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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think going green on electricity alone is enough to solve global warming.

We need cars to go electric, etc.

The point is that co2 generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.

A slow train wreck of decades that everyone sees coming.

At this rate, we’ll be saying the same thing in 2030.

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> We need cars to go electric, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

> The point is that co2 [sic] generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.

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

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

Yes, and that creates massive extra demand for electricity generation, which seems very hard to achieve without nuclear power.

I completely agree. I imagine using electricity to power everything paired with basically free nuclear power makes for a pretty sweet future. For whatever reason though, people and even “green” politicians generally seem opposed to nuclear.

I do believe nuclear should have a role, but please don’t peddle the ‘basically free’ fantasy.

Can you elaborate in what way it is a fantasy?

It’s actually very expensive.

USA electricity demand was 12071 kWh/person over 2016. Multiply by $0.1/kWh (cost of nuclear power given elsewhere in replies to this submission) means Americans would have spent $1207 on electricity, per person not per household, for that year.

It's expensive to build and maintain to the required level of safety?

Even if, somehow, you had a perfectly safe magic hot rock that could put out a gigawatt, all the plumbing and turbine machinery would still have a minimum cost level that would be cheap but still metered. Maybe something like half the cost of natural gas.

Because nuclear is more expensive than on-shore wind and solar (as well as natural gas, for that matter). The problem with renewables today is not cost, but concerns about variability of the output.

In conservative western countries a large proportion of people are opposed to new development of all kings most of the time. That is absolutely true of energy developments, new housing, infrastructure. Dealing with public opposition is a basic neccessity of building stuff.

Society could literally decide how much energy they want and grow it at whatever rate. No need to be bound by how much oil is in a deposit.

You mean "basically free" as in 10ct/kwh (the price HinkleyPointC in the UK got guaranteed). While most renewable sources on the market get guarantees in the range 2-5 ct/kwh. Even Power2gas2power seems cheaper at this point. And let's not talk how long it currently takes to build a nuclear power plant. In Europe we are currently at about 20 years for that to happen. Sure that happens partially because people oppose it but people also oppose green energy in their backyard and even coal power plants are built faster.

If it is clever to shut down existing nuclear power plants (which are very often past planned life time) one can argue, but building new ones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Are you a time traveller? Because I've only read about the "basically free nuclear" myth in some books from the early 80s.

Nuclear energy is not free, though. Doing it safely is pretty expensive. The "whatever" reason that many people were opposed to it, is that nuclear disaster and nuclear waste are serious issues. Just not nearly as serious as global warming is. It's possible that the risks posed by nuclear energy have been overestimated, while the risks of fossil fuels have been underestimated quite a bit.

> "imagine using electricity to power everything paired with basically free nuclear power"

The problem with this fantasy is that nuclear power is not by any stretch of the imagination "basically free". New build nuclear is very expensive, costing much more on a per-MWh basis than most renewables.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be developing new technology to improve the cost effectiveness of nuclear in the future. But right now, each dollar spent on renewables delivers more carbon savings than each dollar spent on nuclear.

The graph of global emissions is a nearly flat line, we will be able to look back at any decade and say it could've bended there...ultimately, we just have decisions day to day that will bend it or not.

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

Batteries making process is far from being carbon-free yet.

While car batteries are charged using fossil fuel derived electricity, you're gaining nothing, and probably losing due to inefficiency. Once electricity is green and cheap, electric cars will naturally follow.

Typical car internal combustion engines are about 20% efficient; typical fossil-fuel power plants are about 35% efficient. So you gain significantly, even before you get to regenerative braking.

> We need cars to go electric, etc.

Marketing is once again far from the truth, check how co2 expensive producing a battery is. Then couple that with the fact that you need let's say 20 years of normal use of a car to "paybacck" that co2 footprint (comparing to an oil car).

Last one is : are you going to keep that same electric car for 20 years?

Battery research should probably be the single most well funded area of research.

Or hydrogen production, hydrogen fuel cells, and hydrogen-based engines. Hydrogen can be created with electrolysis using solar, wind, or nuclear power. Hydrogen-based vehicles have a much better range. Refueling a hydrogen vehicle quicker than charging a battery. Also, it is easy to transport hydrogen to locations where there is no power grid.

(I guess we should do both, but I feel like hydrogen as a fuel seems to be ignored.)

Hydrogen is hard to handle - it is very good at leaking, including through things not normally thought of as porous like metals, and it has low energy density unless under high pressure.

Synthetic CH4 from H2+extracted CO2 seems more likely to happen.

I feel that if anyone took hydrogen seriously, they'd start talking about anhydrous ammonia. This compound actually contains more hydrogen by volume and pressure than elemental hydrogen does. It doesn't have the embrittlement issues that elemental hydrogen has. Ammonia liquefies at a much higher temperature and has a much higher heat of vaporization, which makes it easier to handle. It is a hazardous fuel, but not really more so than gasoline and definitely less so than elemental hydrogen. Anyway, there is already a well-developed infrastructure for handling anhydrous ammonia, because it is regularly used in agriculture. Any cheap and environmentally friendly process that produces hydrogen also produces ammonia, because ammonia is just hydrogen plus nitrogen.

Because I very rarely see mention of ammonia as a fuel, I conclude that no one is seriously attempting to develop hydrogen fuel cells.

Could you post a source or two? I read this claim a few times, but never seen a credible source to confirm the claim.

I’m not sure if your statement is true.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-ev-battery-production-co2-em...

Also, consider that we are in the early stages. Battery technology will improve.

There are people still driving cars older than 20 years. If the car is able to last 20 years I am sure plenty of people would keep it that long. Most people trade in their car due to it giving them trouble. It winds up being cheaper to trade in for a new model.... Wonder if car companies are in on this...

Where are you getting your 20 year figure from? There's a study which says 10 years but doesn't account for the energy/co2 required to refine oil. EV battery packs can also be recycled as grid storage.

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