What better way to save the earth and solve the population problem than to have the energy production capabilities to simply build e.g. ringworlds? Even that's not out of the realm of possibility with that kind of energy available.
With all the investment in solar and wind we could easily have built a fission based economy. The French proved that in the 70/80s and had a green grid ever since.
Had we done that collectively global warming would be a far lesser issue.
It would also help us understand neutronics and material science so we can eventually switch to fusion.
The same basic technology could also be used for space travel in the solar system and would have advanced space travel by a lot.
But of course for idiotic reasons society went away from that.
Much of that high cost is often wholly-legal corruption that attaches to almost any large, centralized, hard-to-account public-money expenditure. Knowing this does not help. Thus far, solar and wind projects have mostly avoided the corruption tax by their simple accounting framework: N generating units x $C per unit = $CxN; and by their clear value proposition: $CxN is lately, and still increasingly, much less than alternatives whether those are figured with corruption tax included or not.
At this time it is cheaper to build out a new solar-and-wind farm and operate it than to continue just to operate a comparable nuke, wholly neglecting construction and decommissioning cost. We finally got the ramshackle Diablo Canyon and Indian Point contraptions shut down, but it will still cost a $billion to take them apart; or, likely, more, according to the degree of corruption tolerated.
That's why France has cheapest electricity in Europe?
Furthemore, once you take into account damage from climate change for fossil fuels or cost of backup for renewables, their cost triples.
For example Scotland generated 100% of it's energy needs cumulatively in a year from renewables, but in reality the renewables only covered ~30% of demand because it was generating loads when none was needed, and generation little when loads was needed.
But this graph indicates that, unlike in 2009, nuclear is in general much more expensive than PV or wind: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20201019_Levelized_C...
From the cost estimates I’ve seen, PV with battery backups are cost competitive with oil and better than coal, even with pessimistic battery cycle-lifetimes. And we are building battery factories essentially as fast as we can, and batteries are still getting cheaper.
US and many other countries have a random of assortment of one-off reactors with different safety issues and operational requirements, fuel requirements, making this very expensive to operate. This "free market" approach doesn't work for nuclear.
Regarding batteries, we will have a massive shortage for cars, let allone grid from all the forecasts I've seen.
Australia and India will be fine with solar, but Siberia has no sunlight half the year and wind is not great there either
I’ve not seen this. Do you have a link?
> Australia and India will be fine with solar, but Siberia has no sunlight half the year and wind is not great there either
Naturally. I don’t wish to suggest one-size fits all, merely what seems to be the best on average at the moment and with foreseeable trends.
The most mature of these is "stored hydro", in which water is pumped up to a dam reservoir. Obviously this depends on having a dam not too far away, a ready source of water below it, and enough spare generating capacity there to take up the load when needed. Ramp-up is near instantaneous.
In places with deep mine shafts, a similar gravitational storage method is practical: suspend a heavy weight (hundreds or even thousands of tons) at the top of the shaft, attached to cables that turn a motor-generator as they unwind. This has the advantage that it may ramp up to full power in seconds, and the available energy is limited only by the depth of the shaft. Obviously this depends on availability of long vertical mineshafts, but there are very many of these worldwide. The tech involved is all 19th-century, so these only need construction. When excess / cheap power is available, the weight is hoisted back up.
Another is underground compressed air. (This may be combined with the above, pumping air into the same mineshaft, as is being done in one pilot installation.) This, also, relies only on 19th-century technology. Roughly half of the energy stored in compressed air becomes heat, so efficient use requires good heat insulation. Earth serves as excellent insulation. Power is extracted by exhaust through a turbine; existing turbines from older generation schemes may be repurposed. Ramp-up is fast. The reservoir must be charged up for some time in advance to be able to get maximum power out at sudden need. Several examples of this are being demonstrated.
Air liquification is a perhaps surprising alternative. It relies on mature 20th-century technology; there have long been numerous industrial uses for liquified air. For maximum full-cycle efficiency, heat extracted from the air is also banked. A GW-scale plant is under construction in Scotland, and a 50 MW demonstrator is breaking ground in Chile. An advantage of air liquification is that the storage capacity is limited only by the number of cheap insulated tanks built, which may be added to at leisure.
The above are the immediately available alternatives. Efficient hydrolysis of water to produce hydrogen has obvious industrial importance, and it may eventually displace other methods, as there is no upper limit to the useful amount of hydrogen that may be usefully produced from surplus generating capacity, even after local tankage is full.
Nonsense. In the 60 they literally developed 100 of different types of nuclear reactor often for a tiny amounts of money. Any coherent strategy over the last 50 years clearly shows that if would been cheaper to reach basically zero carbon and it could have been done far earlier and earlier with nuclear.
Navy ships in lifetime analysis show that over the ship lifetime its very cost effective. Not to mention that you can do many things you simply couldn't do otherwise.
Real private innovation and capital were never unleashed for nuclear innovation after the early explosion in the 60s. The extreme restrictions on the materials, government picking winners early and shutting out everything else. At least at that point some research was still going on, but no real effort to go beyond. After the government lost interest in the technology almost every single project was shut down and a nuclear became basically no-go when asking for funding inside the government.
And of course if you have incredibly low volume systems, with a tiny base of educated people, based on technology that is essentially from the 60s you are not gone have an effective system.
Like everything else, nuclear plants, even incredibly sub-optimal PWR designs when built in large numbers will get significantly cheaper. This is clearly evident in any analysis on nuclear economics. If you can build essentially the same reactor with many of the same project leader and teams over and again the costs go down massively. Even outside the actual parts production getting cheaper.
The cost per reactor that France achieved during their expansion is actually very low and they did it with pretty old technology that was really not at all optimized to be effectively built.
There is a gigantic design space that has not been explored that could massively reduce both the build cost and the operation cost and even decommissioning cost. Alternative reactor designs can be far smaller, far safer and require less human operation in fact a properly built reactor should have almost no human interaction ever.
This was all known in the 60s and the foundations were clear put down. In the 70s some amazing stuff was shown but at that point budget had already gone down government had already picked the commercial winners.
Check out this picture:
https://i.cbc.ca/1.5764415.1602802493!/fileImage/httpImage/s...
A design of that size would have been possible with 70 technology. Had they actually tried to innovate on technology and attempted different designs or had given real advantages to CO2 free technology at the time and let private investors take care of it, designed like this would have happened.
These main reactor vessels are literally not much bigger then a tiny ship, and could easily be manufactured in a single factory on a assembly line, transported to location and dropped into a hole filled with concrete.
Current cost actually are a result of the massively complex large civil engineering, more then the actual nuclear part themselves. That is high cost construction over a long period that has major disadvantage in financing. Having 10x smaller vessels with 100x simpler cooling system absolutely would make building reactors far cheaper and if you build many of them and have teams that are not doing for the very first time there is no reason why a nuclear plant can be build at cheaper rates then coal plant, more comparable to modern gas plants.
If you have an energy source that has that much advantage in energy density. Not taking advantage of such a dense and easy to obtain energy source is insane. Thorium mining for the whole US could have been done in one small mine for all US needs for the next 100 years or thorium extract Throium from the waste product of other mining operations. The reactor above could run on thorium that was dissolved very simply, you don't even need complex fuel production (not that that fuel production currently matters that much for overall cost of plant operation).
So you have basically zero cost of fuel, basically zero CO2, almost no mining, could have been done in the 70s, for sure in the 80s and 90s.
This is what I am talking about when I say its a missed opportunity. Even the incredibly sub-optimal route France took, lead to results that were far, far better then the route anybody else took and France did the world a huge service.
If fuel were serious concern for cost, real searching for it would find much more.
And even with current technologies and reactors there are many ways to extend this, if you are willing to mix in some more highly enriched materials.
Eating up the absurd amount of nukes the US still has for example would be helpful.
And of course no society that actually bet on nuclear would still be using that fuel cycle in any serious way.
This is just the typical fear mongering that people use for all technologies they don't like, "Not enough lithium for EV".
Fuel reprocessing employed by France uses all of U235 + generates and burns plutonium. Fast reactors, which exist in small numbers in Russia, etc, take it up by another two orders of magnitude
We also dont know how to model quantum gravity still. That seems pretty fundamental.
Im optimistic there will be physicists who find something new and whacky that no one could predict.
In particular one can imagine outsourcing every high-entropy activity to space and leaving Earth for low-entropy high-value activities.
That means we'd be able to treat the Earth as a great big park, with little-to-no human inhabitants.
Fanciful, but still possible, given such an energy breakthrough. Even if it takes a couple centuries, genetic records and some terraforming (feasible with that kind of energy available) would probably allow us to recover from the damage incurred by the Earth in the time it takes to develop the tech.
>That means we'd be able to treat the Earth as a great big park, with little-to-no human inhabitants.
That's a nice idea, however the resources required to move enough people off the Earth just to keep the population from rising, let alone moving the bulk of the population off the planet, would be astronomical and definitely impractical.
Consider the data:
1. Population: ~7.75 billion.
2. Deaths per year: ~60 million
3. Births per year: ~140 million
4. Annual population growth: ~80 million
Let's start with the idea of keeping the population the same, rather than moving 7 billion humans off the planet.
In order to move 80 million people just into orbit, let alone have some place for them to go would require that we launch (rockets? catapults? space elevators?) about 220,000 people, along with whatever cargo is required (we'll ignore the cargo here) every. single. day.
How many rockets/space elevator cars/catapult ships or whatever would we need just to move that 80 million off the planet?
Let's use space elevators (SE) here since we can (theoretically at least) make space elevator platforms arbitrarily large.
Let's say we use an SE car that can carry 1,000 people and can travel up the elevator at 1000 km/hour.
In order to just keep the population from growing, we'd need to launch 220 SE cars a day.
Unfortunately, a round trip to/from geostationary orbit[1] (yes, rockets/catapults could deliver payloads in much less time to low Earth orbit. But such payloads would likely be an order of magnitude less than a space elevator) at 1000 km/hour would take ~70 hours.
Which means we'd need ~650 SE cars in service at any given moment.
Loading and launching 220 SE cars a day would require enormous logistical effort:
We'd need to launch ~10 cars per hour (220 per day).
How can we load and launch 1000 people times 10 in an hour, every hour?
I suppose we could build ten space elevators, then each site could just load and launch one an hour. Which seems doable.
But where will people stay while waiting to board a car?
Just expending the resources to build (and maintain) the infrastructure for such an enterprise would be enormous. And without some serious energy (commercial fusion on a massive scale), just running these elevators would quite possibly dwarf the total power output of the planet.
And that's just to keep the population flat. Attempting to remove the bulk of Earth's population would require raw materials, manufacturing, construction and maintenance several orders of magnitude larger than the example above.
So no. We're not going to solve any population issues, let alone removing the bulk of the population, by sending folks off-world.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths
[1] https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
- cheaply access space
- cheaply access cubic miles of asteroid iron
- build whole automated production industries in space, to build however many spaceships we want
- automate the construction of spaceships and that ringwood
- use those ships and tools to automate the construction of more production facilities
You're imagining a single transport into space, but that's a mode of thinking still constrained by expensive and inefficient energy. Imagine hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of autonomously constructed ships all available for that population transfer.
That energy is the catalyst for an exponential growth in our ability as a species to move ourselves and control our environment. It just takes some imagination to see outside our current constraints.
It's not the ai singularity, but I think our ability to build stuff cheaply, in space, with materials obtained in the quantity they're available in space, will represent a singularity-esque leap forward.
How will settling Mars or any planet save the biosphere?
We have a few decades to not kill the planet. Settling another planet would take centuries.
Kind of like Olympic gymnasts lift weights and work on flexibility and they want to exceed what their performances require such that the performance is easy and not pushing them to the limits of their ability.
Ie "You have to crawl before you can walk. If you learn to run, walking becomes trivial in comparison."
If that makes sense.
There exists technology that can transport people over short to medium distances really efficiently and without much greenhouse gas emissions. All it would take would be for policy makers to allocate some funding to build out the infrastructure required, yet they don’t.
There exists technology to transport and distribute food wherever there is hunger. Even technology to grow food more efficiently and without additional greenhouse gas emissions. Yet we don’t apply that.
Most countries continue to pour money into their most devastating government institutions (the military and the police) that not only cause a world of societal problems on their own, but also pollute a bunch in the meantime for everybody else. At the same time they could be using that money to build infrastructure that would allow us to live a more sustainable lives. But they don’t.
If the technology existed that would take people to Proxima Centauri in 10 years, and we invented a bunch of good technology that would help us make our current world better. I bet this new technology would be used equally sparingly as our current technology.
I'm personally heavily invested in the pieces of the puzzle that tech, per se, cannot solve. My work in that regard gets little in the way of attention and people have long attacked me as a nutter, etc.
I run a citizen planners forum on Reddit. I try to write about local community development at eclogiselle.com. Sometimes something I wrote gets a few thousand page views, but most of what I write gets very little traffic and that seems to be generally trending down, not up.
And I have mixed feelings about that because I have actively sought to ditch traffic rooted in lurid interest in me, so that's sort of "huzzah. I win? I guess."
I would like to see more focus on passive solar design. I would like to see more development of missing middle housing. I would like to see more walkable, bikable communities where Americans can actually live without a car.
I would like to see social change of the sort that's needed to actually solve these problems with the currently available tech. The problem I see is that tends to require a charismatic leader of the sort that historically founded various religions and I see problems with that approach.
I think it's inherently problematic to just take someone's word for it and do as you are told because they said so and you basically worship them. People need to think for themselves, not dutifully do as they were told.
And I don't know how you put out good info to foster the right kind of change in the amount needed etc and do so in a way that sidesteps the tendency for leaders of any sort to dictate what others should do.
So I have kept my footprint intentionally small in some sense while I figure out best practices. "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, when are you going to find time to do it over?"
Best.
(And we don't need to and probably shouldn't spend a lot on this. What we currently spend on space exploration/settlement through agencies like NASA is sufficient for this. And we also get the spin-off technology advantages.)
I’m moderately optimistic.