical, as history shows many examples of the majority of scientists being wrong about something.
If you believe that science is above corruption, you have greater faith than most religious people do in their religions.
Finally, you completely ignored my second point: "How many dissenting scientists do you require to conclude that the matter is not settled beyond debate?" It's a simple question; will you answer it?
Or, when presented with a point that challenges your presuppositions, will you ignore it instead of wrestling with it? I can't take you seriously if you do the latter.
You're asking for sources and claiming my argument is too general, yet you provided nothing of the sort for your own original argument. I could link you the hundreds upon thousands of scientific reports/sources that support climate change/global warming, but I'm not going to do that and condone the constant goalpost moving you demonstrate in every discussion I've seen you have on HN.
At this point in time, if you aren't taking the minimal amount of responsibility needed to listen to what is likely one of the most important problems of our lifetime, you have your head stuck in the sand. That's a true disappointment because it seems that you have the intelligence necessary to comprehend it.
Me coming up with a few sources isn't going to fix your willingness to be ignorant on this issue and not get with the program. It's too late for you.
This isn't faith. This is common sense and critical thinking.
Two issues here:
1. You have still missed my point about how faith relates to science and understanding. Please, read it more carefully and try to understand what I'm saying.
2. Regarding your claim that science is always more reliable than religion, you are neglecting a crucial problem: there are issues about which science, by definition, cannot provide answers. I don't know if you are unaware of this, disagree with it, or are just taking it for granted, but you are riding roughshod over this crucially important point. It must not be taken for granted in a discussion about the reliability and utility of science.
> You're asking for sources
I just reread my previous comment, and nowhere did I ask for any sources. What are you talking about?
> and claiming my argument is too general
In the last comment I asked three simple questions:
"What kind of science? Carried out by whom? Under what circumstances?"
In the comment before that I asked another very simple question:
""How many dissenting scientists do you require to conclude that the matter is not settled beyond debate?"
Are you actually unwilling to answer them? These are not trick questions designed to trap you--they are simply intended to clarify the argument so we don't talk past each other. If you refuse to answer them, you must not be willing to have a serious discussion.
> yet you provided nothing of the sort for your own original argument
Please be more specific. I'm willing to have a serious discussion with you, and, within reason, I'm willing to find sources for my claims. (Note: no one else is watching this conversation. It's just you and me now. My only interest is in the truth.)
> I could link you the hundreds upon thousands of scientific reports/sources that support climate change/global warming
There's no need to do that; I'm well aware of how numerous they are. Please understand this: that is not the issue.
Something that is at issue is the vagueness of your claims. For example, "support climate change/global warming" is not a specific claim: do you mean that they support the claim that the climate is changing? That the globe is warming? Or do you mean they support the claim that humans are the primary cause of climate change and/or global warming? These are two distinct claims, and failure to distinguish between them is a chief reason that most discussions about the issue fail to get anywhere.
> but I'm not going to do that and condone the constant goalpost moving you demonstrate in every discussion I've seen you have on HN.
Frankly, when I read this kind of statement from you, I begin to feel like you're not discussing in good faith. I am not digging through your comment history to make ad hominems. I am trying to make specific points, regardless of who I am speaking with. Adding to that the fact that you are ignoring my very simple, specific questions and instead making personal attacks and implying malfeasance on my part--this makes it very hard to give you the benefit of the doubt.
> At this point in time, if you aren't taking the minimal amount of responsibility needed to listen to what is likely one of the most important problems of our lifetime, you have your head stuck in the sand. That's a true disappointment because it seems that you have the intelligence necessary to comprehend it.
Thanks for that backwards compliment! Well, not really, because you also insulted me and made a completely unfounded assumption about me.
You see, by jumping to the conclusion that I have not done any research, and doing so in a way that implies irresponsibility on my part, you have revealed your enormous personal bias on the topic. In your mind, anyone who disagrees with you is willfully ignorant, lacks common sense, and is unable to think critically. These are your words, not mine. This intellectual hubris is quite common today, and it's largely responsible for the inability to have calm, rational discussions and disagreements about anything important.
Please note that I have not insulted you or accused you of failures or flaws in character just because you disagree with me. I have asked simple, straightforward questions, and instead of answering them, you have resorted to personal attacks. Tell me, if you were an impartial observer of our discussion, which one of us would you accuse of willful ignorance and lack of critical thinking? Which one of us would you say was acting close-mindedly?
It just floors me that you imply that you are such a rational, objective, critical thinker, and explicitly accuse me of being the opposite, yet you're the one dodging my questions and refusing to have a simple, calm, rational discussion.
It's an interesting paradox: from one perspective, you have great faith, because you don't consider it necessary to entertain any challenges to your beliefs--you accept them at face value. On the other hand, if you refuse to entertain any challenges to your beliefs, how secure are you in them, really? Do you refuse to challenge them because you have underlying doubts and fear what it would mean if they were found untrue? Are you so emotionally invested in them, are they such a part of your identity, that you cannot see past them?
I don't know what's in your heart; only you do. But if you are really interested in the truth, then I welcome further discussion with you.
I can, however, check the results it gives me and have a degree of confidence based on its accuracy and consistency.
We do just that with climate data and models.
People choose to challenge some aspects of science when it clashes with their interests or system of beliefs while completely relying on others when it's convenient. Even though the process by which scientific knowledge is produced is the very same. That's not only illogical, that's hypocrisy.
There are a variety of arguments to make here, from the flaws in individual models, to the secrecy of source code, manipulation of data, politics, historical examples of incorrect scientific conclusions, and the general fallibility of humans (who perform the science).
But bother with any of those when you are claiming that, if software exists which ostensibly intends to perform a task, it must necessarily do so correctly. And then you accuse others of illogic and selective acceptance of science. That's just...bizarre. In the context of discussing belief vs. knowledge, that smacks of what one might call a "true believer."
Sorry, but how is this point relevant to the discussion?
> more broadly, that one does not need to execute every step of a process in order to have confidence in its results.
That is broad, indeed. I should hope that, before reaching conclusions and making claims and calls to action that would result in the poverty of billions, one would take pains to verify every step of the process used to reach those conclusions.
Of course, what constitutes "verification" is a matter of opinion. To some, the models are sufficient. To others, they are grossly insufficient and have not proven accurate looking forward nor backward. It is a mystery why they continue to be asserted as proof.
By adding uranium you don't need to get net power from fusion alone, which is really hard.
The extremely high-energy neutrons from D-T fusion can fission U238, not just the scarce U235, which means you don't need enrichment and you get very little long-term waste.
By having the fusion reactor as a neutron source, you can use subcritical amounts of uranium, so there's no chance of a runaway reaction. If something goes wrong with the fusion reactor it just stops, and without the fusion neutrons the fission shuts down too.
I understand from other peoples' comments that the project aims to commercialize some kind of fission-fusion hybrid technology where fission reactions kick-start fusion reactions. That's (potentially) cool, but I'd have expected the article to tell me this.
Misleading/sensationalized news articles are just normal "news", as judged by the past 200 years.
I still feel sad for the morons who think that the end of the "war on coal" will bring any semblance of Glory back to coal towns. When all is said and done they still need help.
he is strong promoter of speed when developing business: https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/best-strategy-is-speed...
I am looking forward to what he achieves with his new journey.
21/4: 8.15 AM pitch DFJ 4 pm get term sheet. Dev team gives notice to current jobs.
Wow am truly amazed.
Don't speedy startup types typically get frustrated when faced with the real world?
Sources describe most of X’s public projects — Project Loon, drones, robotics and wind energy kites — as rudderless. [...] Mike Cassidy, who stepped down from Loon, ran the team “like a fire drill,” a former employee said.
Disclaimer: Google employee.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion%E2%80%93fission...
This startup is about nuclear fusion, which may be able to deliver 'clean, safe, limitless energy" ( https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/02/after-60... ). It has been researched for ages, but it was unclear whether it can deliver. If that works eventually, it would be a big thing.
Point is, according to my reading the IFR promised clean energy which is much safer than light water reactors in 1994 not X years into the future.
I suppose the article is written from a pro IFR pov, but assuming lobby powers at play I'm sure it could have been worked around for everyone to benefit from a cleaner energy source.
1) https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=8e59e11...
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8
3) http://www.thepolywellblog.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-gets-i...
I just think the production of Pu239 should enter the rational discussion of nuclear energy.
EDIT: fixed grammar
This is what annoys me so much. We fuck over a cubic mile and never have to worry about energy for like a million years.
[ ((1 mile)^3) / ((30 meters)^3) = 154 377.105 according to google ]
That is a very good thing!
I get it, you can't start a fusion company without R&D so there will be some anyways, but I feel like the research angle needs some love too. I am pretty sure we haven't understood everything there is to understand, and it won't hurt.
Tangential thought, CERN has crazy amount of data. Do you think Machine Learning has any role in nuclear/particle physics?
Of course, they also said that about rockets and look where SpaceX is, but there definitely are a lot of bears on the road.
Ehhhhhh....I hate to bring this up repeatedly but SpaceX would not exist without NASA. Which brings us to the role of government in research: its not necessarily to own everything, but it is provide incentives in one way or the other. To create a Market where none existed previously.
Absolutely, its an integrated part of anything from physics analysis to detector alignment and accelerator control.
Tools of the trade: https://root.cern.ch http://tmva.sourceforge.net (Former particle physicist at CERN)
The article is about new companies which are trying to develop nuclear fusion tech. Doesn't that completely change the cost benefit analysis?
Nuclear is the best source of large scale energy IF safety were guaranteed. The safety of nuclear energy seems like a solvable engineering problem -- a difficult problem certainly, but then again so was manned space flight.
I am not saying solar and wind are worse than fossil fuels -- but I am saying that nuclear could be the future. Combining nuclear generation with advanced batteries seems to be an ideal energy future.
Are you for real?
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-dea...
Really? I've yet to come across a family that's going to the park on Sunday to gather wild bird eggs for food to be honest. I'm sure there's some nature lovers out there that do it but I'm having a hard time seeing the average city dweller making a dent in that statistic.
>Another major consumer of wild birds eggs are humans - all those people in city parks and other places around gathering wild birds eggs for food.
Maybe not enough funds were invested, too bad their runway was so short.
They almost delivered.
There was some small scale experiments, to have a fully working industrial prototype, the amount of problem to solve is just colossal. I think 40+ years is a much more reasonable guess. The thing is we don't even have a realistic timeline for those, because even that requires more research. We need way more data to say something about LFTR.
Fusion on the other hand has an estimate timeline. If everything goes well with ITER, DEMO should be operational around 2040-2050+. And actual power plants will use DEMO design. That's what we know today. With more research, we could find better design and faster ways to get fusion (Wendelstein 7-X) or we can find more trouble along the way.
It's hard to take such estimates seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIDytUCRtTA
fusion's is money and scientific discovery.
That's not really a good reason not to invest in something potentialy world-changing