Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous we're still not rallying around nuclear power (in addition to renewables).

"Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day. The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation.

TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste. We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely. We may be able to build it in the United States if the funding and regulatory changes that I mentioned earlier happen." -Bill Gates, Dec 2018 [1]

And even before that it's already the safest form of energy. [2] Fear has shot us in the foot and continues preventing us from making substantial progress.

1) https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2...

2) https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Is it really safer than solar?

"The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation." - this is an example of wishful thinking. We don't know how we would solve the problems, we are just assuming someone will figure out a way. That assumption is probably influenced by survivorship bias. There's a bunch of technologies where the problems weren't solved, but we don't hear about them much.

The mean time to build a reactor is about 7.5 years[1], so if you wanted to transition all remaining fossil-fueled electricity generation in 12 years, currently with 120,000 TWh of fossil fuel consumption[2], assuming 1GW of generation per nuclear power plant, you would need to start building approximately 14 thousand (edit: originally read millions, corrected as pointed out in comments) nuclear power plants today.

[1] http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

Er, TWh isn't a measure of power. It's a measure of energy. Presumably that 120,000 TWh is consumption per year?

Then we get

120000 TWH/year * (1 / 24 / 365) hours/year ~= 13.7 TW

So you would need 13700 reactors, not 14 million.

Edit: maybe you were just off by a factor of 1000 in your calculation?

Yes, you are right, I was off by a factor of 1000, must have typed '000' one too many times. Sorry.

Also, yes, the TWh was a per year amount.

Nuclear can play a role, but it's already too late to build a sufficient number of reactors, let alone wait until new reactor designs are proven. What we can do right now that doesn't have a 10+ year waiting period is reducing energy demand and building a shit ton of wind, solar, and storage. Wind turbines can be build in a matter of weeks and start reducing GHG emissions immediately. Houses can be insulated and equipped with solar panels in days. Switching heating to heat pumps can also be done in a matter of days.

If we want to we can start building reactors too, but the big changes need to start yesterday.

Unfortunately wind/solar aren't a complete solution[1]. Batteries are several orders of magnitude too expensive to solve for the Tokyo problem (days without power) and producing things like steel and concrete. Nuclear offers a solution and is deployable today. And yeah, really should've been done a long time ago.

1. https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=520

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