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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding?

But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors. Nuclear killed itself with PWR solid rod designs and ignoring the Oak Ridge designs, all so they could have weapons grade isotopes.

Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies and oil states for a trillion dollars, topped democratically elected regimes to keep oilmen happy, repressed the effects of oil/coal for the oilmen.

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> But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors.

Its fascinating reading about all the research online into molten salt designs in the 60's wrt nuclear and its promise that just went ignored (if you take the word of people who worked on it on their blogs) because of things that sounded very much like:

> Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape.

I'm just glad that the rest of the world is not limited to build out for large scale renewable systems (i.e. freaking chile has +200MW and 17.5h molten salt storage sans direct solar radiation CPVCSP plant bidding for under 4 cents/kwh in 2021 and the US has nothing, what a joke the US is for renewable despite all the past research in related fields, but good on other countries taking advantage of it).

I suspect even the sCO2 turbine research will go nowhere towards broad commercialization/utilization in the US and get broad adoption outside of it despite its applicability to nearly every system that converts heat into electricity now.

Sadly, I think nuclear will still go nowhere outside a few places as long as fears around weaponization remain (even the thorium stuff has its downsides from the protactinium -> u233 route, and i've at least seen this stuff pursed for awhile in few EM's leveraging US researchers/companies/consultants).

If you're going to argue for aggressive funding, you should probably include fusion:

https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

> Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding?

To a certain extent, yes. Control electronics and especially HVDC use in offshore turbines, where all the economies of scale are happening, were not as advanced as they are now.

No. Solar technology is based on semiconductor technology to a certain extent, and we weren't as far long as we are now in that.

Funding is no guarantee of discovery in research. Yes you can throw more money at the problem to have more people looking at things, but there's an element of creativity in deciding which pathways to go down for experimentation. Discovery is also often (usually?) random and serendipitous: see James Burkes' television series Connections.

In material science and chemistry there is a finite number of paths, because of the finite number of elements involved, but it's still a grind to go through, and people may prioritize/try the wrong ones initially.

More research is more better, but there needs to be a societal base that is fertile for the change in question. Once that base is there, there is often the same/similar discovery popping up from multiple places 'spontaneously':

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

> Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape.

Oil has not: cheap, convenient energy has. This is because cheap, convenient energy allowed us to get beyond mere sustenance living and industrialize and mechanize work. Oil just happens to be that for the last century or so (after surpassing coal in the Industrial Revolution which kicked things off). Would you have us completely stop modern society?

> Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies […]

The US has been running the globe well before oil companies were a major influence. The US went after Mexico and Texas before oil was discovered there. There was no oil in Cuba or the Philippines.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

Concentrated solar is not semiconductors, it's mirrors and salts. Perovskites I don't think are, although they aren't a product yet.

Do we need cutting edge fabs for silicon solar cells?

And ORNL-LFTR reactors is the biggest missed opportunity in terms of global warming ever.

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