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Comment by Hongwei | Hacker News Reader

"The proposal opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology." Ugh

Do you see nuclear as a stopgap between coal and renewable, or do you think that 100% renewable is not going to be possible?

I'm with you as being pretty pro nuclear, but if I'm making a plan to spend $16T, why even bother with half measures; just go straight for the future ideal.

Nuclear is the "future ideal". Non intermittent power means no need for complex and costly energy storage. Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated, and scientists have found cost-effective ways of producing it (not quite as cost effective as mining at the moment, but enough to supplant it once the mining capacity is exhausted).

Why bother with energy storage if we can just deliver enough capacity to meet peak demand 24/7 and use the excess energy to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere during non-peak hours? If we don't just want to stop emitting CO2 but actually reverse climate change, then we need truly immense amounts of energy.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

2. https://newatlas.com/nuclear-uranium-seawater-fibers/55033/

Not only that, but modern nuclear technology, especially closed cycle breed reactors of various types, not only produce far less waste and more energy per unit than the old-school enriched uranium reactors, but the waste is safer, and they can be smaller, far more geographically diverse, and cost a fraction of the equivalent for the same output in renewables when infrastructure and maintenance is fully taken into account.

You can replace all current nuclear generation in the US with solar and batteries in less than 2 years, for a lower cost (nuclear generators take at least 10 years to build, and almost always go over budget; some are never finished and abandoned [See Duke in Florida, ratepayers got soaked on a nuclear plant they gave up on]). Your point is spot on.

Nuclear lost (for commercial generation; edge cases like the Arctic circle and marine applications are still valid). It’s time we get over it and build as much solar, wind, and batteries as we can, and get Americans trained to deploy these technologies. Anything else is deck chairs on the Titanic. Drive out fossil fuel use through any means necessary.

Nuclear only lost because the government picks winners and losers. Wind and solar are getting subsidies. France manages to produce its electricity at 1/10th the cost as Germany, while also emitting less C02 because of its investment in nuclear power.

American nuclear plants tended to be one-off projects of unique designs. This is drastically less cost efficient than what the French did, design a handful of standardized designs and do serial production.

France heavily subsidizes their nuclear fleet operator (EDF), and continues to own 85% of the company. No one wants to wait decades for ROI on funding a nuclear power plant, and no one (besides governments) will insure them from black swan events.

Everyone gets subsidies, provide them wisely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Fra...

And we're heavily subsidizing wind and solar - it's just as much of a black swan event. The market will always pick the most cost effective power generation: fossil fuels. And for what it's worth, ~70 billion Euros of debt in order to bring a country like France up to ~70-80% nuclear electricity generation is dirt cheap compared to this $16 trillion dollar plan.

If the government is going to pick our power source, then there's little justification not to choose the source that is more cost effective and does not require complex energy storage.

The main reason I see why democrats stay away from nuclear power is twofold. One, nuclear plant operators are typically traditional power companies and thus Republican donors. Democrats don't want to give contracts to the people that fund their political opponents. Second, the cost efficiency of nuclear power in the long term mens that it won't result in as many jobs. The reality the emphasis on the phrase "Green New Deal" is on the latter two words. These plans are promising 10-20 million jobs. These are federal jobs programs with the word "green" prepended to them.

Just wait for the first blackout caused by careless implementation of renewables.

Ehh, so install some battery storage. It’s not like we’re going to reverse course because of mistakes made along the way.

I feel like all the waste created from those batteries (since wind and solar can't meet peek demand) will ultimately be worse for the environment than any waste created by modern nuclear technology. If you compare the waste created by the two at the scale needed to cover peek demand, nuclear actually creates less.

Yes, batteries can be recycled[1], but from what I've seen, many of the efficiency figures are grossly overstated (or absolute best-case scenarios rarely seen in practice).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling

Do you mean, replace just the nuclear with solar in 2 years, but keep the rest of the infra (Coal and other source of power generation) as is?

If so, it can only mean exponentially more coal/gas power generation to supply power during peak demand. How does that help?

Coal is going away regardless due to it not being competitive against natural gas, no solar required. I’m saying nuclear should stick around until it’s the last base load left, but not bother building one more nuclear generating unit. Safely extend operating licenses whenever possible.

Batteries and their lower costs will meet us at peaking needs in 3-5 years. There are hundreds of GWs of battery manufacturing capacity coming online over that time frame. Every million Tesla EVs is 10GW of controllable battery storage load on demand (example used only because I’m familiar with their presentation on it, and have seen it’s orchestration demo).

I agree

Natural gas burns fairly clean and will likely be supplanted by as better gridscale storage technologies reach the market (which will happen now that demand is there). Coal is on its way out anyways because it can't compete with natural gas. Coal is more expensive than natural gas and the plants are more expensive to operate and can't react to demand as quickly (you can turn a gas valve faster than you can light coal). Coal will silently vanish as existing plants reach the end of their life and no new ones are built.

You are arguing that we should keep burning (400.000-1M years old technology) instead of using nuclear fission (70 years old tech) because natural gas burns fairly clean?

Maybe it depends on the country. USA have enough heavy sun areas to go full. But in France people think it's gonna be just too irregular to be the main generation.

“Europe Could Power The Entire World With Onshore Wind Farms Alone” (2019)

https://www.sciencealert.com/europe-could-power-the-entire-w...

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/id...

I’ve also seen a proposal to transmit electricity from Northern Africa solar generation to Europe, but nothing has come of it.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161129-the-colossal-africa... (2016)

nobody wants to depend on another continent for energy, let's be realistic

The point was there’s enough renewables everywhere. You don’t have to rely on another continent if you don’t want to. No more energy geopolitics.

It’s absolutely silly to keep arguing against renewables. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in an hour to power humanity for a year. The wind blows almost everywhere.

I mentioned something about irregular sunlight being a problem in some countries.

I didn't do the math, but some dudes (officially half pro nuclear) say that you cannot run industries on "maybe sun will power your furnace today".

It’s certainly not sustainable. We can’t handle the radioactive waste we already have unless there are some massive overhauls.

You are right, we cannot handle the nuclear waste from coal power plants. As far as nuclear waste from nuclear power plants go we can handle those very well because the volume is significantly less and there are very strict rules how to handle it.

Does nuclear waste really take up that much space? My understanding was that it's negligible for the amount of power it provides.

It does not. Nuclear waste is incredibly easy to safely store. Dig a deep hole, encase the waste in concrete, and bury it in a remote location (or in a location already poisoned by nuclear weapons testing). There are digs in Finland and Yucca mountain that have enough capacity for generations. And if that's still not enough room >98% of waste can be reprocessed. France does this, and their total volume of nuclear waste in only a few cubic meters.

The hypothetical scenarios in which nuclear waste can contaminate humans are borderline hyperbolic. Yes, if society collapses and all records of disposal sites are lost, and if some future civilization digs a mile deep in a location with no natural resources, and if they crack open a nuclear waste casked, and if they manage to do all this without knowledge of radiation then they will be irradiated.

> There are digs in Finland and Yucca mountain that have enough capacity for generations.

All we need is safe transport across large distances? It's not something we're very good at..

No, it's actually quite simple. Encase the waste in concrete, and ship it in a shipping container [1]. The concrete caskets have enough radiation shielding that it is not dangerous to stand near them. Burying the waste is really just a safeguard against potential long-term leakage.

1. These concrete caskets look like this: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/avery-w2/images...

Meanwhile,

> An average of 1,390 containers have been lost at sea each year over the past three years, [...]

To be more explicit, that is 1,390 containers per year out of all shipping containers shipped in a given year. That's a fairly low failure rate. And most waste doesn't need to be shipped overseas, just within continents.

And besides, losing one (or even dozens) of these caskets at sea will not result in any noticeable increase in radiation. Multiple nuclear powered summaries have sunk with fuel still in their reactors.

The point remains: nuclear waste is a non-issue, and it is extremely difficult to use it as an objection to nuclear energy in an intellectually honest manner.

It seems like an objective fact that we cannot handle nuclear waste, at least in the US. IMO you have to consider the political situation as part of the whole system. If we as a society cannot deal with having nuclear waste repositories in our backyard, it is irresponsible to create more nuclear waste.

This argument amounts to: "People freak out about nuclear waste. Therefore nuclear waste is bad even if it's not bad."

Handling it takes money and effort no one wants to spend. John Oliver covered the situation a couple years back [0].

[0] https://time.com/4908330/john-oliver-nuclear-waste-last-week...

Why then would people "want to spend" money and effort on handling the waste created by batteries? Let's be fair about the stick we're using to measure people's environmental altruism - it cuts both ways.

I'm for nuclear energy as it gets us away from coal the most reliably, but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. Not only that, but we'd actually be willing to share those green solutions around the world.

> but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it.

2 questions:

Don't huge windfarms affect the local climate and wildlife? Afaik we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms.

Have we solved the solar storage problem yet?

I read something about massive battery plants and/or high speed flywheel energy storage, but as far as I know this is still a problem.

I vote we go all in on nuclear just to quickly remove coal, and then slowly phase out nuclear with better, low-impact renewables.

> we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms.

Yes, and we should pay (with money) more attention to study that. However we shouldn't/can't stop because of that and wait till we'll know more certainly - in general; some decisions need to be made early, and this question is an example.

> Have we solved the solar storage problem yet?

We have a variety of ways to store energy, and we're getting better with it with time, so forecasts here are optimistic. This is still a problem, but, again, we may move forward with other parts while we improving on batteries.

> I vote we go all in on nuclear

I think with nuclear we're uncapping worst case scenarios. This is harder to calculate, so I'm hesitant.

Seems that building nuclear plants takes much too long to have any noticeable effect in the short term, better to take it off the table so that it’s not present as a red-herring.

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/

I rather like Yang. He’s my favorite candidate outside of my Warren and Sanders. His policies are evidence-based, compassionate, and Yang Gang is fun.

Yang is just flat out the best candidate IMO for those two reasons. Rational and empathetic.

Wish he had more of the spotlight.

Just as the US wasn’t ready for Sanders in 2016, it’s not yet ready for Yang in 2020. You can be ahead of your time but still right.

He would get my vote because of his views on nuclear too. It is a same that people are so uninformed about energy and have a strong view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

I can understand the opposition on a long enough timeline, but to dismiss it from the start is almost certainly a recipe for failure.

Opposes? Or just "doesn't support"?

I mean, free market is still free to jump in and create nuclear power plants and CCS technologies, or am I wrong?

I'm on board with not funding nuclear (takes forever to build, on those time frames it will likely be outcompeted by solar+storage). But carbon capture and storage seems essential for keeping carbon levels on an acceptable level. We dragged our feet too long to solve this with just reducing pollution. And while carbon capture is expensive it's a bargain compared to the costs of climate change over a few decades.

why

Carbon capture is a completely absurd idea, but agreed on the nuclear.

We took a bunch of carbon from the earth and put it in the air, causing climate change. If we want to reverse climate change, we need to start pulling carbon from the air and putting that carbon back into earth.

How do you do that efficiently is going to be a challenge, sure, but one we need to undertake.

We are contributing to the climate change not necessarily causing it. The climate has changed significantly several times without humans in the past.

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big-picture-65-million-...

http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/65_Myr_Climate_C...

No it's not. What do you think trees do?

They seem to get in the way of humans. We keep burning them down.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/americas/amazon-rai...

I tend to think the opposite, but maybe nuclear isn't such a bad idea; this isn't clear to me.

why do you say that?

I should be clear by carbon capture I dont mean planting trees (which is clearly an excellent idea) but the commercial co2 -> liquid/solid process.

Firstly it can only be applied to large stationary emitters of co2 so stuff like refineries and gas/coal power stations but that makes up if i remember only 25% of our total emissions so the bigger stuff like transport and agriculture is missed.

Secondly its quite challenging to implement. think about how few plants can be retrofitted with the process, and even so you need a bunch more energy to convert it to a liquid form for long term storage so you need excess power generation in the first place (even more if you want to convert into a sort of brick). Even once its in liquid form thats an enormous volume of liquid we need to store somewhere and just think how much people hate living next to powerstations right now - so people are going to be okay living under like a billion cubic meters of Co2 gas that can start seeping into air in a few years time. So ok we have to start piping this gas far away into giant underground storage containers but even so thats a lot of infrastructure and there arent many places that have these big caverns we can pipe it into. And the volumes must be immense. Like absolutely immense if we want to do it on a large scale. And right now oil is worth like 30-40 USD per barrel? Pumping that Co2 back into the ground who wants to pay for that? It seems crazy to me. Planting trees and stopping the amazon from burning seems like a much more sensible investment

Well I was thinking investing more into something like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering-co2-captu... which captures co2 out of the air, rather than retrofitting stationary co2 emitters...

Sooner or later we gonna have nuclear power as the main source of energy.

To disambiguate, it doesn't oppose energy storage technology, "carbon capture and storage" should be read as one thing, relating to carbon capture only.

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