The only thing that should be front and center for climate change is the large scale adoption of nuclear energy across the globe. And then, carbon recapture.
Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.
Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.
We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.
How? What other environmental crisis do you see happening if we embrace nuclear?
> We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.
It seems short-sighted to focus _all_ of our efforts on holding quality of life the same as reduce consumption. I certainly agree that this will be a part of the solution, but by constraining the problem thusly we make it much harder to solve. A robust mix of nuclear, renewables, and efficient consumption is much more likely to work than any of these three options alone.
I don't see into the future better than anyone else, but my guess? The sheer amount of resources we need and the waste we create is drastically reducing biodiversity around the globe, and keystone plant and animal species are on the verge of becoming extinct. This will cause a cascading ecological collapse, including our own food chain.
But why? I'm not arguing that our current lifestyle in heavily developed countries is sustainable, but what makes you certain that we can't form sustainable habits? As long as humans have existed on the planet, we've become better at using available resources (though many of us have certainly died trying, as evidenced by the decline/collapse of many pre-Industrial civilizations through environmental damage). What about this moment in time marks the end of our ability to become more efficient?
Nuclear was a technology that was overhyped in the 20th century but never delivered on its promise. We have far better, cheaper, and more flexible tech now to replace it.
Not to mention it would allow us to shut down all these ancient ass reactors we got going now which is the equivalent of driving around in a Model-T because we can't be assed to get a newer car.
I love renewables, but we still have a long ways to go in scaling renewables to not only provide global power demands, and we also need to be using ass tons of additional clean power just trying to stabilize the environment and sequester CO2.
If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life.
What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. This is the crucial road block to nuclear. There are lots of places begging for nuclear to be built, but it never works out, and causes tremendous disaster for all involved in construction. The two "success" stories are China and Russia's Rosatom, but it's unlikely that we could have them construct reactors in the US and succeed. For a while it was hoped that South Korea could build for the rest of the world, but it has become clear in recent years that there was corruption at the root of their inspection process.
As for storage, it is getting deployed all the time, mostly in conjunction with new wind and solar installs (called "hybrid" in the field). It is unlikely that we could scale any sort of nuclear construction to catch the coattails of storage now, we are rolling out dozens of GW per year currently, and that will go up by a factor of 10 by 2026, and another factor of 10 by 2031, with an expected 10-30TWh of storage production annually. Nuclear can't scale like that.
And how much less CO2 would have been put into the atmosphere over that time period? Also, if we had scaled up to produce that many nuclear reactors, don't you think we'd be invested in new and better ones coming online? Or at least until solar and wind can solve their storage and transmission issues.
It's definitely feasible to construct and run, it's just that folks are scared to run nuclear power. France has a _lot_ of nuclear power but only started dialing back after Fukushima scared them.
I'm begging that anybody who believes that nuclear is possible to construct today, to look at any of the many places where it has been attempted: any of the French EPR or the AP1000s in the US. It has been abandoned by all, except for a few startups working on small modular reactors. These had been avoided in the past because it was thought they could never be as economical as the large reactors that we can't construct today.
And even before that, nuclear was abandoned in the US not because of TMI or Chernobyl, but because it had been a financial and managerial disaster:
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?
I'm not sure why we don't fork the reactor designs with some minor changes for powering urban grid infrastructure....Hmmm, maybe a sneaky rollout would be to establish a bunch of "test reactors" physically on naval bases, but with grid connections to the local cities.....essentially subsidizing the national power grid with US Navy nuclear assets.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine
The link you post talks about the project mismanagement and bad incentives that tanked nuclear prices. This isn't anything new. The US has been failing to build new infrastructure on time and under budget for decades now and it's a much larger problem than just nuclear plants.
> Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?
I mean, I don't think there's definitive proof that cost is the reason here. Whataboutism isn't enough to sow doubt, we need a more clear line of reasoning.
But it's a bit unfair to call my questions about the supposed success of France when you are the one who brought up the topic. I have searched for cost numbers on the Mesmer plan a few times and came up dry. Yet I still hear it as evidence that nuclear was cost effective and a good idea, without any numbers or data attached to it. So if it was cost effective, where are the numbers? And why did they stop at a fraction of what they had planned? These are earnest questions, directly on topic, directly about the feasibility of constructing nuclear. But I'm not surprised that nobody has the details, as I've never met a nuclear advocate that has investigated it as much as I have and could provide me with a single new fact. I am very interested in all potential solutions to climate change, but I don't see how nuclear could be one after three history I have learned and the recent track record with construction. Nuclear as climate solution does not have enough basis in fact for me to be able to support it.
Japan may have a difficult time, which is why they have been so fond of hydrogen, but I have a feeling that they may find some other solutions. Deep-sea floating turbines are falling in price all the time.
I think we need a bit more than feelings and faith to solve climate change. Nuclear buys us time to work out the issues with renewable energy, as long as it takes. And in certain cases, it just might not. That's the nature of renewable energy, much like oil deposits or rare-earth deposits aren't available everywhere in the world.
"Feelings" are the only reason people think nuclear is possible. Those that have been trying it in the past decade have shown it to not be competitive.
Usually HN is good at thinking like engineers, but for some reason nuclear seems to get very little critical thought, and renewables get very little consideration for their actual reality.
There is not a carbon-free grid model out there that uses nuclear except as a tiny tiny fraction of grid power. Literally none!! Yet somehow comments about needing to build lots of nuclear get treated as serious statements that could hold some water. Nuclear will not be the backbone of any future grid for at least 50 years, and most likely never again in human history.
> There is not a carbon-free grid model out there that uses nuclear
and in what timescale can these carbon-free models be developed? We probably need a carbon-negative model to reverse existing CO2 damage.
> Nuclear will not be the backbone of any future grid for at least 50 years
France has declared it will wants to cut nuclear to 50% of the grid by 2035, it's current share is 70%. So what does this statement mean?
> Floating wind is falling cost all the time. Nuclear's cost is going up all the time.
The cost of energy production, or the total cost of infra?
Part of the reason nuclear is growing is lack of funding. Turns out, you need to keep building nuclear power stations for people to think a degree in nuclear engineering is a good idea. And you need to keep building them to keep power-plant-building corps in business and innovating/improving efficiency.