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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this kind way of thinking. We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants.

This article even mention it, obviously on the last place in a strange way "and to advanced nuclear plants with zero emissions". As if there were some non-advanced nuclear plants that have non-zero emission.

Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. In addition, in large parts of the World they just does not make sense as there is not enough sunny/windy days.

For nuclear energy we have everything - knowledge, infrastructure, experience.

What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Eco people fought vigorously nuclear energy for years and now we are where we are. Time to say that they've made a costly mistake and move on.

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Like solar & wind, nuclear also needs supplementing with peaker plants. Nuclear can be used for peaking, but current designs cannot, and nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker.

And storage for renewables is a last resort. Instead of storage:

1. build in areas with reliable winds (offshore trade winds)

2. better interconnection ("the wind is always blowing somehwere")

3. over-provisioning. If you build 3 times as much wind power as you need, it's still a lot cheaper than nuclear and you need a lot less storage.

4. storage. It's expensive, but if you did 1-3 correctly, you don't need much of it.

Nuclear is safe, but it's also crazy expensive and takes decades to build.

Scale is missing in your analytsis. For instance in New England, the peak demand goes from 15GWh (average) to 16.5GWh down to 10GWh. Solar and wind on the other hand, need supplemental for 100% of its installed capacity the day there is no wind...

In France, 70% of the electricity is nuclear, 15% is hydro, pumped by the excess nuclear power generated at during the night.

Now for your arguments:

1. Wind goes from 0 to 50mph at sea. No reliable wind corridor exists. Even if Market Street in San Francisco makes me think otherwise frequently :)

2. The concept of wind proliferation has been debunked, at least on the European level. We built a network between Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Italy. It doesn't work.

3. If you don't have wind, putting 3 wind turbines won't help you more. Germany learned it the hard way where their CO2 emission flat lined since 2009 instead of going down despite their all in on the wind and solar energy. If you install 3 times more than what you need, you also have the side effect of making your renewable energy 3 times more carbone intensive. It kills solar as a viable, scalable option for instance.

4. Yes that would be the required breakthough to change the game. Right now batteries production pollute way too much and cost too much to be climate efficient.

Great points. “The damage done by these wind installations is out of all proportion to the benefit,” https://www.ft.com/content/d8b9b0bc-04a6-11ea-a984-fbbacad9e...

Heya,

Do you have either a non-paywall version of that article or an alternative article with a similar view? I'm curious what it says, but I can't read it with the paywall in place.

https://docdro.id/SjaNeM6

> nobody is going to pay the crazy costs of nuclear just to have it idle 23 hours a day as a peaker.

Are we anywhere near the limits of what can be done with time-of-use pricing? If we flatten the "duck curve" then nuclear is a good match.

You would need utility scale storage to flatten the load curve. The peaks and super peaks are not going away until there is a viable storage mechanism with enough capacity. We are talking significant changes in demand between even the early afternoon and the super peak in almost all load areas (pjm California ercot). The other alternative is a massive buildout or behind the meter solar which theoretically could solve this issue.

What the above poster is suggesting is adjusting demand dynamically based on price. That requires consumers to throttle their own usage (probably using automated systems that know the real-time price of electricity). You can run the dishwasher or charge your car or cool your home when electricity is cheap.

I’m not sure there is enough play in demand elasticity to affect significant change relative to the amount of load difference you see. Furthermore the peaks are highly weather sensitive. Would love to be proven wrong though.

There's not much play in demand at the moment, but there could be if more systems were aware of the price of electricity. A/C can be turned off, cars can stop charging, dishes can wait, etc.

Variation in renewable energy generation can be reduced by averaging over larger geographic areas. Wind speeds and cloud cover vary much more on local scales than on continent-wide scales.

A combination of demand adjustment and linking of power generation over large geographic areas can reduce the need for energy storage.

The daily fluctuations in demand aren't as large as this comment makes it seem. Usually, demand changes by ~25% between peak demand and minimum demand [1]. Excess energy produced during non-peak demand can be used for carbon sequestration, desalination, hydrogen production, or any other intensive industry.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=830

We don't have enough uran for it.

We would need to develop a wavesomethingreactor which doesn't exist yet.

Nuclear will not solve our problem.

Nuclear is safe until it isn't, then you lose a large area of the country around the power plant (Chernobyl, Fukushima.) Personally I don't think it's worth the risk, plus the building times you write about and the costs of decommissioning.

Fukushima, "1 death from radiation, 2202 from the evacuation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

As awful as it can sound it's not about the deaths. It's about people not being able to enter that area basically forever, on their time scale.

If Fukushima was in New Yersey the USA would have lost New York City.

I'm starting to think the permanent evacuation zones are based more on arbitrary scare tactics than actual danger, at least after the acute event is under control. Maybe you don't want to live there. But entering doesn't seem to be the death sentence it's made out to be, based on the people that never left Chernobyl and returning population in Japan.

If global warming is as certain and as dangerous as what's being claimed, the risk of contaminating a few thousand acres (or even miles) with radioactivity is certainly worth it to save the world.

Plus Fukushima basically disproved the China syndrome scare we've been fed for 40+ years.

"This solar farm in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India has a capacity of 648 megawatts and covers an area of 10 square kilometres." [1]

That's 10sqkm that's been lost basically forever, or as long as it humans require solar power for only 648MW during the day when the sun is shining.

Fukushima Daiichi was 5,306 MW and generated that 24hrs a day.

[1] https://www.originenergy.com.au/blog/5-largest-solar-farms-i...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

Michael Shellenberger is one of my favorite writers on this topic. The radiation around Fukushima is less than the naturally occurring radiation in Colorado.

1. huge bureaucratic hurdles

2. huge political hurdles

3. no ROI and no clean energy without billions of up-front investment and 20 years

I think we should have started spending hundreds of billions on nuclear power plants yesterday, but now we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. If it really does take 20 years to build enough nuclear power plants (construction that will be fueled by carbon) we have to make some other clean energy investments RIGHT NOW that will soften the blow until we finish building those reactors.

1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia".

If it can solve global warming in 20 years, that's an easy win to take. There is no emergency forcing anything faster, and I doubt that it's even possible to find a cure (that isn't worse than the disease) that works faster anyway.

> 1 & 2 are political decisions, fueled by "nucleophobia".

You say nuclear isn't dangerous because of all the safety measures, yet here you're qualifying those safety measures as mere overreaction.

> If it can solve global warming

Not to be pedantic, but nothing is going to solve it. We're talking about efforts to mitigate it.

I thought it’s more just that nuclear power plants aren’t economically or politically viable any more, since wealthy governments are no longer subsidizing them with their massive and growing nuclear weapons programs.

Nuclear has huge hurdles and long implementation times because of hysterical anti-nuclear activists. It's not inherent in the engineering. If we care about climate change, it needs to be acknowledged that the activists created artificial delays and those should be removed forthwith.

Even China takes >5 years to build a nuclear plant. China normally builds non-controversial infrastructure 3X as fast as the US, so by that rule of thumb a nuclear plant would take 15 years in the US, and longer if you don't get rid of the anti-nuclear activists.

The obvious answer is public distrust of nuclear. There have been several high profile nuclear disasters, not to mention the universal distaste for living anywhere near a nuclear waste dump. Plus reactors are very expensive to build, and they have to compete with cheap fossil fuels for energy cost. In 30 years we haven't been able to tie fossil fuel companies to the carbon cost of their product.

There are so many people who in one breath will say climate change is the biggest existential threat that will kill us all soon and when asked about nuclear will suddenly start hand wringing about politics and ROI.

When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. It’s just too bad people on all sides can’t get there before reality sets in further, including those who claim to be legitimately fearful (if they aren’t pushing for nuclear now, and fast, they’re not truly fearful.)

That’s the thing about this issue: humans aren’t built to deal with it.

> When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly.

By this point it is far too late for any action to have meaningful consequence. People are raising hands now, when the effects are practically nonexistent on a human timescale, because if we wait until the effects affect us, then we are well and truly fucked. Society won’t collapse this century, but it might in a few hundred years.

Well, my own prediction is a) that we will mitigate climate change and b) it will not be through any of the activism methods being pursued today. The reason we will succeed is because we are, luckily, converging on market incentives which will (as a side effect) fix climate change. Specifically, it seems likely that the next iteration of technology startups focused on energy should be able to create products that are both clean and radically reduce energy costs, and hence will be in-demand by the global markets. For example, small nuclear reactors, or solar products. These will be easily exportable, and as such will cause a virtuous cycle of iteration and innovation.

In retrospect, the advocacy of regressive policies like "everyone should fly less" will be just another chapter of the long serious of luddites thinking the only solution to problems is to reverse technological progress in the face of new, unexpected problems raised through the continual growth of the global economy.

I agree for the most part. We will either fix it technologically (my guess through a combination of nuclear, renewables, and carbon capture) or we won’t fix it. In the latter case we either won’t fix it and everything will still be fine, because the IPCC and others estimate the cost of a do nothing scenario at like 10% of world GDP by 2100,[1] or we won’t fix it and we’ll all die.

What will never happen is addressing climate change through social engineering.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-globa...

I think you would probably agree that those technological shifts require significant policy shifts, like a carbon tax, right? Does your pessimism about social engineering extend to getting public support for those kinds of policy shifts? (I agree that individual choices to eg fly less will not be a major component of any solution we reach.)

How is that not still social engineering? It's just collective and punitive instead of individual and guilt driven.

A carbon tax (at least without going 100% to sequestration) is only an behavior penalty. It's not even a net gain, it's just slowing a net loss. There's nothing innovative about that.

The sequestration part of the equation is where there's potential for technological breakthroughs. If we go carbon negative, it won't be because it requires a change in lifestyle, but because we find a cheap way to offset our carbon generation. And I mean literally pulling carbon from thin air (or water). Not using accounting trickery to buy some emission "offset" that a developing population surely would have hypothetically used, had you not paid them cash money (along with a sizable percentage to some broker who has friends in DC).

I think you would find much less opposition, no matter the government's cost, once 1) a plan is laid out that doesn't require a regression in anyone's lifestyle, and 2) doesn't involve a punitive cost to sustain that lifestyle, and 3) doesn't involve any component resembling wealth re-distribution, or buying credit that amounts to paying someone else to not do something.

A carbon tax is not paying someone to not do something. It is charging someone for the actual cost of their actions. It is pure utilitarianism.

I said carbon credits (in it's current enron-accounting form) is paying someone to do nothing, and that carbon credits and a carbon tax are both types of negative action social engineering, likely to fail.

If you're going for utilitarianism, pick a more politically agreeable utility, like actual sequestration, if you want to be successful.

I fail to see how a carbon tax "only slows a net loss". Are you implying that economy is a zero sum game and that investment does not yield results?

I'm speaking as a matter of strategy. A carbon tax might work, and be seen as a victory, tactically, but will be the wrong move, strategically.

It prevents addition of co2, but does not subtract. Focus on encouraging and incentives for subtraction, not preventing addition. If you want people to get on board. (I get that reducing emissions means less to sequester. That's thinking short term, and beyond minor cutbacks, a political loser. A successful solution won't require that to be effective.)

I'm saying anything punitive and negatively coercive is the wrong approach. It might technically work, but won't ever be successful politically. Unless we go full authoritarian regime. As soon as a large enough portion of the population is hit with having to change lifestyle, it's done for. Focus on solutions that don't require that.

Clean energy solutions are only desired by the market because activism impelled governments to try to price in the externality costs of dirty energy.

How do you foresee the other environmental pressures (water, soil etc) being resolved? Are we merely maturing through a series of dirty technologies and are on the cusp of a clean tech revolution that will allow us to arbitrarily increase the Earth's carrying capacity? At what point does absolute decoupling of growth and resource consumption occur?

I do hope you're right, as it seems like the only viable path, but I am still doubtful.

>What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now?

Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima.

You might say those were caused by outdated tech or bad management. I'm someone who doesn't think my local or national government would be immune to those failings.

One thing those disasters have shown about nuclear is that a single accident -- even if there is little loss of life -- absolutely ruins the economics of nuclear power. Even an accident with no loss of life will cost an absolute fortune to clean up and decommission due to how hard it is just to handle and transport the material.

Prior to Fukushima nuclear power was fairly economical in Japan. Post-Fukushima and in retrospect it would have been cheaper to cover every roof in Japan with solar panels, build loads of offshore wind, and build massive energy storage facilities and pumped storage reservoirs.

I'm not doubting you but, do you have some stats to back this up? I'm curious.

I would imagine the expense is difficult to determine and quite controversial. Especially when you consider the costs of the effects to the ocean/environment and whatnot that aren't being borne by the japanese people.

Another issue I am surprised doesn't get brought up is that there are only 450 Nuclear Reactors in the world.

Any nuclear accident is unacceptable, but what do you think the rate of crashes were in the first 1000 Airplanes?

When we don't build nuclear, we don't really get better at nuclear. If the U.S. decided to build 50 Nuclear reactors in relatively remote parts of Nevada to power California. Even if we had another accident, by the time we had finished that project our safety standards would be in a very different place.

America has a huge problem with corporations bribing politicians to loosen "costly" regulations at the expense of our health and environment.

The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. So while nuclear is plenty safe when handled correctly, it's completely understandable to feel like America is not a country which can be trusted to handle things correctly.

> The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating.

All of this is completely wrong. Fracking has enabled us to simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions (by reducing coal mining) while reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Nuclear would be a huge leap forward, again maintaining energy independence (no reliance on Chinese solar panels) while cutting CO2 output.

You’ve got it backwards. America, and the rest of the world, has a problem with environmentalists who can’t do cost-benefit analysis. Thanks to nuclear, France hit CO2 emissions per capita of 6.5 tons back in 1990. Now it’s at 4.6. Germany is still around 9. By the time Germany gets to similar levels using wind and solar, France will have been sitting at those lower levels for 50 years. Everyone in Germany becoming vegans tomorrow won’t make up for half a century of unnecessary CO2 emissions because environmentalists were afraid of nuclear.

I'm not talking about CO2, I'm talking about the localized effects of fracking, which is leaking into the water supply and probably renders the area around fracking sites uninhabitable.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont...

We still can't get companies to tell the public what's in these fluids because they are protected trade secrets.

I too am pro-nuclear, but isn't it too late for traditional nuclear to save us? We need solutions very quickly and the typical nuclear power plant takes 10 years to build.

In my uneducated opinion, the only way I see nuclear working is if there are small modular reactors that are produced quickly in a factory assembly line.

Nuclear, slow as it may be to build, is still the fastest option to actually eliminate fossil fuel usage. The other plans involving intermittent sources require immense amounts of energy storage. To put this in perspective, the US consumes ~5TWh of electricity during nighttime. The entire world only produces 300GWh of lithium ion batteries annually [1]. This is expected to increase to 1TWh by 2023 and probably 2TWh by 2030. But still, if we're talking about eliminating fossil fuel usage globally it'd take the better party of a century to build the energy storage required. Other plants for energy storage are either geographically limited (hydroelectric), or have yet to be built at any meaningful scale and have questionable efficiencies (Sabatier process, hydrogen).

France's nuclearization program took 20 years [2], but that's a hare's pace compared to building the energy storage required for intermittent sources.

1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

And ten years later, with little done, this kind of a statement would look really bad in retrospect.

We need both fast actions and we also need actions that take ten years or even thirty. Everything helps.

I've been participating in climate discussions for multiple decades.

The less we do and the later we do, it's going to be worse. But it's still better than not doing anything.

Ie there's no point in time, after which it's not worth doing anything.

Far too late. 10 years to build is optimistic, and that is on top of a good decade or 2 of bureaucracy before even breaking ground.

France managed to bring its nuclear generation from close to 0% to over 75% in 15 years.

Interesting... actually, that is actually fairly compelling evidence that it can be done. Thanks!

For anyone interested, citation is here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...

In the 1970's, yes. Nowadays it seems to take 10 years to build something as simple as a subway station.

Technology hasn't regressed. Nuclear plants get built cheaper and faster on a per unit basis when they're built as part of a series of production. France built dozens of copies of the same four reactor designs. By comparison, many new projects are one off or part of only a single digit number of copies.

10 years is s perfectly fine.

The idea that there is some tipping point in 2030 that must be avoided at all cost is just an internet rumor.

Here's a Twitter thread discussing the significance of the 2030 date: https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/1104833329587806210

It's more complicated & nuanced than most blogs or stories have time for, but it's not an Internet rumor.

Thanks!

I don't think she says anything I much disagree with. I think this even restates my point, in less inflammatory language:

> and here, my friends, is where the mythical "we have 12 years to fix this or the world ends" narrative comes from. (I'm not pointing my finger at anyone in particular here; I'm just saying I've heard this. A lot.)

> Concl'n: Science does not identify a specific goal, target, or timeline. What it says is simply this: the more carbon we produce, the worse the impacts. The best thing to do is wean ourselves off it, as soon as is humanly possible. As a human I'd add: while minimizing suffering.

I would say misunderstanding rather than rumour — the original statement was closer to “Given how long it takes politicians to do things, we have until 2030 to get started on really fixing everything and not just painting things green and mistaking that for action”.

I was 100% against nuclear because I fear the risks. But I believe it is a tool we must use.

Most nuclear plants have been working 20-40 years. We need new designs for safer, cheaper plants, and a viable storage for nuclear waste.

> What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now?

People aren't always rational, people will strongly resist changing their current viewpoints and people will very strongly resist making lifestyle changes. Politicians know this also when looking to get elected.

Reducing meat consumption and reducing the number of flights we take are other areas people need to look at but you'll be met with the same problems at a personal and political level.

The article is advocating for increased nuclear. But energy is just one piece of the puzzle, and it's the piece that's the furthest along the deployment curve from emergence to diffusion to reconfiguration. According to the article the other pieces are cars, buildings, trucks, agriculture, aviation, shipping, steel, cement and plastics. Nuclear won't replace any of them.

I’m all for nuclear. But we haven’t yet replaced petrochemicals or concrete, for example. Energy production is just one slice of the pie.

How many gigawatt of nuclear power are built each year, and what's the trend curve on those numbers?

And what are the equivalent numbers on solar and wind?

What do you do with the waste? Blow it into the sun?

Bury it underground. The amount of waste generated by nuclear power is a fraction of 1% of all the toxic waste generated by heavy industry. The entirety of the United States' nuclear waste from electricity generation occupies a volume the size of a football field in footprint and 10 yards high [1]. A coal plants generates this much waste every hour.

1. https://www.nei.org/fundamentals/nuclear-waste

You reprocess it to remove all the stuff that isn't actually "waste" because it's usable as fuel. What remains presents a much smaller storage problem which has known working solutions.

not Solar, we have battery ways of storing it now..my local high school uses it in fact.

> Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap.

We do have energy storage now, and it is already pretty damn good. Lower costs of production offset the cost of any inefficiencies of storage.

> We have a proven and tested way of producing electricity without any emission - nuclear power plants.

We don't know that since to this day we do not know what cost a nuclear power plant actually imposes on society. The geological issue of ultimate storage for example is absurdly complex and remains unresolved. Here in Germany there's only very few potential locations[1]. None of them without potentially hazardous downsides.

[1]: https://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Endlagerung/Bilder/BGR_Ber...

A surface level bunker would be fine. I really don't see why it needs to be deep under ground.

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