Activists who embrace nuclear power

Nickel-iron and lead-acid batteries have a lot of historical use for grid-backup applications, and lead-acid ones are still cheaper than lithium, but I don't think the resources are there to scale to an all-solar civilization. Nickel-iron batteries might be cheaper (the resources are a lot more abundant) but nobody sells them anymore I think?

There are whole classes of all kinds of energy sources that haven't been industrialized yet, including, to a great extent, nuclear energy. EGS comes to mind. The critical thing about PV is that it's crossed the chasm to mass production and the ensuing price drops. So I think it's crucial that current lithium production won't scale to the needs of an all-solar grid — but that oceanic extraction could.

If you liked this thread, you might also enjoy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219000

I'm a lot more "in favor of the truth" than "in favor of renewables". And the truth is that there's plenty of lithium, but not with current extraction techniques.

> No, no it doesn't. If you generate 10 GWh of solar during the day and 10 GWh from methane during the night, and you install an additional 10 GWh of daytime solar how much did your carbon emissions go down? Zero. How is this hard to comprehend?

You seem to be violently agreeing with me, while congratulating yourself on your intellectual superiority, which is terribly amusing.

Last I checked, Li-ion was about US$111/kWh https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h... which is probably around US$300/kW on th current grid, depending on how many hours a day you need battery, and buyers were undervaluing storage. Given that coal and (1970s) nuclear plants cost on the order of US$1000/kW to build, this is already economically feasible. (Current nuclear plants cost close to US$7000/kW, but plausibly that's largely regulatory costs.)

So, existing lithium batteries are already cheap enough to be economic to deploy; about US$100 billion of batteries into the future, new mining techniques are needed; there's plenty of lithium in the sea to get to an all-solar grid; and existing utility incentive structures haven't yet accommodated the necessity of storage.

You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.

While scaling up the industry isn't trivial, it's absurd to claim it's impossible or that demand outpacing supply will somehow reduce investment in greater supply.

And it's not just the electricity sector where this matters. A battery vehicle uses much less energy that a gasoline vehicle, because the latter has maybe 25% average thermal efficiency (that varies with details, of course). It applies to any industrial process using anything below arc furnace level heat: heat can be generated by heat pumps (compress argon to the desired temperature, extract the heat, then expand the cooled argon maintaining its temperature with low grade waste heat to recover some of the work.)

About the only place it doesn't apply is if the electricity is used to make synfuels (aviation fuel, for example) or in chemical processes where the fossil fuels were used directly (hydrogen for ammonia synthesis).

I agree, and I think all proposed plans should absolutely be considered against that threat. I certainly hope that's not a radical take on my part....

There are many countries around the world that implemented good ideas (Where To Invade Next?), like Finland baby boxes and no school homework, France with proper school lunches, Italy's work day and labor relations, and many countries with adequate healthcare and free college. It's better to borrow good ideas than believe everything is excellent when there are areas that need improvement.

and even then just "restarting" it, is not as easy as restarting software.

> without wind as a kind of a complement, solar is completely not feasible

This is not correct, and there is no reason to even suspect it might be true.

> the one message where I got sloppy and referenced only solar panel[sic] with a passing reference to 'rare earth minerals'

It wasn't a passing reference; it accounted for the vast majority (99.9% to 99.99%) of the resource and environmental impact you attributed to "a typical solar panel":

> A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all).

Your describing it as "a passing reference" reinforces the impression that you have no interest in what might or might not be true, only in finding excuses to attack people. The question of whether making a 40-pound solar panel requires 30 kg of rock or 20 000 kg of rock is absolutely central to your purported primary concern here: the environmental impact of mining and waste management. Yet you dismiss this as "a passing reference"? How is it of no consequence to you whatever if a problem you are concerned about is literally a thousand times less serious than you had thought?

The only correct thing in your paragraph quoted above is that a typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds (18 kg in non-medieval units), and that materials cannot be incorporated into a panel without being mined, transported, and processed. (And some stuff about wind generators I'm not even going to address.) As you can easily verify, a square meter of 100-μm-thick silicon wafer only accounts for 230 grams of that; the other 98% of the weight is mostly glass, aluminum, silver, and copper, which are extremely recyclable and have been thoroughly recycled since their discovery — centuries at least, millennia in some cases.

It's true that nobody's recycling the silicon at present, but that's not because it's difficult — it's that there isn't enough scrap solar-grade silicon out there to recycle, because the vast majority of the panels ever made are still being used, not scrapped.

> You forgot that Solar[sic] and Wind[sic] need to be overprovisioned

I did no such thing. I referred to PV capacity factors explicitly in about half a dozen places in the comment you are responding to. Depending on how you count, about a third of the text in the comment to which you are responding, saying that it "forgot that solar...need[s] to be overprovisioned" is specifically about capacity factors; that is to say, it is specifically addressing the fact that solar needs to be overprovisioned, and calculating by roughly how much. I could not be further from forgetting that solar needs to be overprovisioned.

As for wind, my comment didn't mention wind at all.

My notes on batteries are in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html.

> also enough to store to bridge the daily, seasonal and inter-annual intermittency

No, that is a bad idea. You may need to store energy to bridge daily intermittency, but for seasonal and interannual intermittency you need to overprovision. (Except in the Arctic and Antarctic, where you should probably just get fuel or electricity shipped to you.) Where do you think the seasonal and interannual intermittency problem is worst, and how bad is it? Then we can calculate by how much extra we need to overprovision to handle it, or how far we need to run transmission lines to avoid it. Please stop this vague gesturing at potential problems and provide specific, verifiable data and careful reasoning, as I have done.

> you're placing high-tech devices in that area. Devices that need maintenance. Devices that break-down. Devices that need to be decommissioned

Solar panels do not need maintenance, although they are more efficient if you dust them occasionally. Some of them do break down, but this is unusual, usually due to design or manufacturing defects or very extreme weather. They generally do not need to be decommissioned. Typically they have a design lifetime of 25 years but continue to produce slightly reduced amounts of power for decades after that. https://www.nrel.gov/state-local-tribal/blog/posts/stat-faqs... https://www.nrel.gov/pv/lifetime.html Silicon solar cells haven't existed for long enough for us to see how long they last naturally; the first ones manufactured 60 years ago are still working.

Inverters and charge controllers do break down and need to be replaced every ten years or so, but there are many fewer of those; the maintenance load is similar to that of any other kind of power plant serving the same load.

(continued...)

> That is an insane amount of land

If any of Texas, Thailand, or Botswana can singlehandedly power the entire planet's marketed energy consumption, which is what that "insane amount of land" adds up to, there's no land shortage for solar.

> If you're covering an area of 550 thousand km² with panels, there is an equivalent volume that you need to dig up somewhere else

550 thousand km² times "40 pounds" per m² is only ten billion tonnes, which is the weight of a 1-kilometer-radius sphere of rock. Botev Peak in Bulgaria, say, or the Matterhorn, although of course in practice you'd want to use ten or twenty billion tonnes of sand and bauxite that don't require climbing mountains to get them. Please do the math yourself before bringing up irrelevant trivialities like this.

> For all the talk about wind and solar being the energy of the future, I don't actually see where solar and wind are actually powering a modern economy.

Well, it's possible you're unaware of the relevant facts, so I'll explain.

Until four years ago, solar energy was more expensive than other sources of energy, so modern economies were built on those other sources of energy. Until about seven years ago, solar was much more expensive. Now, solar energy is cheaper. But most power plants are more than four years old; I think the median age is something like 15 years old, 30 years for nuclear plants, 40 years for both US nuclear plants and US coal plants. Typically planning and building a power plant is a process that takes a few years, too, and utilities and regulators are justifiably cautious about innovations.

So let's look at new installations rather than installed capacity.

For example, China built 38.4 GW of coal capacity last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U and 71.7 GW of wind capacity and 48.2 GW of solar capacity https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang.... Taking into account typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that adds up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. That last number doubles about once every three years. So I think it's fair to say that, even in the coal-heaviest country in the world, the transition to solar (and, I grudgingly admit, even more toward wind) is quite clear: the great majority of new power plants are running on renewable energy.

You may not be aware of this, but Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company, went bankrupt in 02016. They've emerged from bankruptcy but their latest annual report says they lost US$211 million in 02019, after turning a profit briefly the year before — but nothing compared to how they lost US$2 billion in 02015.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1064728/0001...

Their latest quarterly report from 02020 has them losing US$1.6 billion in 9 months.

One of the factors in Peabody's problems is that in the Southwest of the USA, where some of their major customers are, continuing to operate already built coal power plants like the San Juan Generating Plant and the now-defunct Navajo Generating Station is no longer economic; solar energy has driven down prices (averaging US$26.58/MWh at the Palo Verde trading hub in 02019 according to this article) well below the coal plants' operating expenses (for example, US$44.90/MWh at the San Juan Generating Plant).

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas...

> I see Germany building pipelines to ship natural[sic] from Russia and signing multi-decade contracts with that nation while being held up as a model nation. Why not invest in solar and wind deployment instead,

This is another question I answered in the comment you are purportedly responding to: Germany's solar capacity factor is an abysmal 10%.

Let's unpack what that means. A 280Wp solar panel module in California with a 28.1% capacity factor produces 79 watts average (690 kWh/year, worth about US$28 at a wholesale price of US$40/MWh); the same module in Germany produces about 28 watts (245 kWh/year, worth about US$9.80 at wholesale). But the module costs about US$50 wholesale in both places, or US$300 if you buy it on Amazon. So, absent subsidies, a solar plant is a much worse investment in Germany than in, say, Qatar.

Why is Germany often held up as a model nation? Germany was an early pioneer in a variety of energy reforms (the "Energiewende"), including massive investment in utility-scale solar, rooftop solar, and utility-scale wind, as well as energy-efficiency programs like Passivhaus. Still, in Germany it's still cheaper to run existing coal and gas plants than to build new solar plants, so Germany is no longer a leader in this field; the leaders are now countries like China, India, Qatar, and Chile.

Also, I didn't mention this, but Germany uses about 80 gigawatts in only 357 thousand km² of land, largely due to its high population density of 230 people per km². By contrast, the world has about 50 people per km², using 18 terawatts in 150 million km². So Germany, despite its high efficiency, uses about 0.2 W/m², almost twice as high as the world's 0.12 W/m².

So, in summary, Germany has a higher energy demand, higher competition for land, and a terrible solar resource, so it's one of the last places in the world you'd expect solar to be cost-competitive.

> I look at all that, I shudder at the amount of solar and wind collectors that will be required to manufacture and deploy and the stress it will put on existing ecosystems.

If you were to chop down a forest to build a PV farm, it would put stress on an existing ecosystem, but in a desert it will provide shade and windbreaks, and in arable land it will return cultivated land to being a habitat usable by native plants and animals. And those are typically much cheaper than chopping down forests. (They also don't concrete over the site anymore. Too expensive.) And, as outlined above, the mining and manufacturing are of a trivial scale compared to the deployment. So there is no reason to suspect that the environmental effect of solar energy will be net negative in the next couple of decades, even if compared to a nuclear alternative.

It's likely that in 20–50 years, as solar energy production vastly exceeds current world energy production, that it will become environmentally devastating, as people desperately seek to cover any scrap of land or ocean with increasingly efficient solar panels to harness every last little bit of terrestrial insolation. Unless we have greener ways of making such decisions by then.

> we have an energy-dense alternative, with no engineering challenges to solve and with decades of experience

Now that solar is so cheap, the alternatives are too expensive except for niche uses, and most of the alternatives are also wrecking the climate — nuclear, hydro, and geothermal being the exceptions. Even in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, nuclear power plants cost over US$1 per average watt, which is about twice what PV plants in favorable locations cost now.

> This kind of emotional appeal is not conducive to good discourse

You know what's conducive to good discourse? Basing your discourse on easily verifiable facts instead of easily falsified nonsense is conducive to good discourse. Rigorous arguments based on specific, easily checkable calculations are conducive to good discourse. Responding point by point to what other people have actually said, instead of baselessly accusing them of "forgetting about" one of the primary topics of their comments, is conducive to good discourse. Trying to inundate careful consideration of relevant points with piles of nonsense you haven't done the most basic consistency checks on, thus challenging others to do your homework for you if they want to disagree — that is not conducive to good discourse.

And that is what you were doing.

I don't know how to appeal to you to step up your game, if not emotionally. It looks to me like you're trying to monkeywrench good discourse and prevent it from happening, and you're immune to appeals to your shame.

Lacking a correct understanding of even the most basic facts of the situation, we cannot hope to reason about the consequences of possible courses of action.

As you can see above and elsethread, I've spent some time and effort to try to figure out some of the basic facts of the situation. I'm certainly no expert — for example, I only found out this year that solar panels include screen-printed silver paste, which accounts for on the order of 10% of the cost of photovoltaic modules and on the order of 10% of global silver production — and so I'd appreciate some help.

Indeed, if the prices of modules and power electronics keep dropping as they have been, there's a point where it becomes uneconomic for most energy users to pay for offsite generation, transmission, distribution, and billing; around 02013 there was a lot of talk about the risk of a "utility death spiral" as more and more grid users deserted the grid for their own private PV farms, leaving the remaining grid users (steel mills, diamond foundries, Bitcoin mines, and the like) to pay higher and higher prices to maintain the stranded infrastructure. So far this has not materialized and probably will not.

However, of those 18 terawatts, about a third are transport fuels, mostly gasoline for cars and diesel for land shipping, but also passenger trains, bunker fuel for cargo ships, and jet fuel for airliners and air shipping. Although ships can plausibly tow their own PV rafts, the others will probably be the last strongholds of fossil fuels due to the low efficiencies of electrolysis (typically around 60%) and the Fischer–Tropsch process (typically 50%), which adds up to "transmission losses" of around 70%, relative to how they're measured in the IEA's report today. And if you're doing this to power your Antarctic research base's electrical needs, you lose another 60% (total losses: 88%) to Carnot.

The good news there, though, is that the electrical part of the equation gets a "Carnot boost": a kilojoule of coal or gas burned to generate electricity only yields 400 J of electrical energy. So we only need 400 W of PV generation to replace each kilowatt of coal mining for electricity!

Okay, I've answered three of your questions. Now it's your turn. How much are current transmission losses typically, and in maximal and minimal cases? How are they affected by transmission-line distance, and how much does the step-up and step-down equipment cost for different voltages? How does HVDC help? Are there better alternatives to water electrolysis followed by Fischer–Tropsch? How does the global distribution of current human energy use relate to the distribution of solar resource?

Which puts solar and nuclear on completely the same scale...

If you don't think mass is a good way to compare, and you're concerned about resources, please suggest the metric that will somehow make nuclear look good. Because that concrete is not very recyclable. So the 95% recyclability of solar panels is making them look a looooot better than nuclear once we move beyond mass to something more nuanced.

I'd be ecstatic if someone figures out how to change the ROI on nuclear, but I'm no longer optimistic about it. Just saying the words "small modular reactors" isn't a solution.

So is storing enriched uranium. Again this is not a point in favor of nuclear.

"Benefit from partial shade" means exactly that. Any 2800-acre farm that welcomes 50% shade, or any four such 700-acre farms, can. But there has thus far been no demand for the technique, because there is in fact no shortage yet of land for 100% coverage. I have personally seen a large number of fully shaded parking lots; I daresay you have, too.

Solar farms do not need 1400 connected acres. Fourteen 100-acre solar farms are more useful, producing a peak 71 MW each. In my immediate area, just recently, a decommissioned 20-acre landfill ("It’s not exactly a tourist area") was turned into a solar farm, producing useful power the very same year as it began construction. <https://highlandscurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Sunl...>

Canals in India are being roofed over with solar panels, reducing evaporation loss. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Solar_Power_Project> Panels are being floated on hydroelectric dam reservoirs, all over the world, for the same benefit, with easy access to the power grid. Los Angeles could float 175 acres of panels over its municipal reservoir, replacing the black plastic balls it floats today to absorb sunlight that would produce bromates. <https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-w...>

Railroad rights-of-way are similarly available.

A large fraction of carbon-neutral power comes from wind turbines, which also have encountered no difficulty locating space to operate, already often shared with existing farms and ranches.

Air compression is familiar tech.

So, the only remaining question is which of the others will turn out to be cheaper than air. Hydrogen is essential feedstock in many industries, where storage and handling have long since been worked out, so synergy may push H2 over the line, particularly once it becomes the dominant aviation fuel. There is of course no difficulty with storing or using ammonia, and similar synergies apply. Modern catalytic methods are much more efficient than traditional Haber-Bosch, Sabatier, or electrolysis processes, so costs are plummeting, and the ultimate winner, if there is only one, is unpredictable. In other words, they are all viable, and getting better.

In all cases the costs are still in free fall, so nukes, as already mature tech, fall progressively farther behind.

It's not. It can be stored underground. This is a demonstrated technology, little different from how natural gas is stored.

It is also a mistake to inflate, which is what I'm concerned with. I'm under the impression that the political aspect is being inflated because this is an aspect that the average person can more easily understand.

> Listening to experts is also not a good advice on it own, there is a lot of domain specific knowledge out there.

This is why I specifically mention consensus and the vast complexity of the problem. You can easily replace the instances of nuclear in this paragraph with any power source and the basis would still hold true (honestly even the concerns of lobbying from the above paragraph). But there are experts in nuclear power, experts in solar, experts in wind, etc then there are people who have worked in these industries for decades that lead these groups (usually the leaders of these groups hold multi-domain knowledge and there are several members). This hierarchical structure provides the communication network for these people. The mistake you're making here is assuming that these people are working in isolation. Go to any DOE lab and you will find reactor researchers eating lunch with solar researchers. These people talk. They talk a lot. It is their job to talk to one another. Half the models that the climate scientists do wouldn't work if these people weren't talking to one another. You're over simplifying the reality of the situation by creating nice and neat boxes for researchers to sit in. I'm not saying "listen to a nuclear expert" I'm saying "listen to the consensus of several disciplines." Having been in those lab settings I don't see the nuclear researchers being anti-solar or anti-wind, but I do see them being anti-fossil fuels. Similarly I don't see the solar or wind researchers being anti-nuclear (actually the opposite) but I do see them being anti-fossil fuels. Even the researchers studying fossil fuels there are anti-fossil fuels and pro nuclear and renewables. There's a very clear consensus here. They disagree about the proportions of the energy portfolio, but not the components. And honestly their disagreement on proportions isn't large and all sides are making different assumptions about technologies that do not yet exist, and they will gladly admit this.

> Off course I am non of these things, my expertise is in front end web development. I am less then a layman in nuclear or power policy. However I am worried about the climate emergency, and I do worry that experts giving advice in favor of nuclear power are misguided—or worse—have their own agenda.

Do you question that of fossil fuels? Solar? Wind? Hydro? If not, why? What's the difference here? Why do you have faith in one set but not the other? They all have their own agendas, and for the most part they are the same (though applied to their own technology). But a researcher also has a very different agenda than the company providing the energy product. Clearly the latter has a more biased position than the former and I'm saying to listen to the former.

> I don’t think this puts me on a high horse or—more accurately—under a tin foil hat.

These are the same. The tin foil hat is often associated with believing that the scientists have missed something that is clear to you. The tin foil hat is the know it all manager who micromanages but doesn't have the first clue about the technical aspects of your work. We've all had that manager. We all know that manager's ego and how frustrating they are. How they make it more difficult to get work done.

> Experts failed to stop the climate catastrophe before it was an emergency.

I'm not sure where this diverges from my main point. It is exactly the problem I'm concerned with. The experts say one thing. That thing gets politicized. The politicization takes over and manipulates the perception of what the experts say to fit the political narrative. Population becomes confused and argues. Policy fails as we fight and experts are scrambling to clarify what they actually mean and how that's different than what people are saying that they mean.

> Again I am not an expert on what I am talking about.

Then don't take a hard position, but rather a soft one. That is all I'm arguing for here. I'm not sure how many times I need to say this, but I'm not advocating for nuclear so much as "let the experts." If that's a controversial position then I'm highly concerned. We can only do the best we can do. I'm quite certain that the best efforts of experts is vastly superior to the best efforts of laymen. Sure, the laymen will have a few wins now and then, but the likelihood of success is magnitudes higher by going with experts. (Again, I'm not saying don't be critical, I'm just saying that if you're a layman don't bring a baseball bat to the debate. Doing so represents extreme arrogance and leads to a regression in progress)

> When reading commentary on HN I usually try to filter out the people that seem to know what they are talking about.

This is great and should be done, but HN is not highly populated by climate nor energy experts, although there are some here. It's easy to say things that sound intelligent without them actually being.

Edit: I want to add, in my original post I also did shit on the typical pro-nuclear commenter, complaining about how they are talking about things they don't know about (thorium, SMRs, liquid, breeders, etc). It should be explicitly clear that my comment is more "hey guys, maybe this is a complex subject and we should stop arguing so strongly and see what the experts say" and not "fuck yeah nuclear power screw those renewables." I'm tired of anything remotely suggesting nuclear is anything but evil is equated to the latter.

I am sure not all anti-nuclear green activists are like this, but its the reality in the here and now. This is why I started the conversation about those issues. Oil and coal is not the way forward, and since that is the proposed deal currently on the table on the renewable side then I reject it and look to someone who can offer a better deal.

I would be much more open to the anti-nuclear side if they clearly came out against the practice of using fossil fuels for grid stability and reserve.

The deepest flaw of nuclear is that it has failed to show good experience effects. This alone marks it as a doomed technology, when it is facing competition with strong experience effects. Unless this changes, things will only get worse for nuclear, not better.

This all started with Texas deliberately ignoring Federal warnings to winterize their energy infrastructure. They went so far as to keep their own grid in order to make the Federal government unable to force them to do something good for the people of Texas.