The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas
wsj.com
wsj.com
I think HN should have a rule that no paywalled link be published without including an alternative.
Are the coal companies going to zero?
A Chinese company recently abandoned plans to invest nearly $7billion in an Austrialian coal mine[2].
> A $6.7 billion Chinese mega mine coal project adjacent to the Adani venture in Queensland's Galilee Basin is in doubt after the company abandoned its bid for a mining lease.
> The company will not explain why it abandoned the process, but analysts believe the project is no longer aligned with China's interests in coal and is financially "unviable" given the difficulty companies face obtaining finance for coal developments.
Even the famous "Belt and Road" won't risk large investments in coal under the current conditions.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=NYSE:+BTU
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-23/macmines-abandons-min...
For example, Mariner East somehow got declared a public utility which gives Sunoco rights to eminent domain whatever they want along the route to maximize profits with minimal oversight. They ruin neighborhoods and property values, literally bulldozing through apartment complexes, under schools, through little league fields, contaminating aquifers, causing sinkholes, and this is before anything is pressurized. There are no disaster plans like you see for nuclear plants. All these downsides so Sunoco can offshore the product.
Late stage capitalism.
Global warming is going to 'disproportionately impact the most vulnerable' even more. (Is there anything at all that won't? People with fewer resources have fewer options in dealing with new challenges, this seems like a fundamental fact.)
Yes. Decline in stock prices or real estate for example.
> People with fewer resources have fewer options in dealing with new challenges, this seems like a fundamental fact.
Yes, that's almost true by definition.
Even in my examples, in general the people who start out rich will still be better off after a stock market crash than the people who started out poor.
Look on the bright side though: by symmetry any disaster averted or condition improved also helps the vulnerable more.
True that rich people (if they're not being stupid with their money) will be better positioned to buy cheap stocks after a crash and will multiply their fortunes in the long run.
I like your bright side.
Shouldn't make too much of a difference? The total number of houses and households stays the same after the sale. Basically, you are right, for every such transaction you describe, one rental unit is taken off the rental market, but also one household exits the rental market, too.
Brazil relies on hydroelectricity for 65% of its electricity, and the Brazilian government plans to expand the share of biomass and wind energy (currently 6%) as alternatives.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Brazil
There was no point other than to identify the error in your proposition.
For new builds a heat pump + solar is the smart choice - they cost more upfront but the lower costs win in the long term (after 15 years or so, without grants). The problem is older properties don't have the same level of insulation as new builds, so even if there are grants for replacing the equipment it's going to be a long time until it pays off. It depends how big the grants are though, if a government is serious about going green then it's a worthwhile investment.
Still way better than coal on the deaths-from-air-pollution metric.
But not a reasonable or good option. We need to stop celebrating the transition from coal to fracked gas and get on with actual low carbon energy like solar, hydro, nuclear, wind.
Nuclear being the best of those :)
With nuclear you don't need to build vast new storage and transmission, or cover the landscape with energy harvesters.
Then there is the problem that nuclear is terrible at anything but baseload, so you still need gas turbines for reacting to load. Everytime this is brought up nuclear proponents say research in new nuclear power generation will solve all of it. But they have been saying this for decades while renewable are there and all the solutions for its downsides exist.
See the calculation starting on this page https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml
> Land use
> Let’s imagine that Britain decides it is serious about getting off fossil fuels, and creates a lot of new nuclear reactors, even though this may not be “sustainable.” If we build enough reactors to make possible a significant decarbonization of transport and heating, can we fit the required nuclear reactors into Britain? The number we need to know is the power per unit area of nuclear power stations, which is about 1000W/m2 (figure 24.10). Let’s imagine generating 22 kWh per day per person of nuclear power – equivalent to 55 GW (roughly the same as France’s nuclear power), which could be delivered by 55 nuclear power stations, each occu- pying one square kilometre. That’s about 0.02% of the area of the country. Wind farms delivering the same average power would require 500 times as much land: 10% of the country. If the nuclear power stations were placed in pairs around the coast (length about 3000 km, at 5 km resolution), then there’d be two every 100 km. Thus while the area required is modest, the fraction of coastline gobbled by these power stations would be about 2% (2 kilometres in every 100).
The book also has sections about the economics of clean up. About fast breeder reactors and thorium designs.
Is there anywhere in the world where the private operator of a nuclear power plant if covering all their own costs for clean up and decommissioning? Genuine question - I am well aware I could be wrong.
My understanding is that nuclear is always about energy independence - not cheap energy. (Don't get me wrong, the sooner we remove coal, biomass, wood and gas from our energy mix the better.)
You have to be kidding me.
No, in the US utilities are generally privately-owned, and are "responsible" for the cleanup.
Their playbook is:
1) Extend the operating license for an additional 20 years, safe or not.
2) After that, declare bankruptcy.
> Is there anywhere in the world where the private operator of a nuclear power plant if covering all their own costs for clean up and decommissioning? Genuine question - I am well aware I could be wrong.
It's surprisingly hard to (quickly) find who is paying for those decommissioning funds. I imagine there's a levy on active nuclear power plant operations that goes into these funds.
You can find a lot of discussion online about whether those funds are big enough, and worries that they might not be.
Perhaps the most quantitative treatment I found is from https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_167.shtml
> Economics of cleanup
> What’s the cost of cleaning up nuclear power sites? The nuclear decommissioning authority has an annual budget of £2 billion for the next 25 years. The nuclear industry sold everyone in the UK 4 kWh/d for about 25 years, so the nuclear decommissioning authority’s cost is 2.3 p/kWh. That’s a hefty subsidy – though not, it must be said, as hefty as the subsidy currently given to offshore wind (7 p/kWh).
The situation is actually more complicated than that see [1]. Essentially it comes to book keeping, however after 2017 the operators had to pay into a government fund to ensure sufficient funds to decommissioning (currently this holds 24 billion euro). Estimated decommissioning cost for a nuclear power plant are 1.2 billion euro (there is some dispute about the numbers though). This number does not include wast storage.
[1] https://www.iwr-institut.de/de/presse/presseinfos-kernenergi... (sorry only in German)
(I'm German as well. But for other people: Google Translate has gotten really good.)
My understanding is that much of the wood that is burnt is actually shipped half way around the world to the UK and other countries just so it can earn 'carbon credits to be burnt there. I may be wrong, it was a while since I read the article. It also generates a lot of localised air pollution.
But the main point still remains, nuclear power is bad at everything but baseload. And pointing at breeder or thorium reactors is exactly the thing I mentioned earlier. Technology that is completely uneconomical or unproven on commercial scale. Even France stopped doing breeders.
You are still ignoring the land use of open pit mining as well.
At the end nuclear is an uneconomic technology with significant unresolved issues even after decades of heavy subsidising, while renewable are cheaper proven and continously getting cheaper. The only reason to keep nuclear on the table is to keep power generation highly centralised and monopolized thus favouring few large corporations. It's ironic that nuclear is often proposed by self-confessed libertarians even though its the epitome of centralised corporatism.
The comment you are replying to merely said that decades of subsidizing nuclear didn't remove technical issues. And perhaps you can say the comment implied that the technical issues with renewables did mostly go away, without making any comment on whether renewables got any subsidies and on whether they helped or hindered.
(I would even go so far to argue that most of nuclear's remaining technical issues are from continued government meddling. But that's down to public opinion that wants government control of nuclear power. In places like eg Germany, for a long time the government was much more pro-nuclear than the population.)
The book I linked to mentioned some of that. It's just not much of an issue, since you need so little fuel. (And you could filter that fuel out of the ocean, if you really needed to.)
> At the end nuclear is an uneconomic technology with significant unresolved issues even after decades of heavy subsidising, while renewable are cheaper proven and continously getting cheaper. The only reason to keep nuclear on the table is to keep power generation highly centralised and monopolized thus favouring few large corporations. It's ironic that nuclear is often proposed by self-confessed libertarians even though its the epitome of centralised corporatism.
I'm just as happy as the next guy that decentralisable renewable options like wind and solar are becoming more and more competitive. Even the ascent of shale gas is a boon for the environment as long as it is replacing coal.
Nuclear fission (and fusion) are interesting as technologies. And especially fission is contrarian enough these days to attract certain types of admirers.
I do agree that in practice given global public opinion as it is, nuclear power is nigh guaranteed to remain centralised.
I am arguing that nuclear power generation has some flaws, but also that it doesn't have all the flaws.
Nuclear energy also used to serve as a useful reminder to the peak oil doomsayers (and these days to the climate change doomsayers), that in principle we could keep living a very energy intensive lifestyle, even if we were to stop using fossil fuels completely, and even if renewable solar and wind never took off.
Some people seemed to get an almost religious elation out of predicting that our sins would need to be paid for with lots of hardship and privation. Instead of just taking a hit of perhaps 10% of GDP or so to run everything on nuclear instead of oil.
(Similar to how the Club of Rome folks predicted doom from overpopulation. To broad popular appeal.)
As you point out, we are even luckier: renewables like wind and solar haven gotten cheaper faster than expected, so we found an even better alternative to oil and coal.
But it's good to know that there's another backup that in the grand scheme of things is not much worse than cheap oil used to be.
It is a terrible measure for human well being. Many things which are actually detrimental increase the GDP (accidents, obesity, depression, pollution...). The inventor of the GDP Simon Kuznets even warned against using it to judge progress, but instead it has become this metric that is the be all.
Btw, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History suggests a more nuanced history of the concept.
Nuclear can load follow but chooses not to for economics reasons. Markets are human constructs and can be adjusted as needed. Also nuclear works fine with all forms of energy storage.
Selling out the future generations for cyrrent greed. Nice one
Sure there is. You may not like it, but here it is: encase it in a concrete block and put it on a boat, sail boat to middle of ocean, dump it overboard. Done and dusted. That block of problematic nuclear waste is now going to kill less people over the next 100K years than solar will kill this month.
Burning it would probably put less radiation into the atmosphere than coal, and allow it to disperse. Breeder reactor designs could reduce the amount of dangerous waste, but a fair amount of waste has piled up over the decades while it was implausible to build new reactors. As it is, with one new reactor online in 2016, and two still under construction, we're likely to see a large drop in power and waste generated by nuclear plants over the next few decades.
As for the waste, it pays to extend 'relative' - nuclear leaves a coke-can size of waste safely stored on site for a person's lifetime energy needs, including transportation. For comparison, other baseload energy generation methods create tens of tons of waste a lot of which ends up in atmosphere.
Whole waste generated for decades of generating 10-20% of grid power in US, all of it, will fit on a football field ~ 50feet high.
Then, if not for politics, one can follow France, and reprocess the waste into more fuel.
France got waste reprocessing to the extent where decades of electricity provided to Paris only leave several glass slabs of waste behind [1].
[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...
[2] Decarbonization in 10 years: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYp2uVFVcAEWAoW?format=jpg&name=...
Even then, breeder reactors would solve much of that problem, but the government is afraid of that solution because it is too easy to derive bomb making material from those.
Mercury never stops being nasty mercury. It doesn't have a half-life.
Certain technologies, like fast breeder reactors, significantly reduce the volume of radioactive garbage coming out of your nuclear reactors at the end, because they re-use fuel multiple times.
Do keep in mind that public opinion demands nuclear to be ridiculously safe. And even the Chinese government cares about domestic popular opinion, even if they don't run a democracy.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/12/138271/chinas-lo... supports that public opinion interpretation to some extent.
I did a bit of Googling, and eg https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... suggests that nuclear is orders of magnitude safer in terms of fatalities per Joule than most other energy sources.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for an alternative source or https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
If we scaled down the safety of nuclear to eg the safety of natural gas generation (still miles ahead of oil and coal), we could surely safe a lot of money. And we could probably replace lots of oil and coal generation, thus saving lives as well.
TL;DR: policy forces nuclear power to be ridiculously safer than other power sources. But governments are at most indirectly to blame: they are just following public opinion. Democracy at work.
I wasn't suggesting we need to skimp.
(Similar to how my suggestion for air travel would be to make planes as safe as eg trains.)
Wind has become cheaper (but not more reliable) because thousands of turbines are being installed each year. If they were built at the same rate as nuclear, they would be even more expensive (and still not able to provide base load power).
Nuclear fuel can be stored safely (look up Sweden and Finland’s joint project) until it can be burned in next generation reactors, which are being designed and tested as we speak.
Please don’t straw man on HN. It’s destructive to the community and really bad mannered.
The practice of running dangerous/obsolete plants until EOL is absolutely absurd though. How can one tell the people that modern designs will solve all safety problems if plants older than the one at Chernobyl are still operating to this day?
I disagree about what you say about wind though. Wind power is massively benefiting from the same economies of scale that small reactors would benefit except they do so on a much bigger scale.
Similar considerations apply to some nuclear power designs. In addition, many nuclear power designs are saver per Joule when build on a larger scale.
Of course, safety would still benefit from the experience from building more of any one design.
The absurdity of running old plants past EOL is directly tied to how hard / impossible it is to build new plants.
Crazy enough, the rest of Chernobyl power plant continued to operate for a long time after the famous accident. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
The futures market not only gives you guidance for how prices are expected to develop, but also lets you transfer the risk of price movements to willing counterparties. Sometimes for a fee, of course.
[1] "Я играю на балалайке / Это самый русский инструмент"