Comment by sword_smith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sword_smith | Hacker News Reader

I was studying nuclear engineering in Finland in 2011, and by reading BP's Statistical Report on World Energy I came to a conclusion which dismissed the reason that I had opted to go into the energy sector: the belief that we are running out of fossil fuels. The specific numbers that convinced me that there was no shortage in fossil fuels was the known oil reserves vs time and consumption vs time. In the 25 years from 1985 to 2010 humanity was discovering oil reserves faster than we were increasing production! This ran counter to the narrative of Peak Oil at the time (noticed how no one talks about that anymore?)

I only saw part of the picture, though. I didn't spot the revolution in natural gas extraction that was occurring and which is the interesting part of this story: nuclear power can't compete with natural gas! The prices of fossil fuels are simply too low.

This makes me happy that I chose a career in programming and crypto currency instead of trying to solve a problem that wasn't there.

There are plenty of fossil fuels available. Far too much. If we burn it all, or even a decent fraction of it all, we’ll wreck the world. We must leave the vast majority of it in the ground.

We’d be much better off if, in fact, we were running out.

Oil, gas and coal are all quite different beasts. Oil is the scarcest, and is still running out (hence looking at more expensive fields in remote places, and tar sands). Gas has only recently (last couple of decades) been 'tamed' (i.e. capable of being stored and transported long distances). I have no idea what gas reserves are like. There is _heaps_ of coal. Which is the problem for climate change. And that's also why no-one talks about peak oil anymore.

Oil will never run out in our lifetime. The green River formation in the us alone has 3 trillion barrels worth of shale oil with half expected to be recoverable. At 100 million barrels of oil usage per day for the globe, it could support the world's oil usage by itself for over 40 years. Factor in all of the other resources, and it will be a long time before we run out.

The other reason that nuclear can't compete with natural gas is that combustion turbines are just inherently cheaper than systems based on steam turbines.

Steam turbines requires at least two systems to transfer heat across solid/fluid boundaries. In a coal burning power plant, these are the boiler (where heat is transferred from the hot combustion gases to the water/steam) and the condenser (where waste heat is transferred from the low pressure steam to the cooling water). PWRs have three such boundaries (fuel rods, steam generator, condenser).

In constrast, simple cycle combustion turbines requires no transfer of energy across solid/fluid interfaces. Combined cycle plants do, but for only 1/3 of their output. As a result, the power density of a combustion turbine based power plant can be very high.

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