China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors | Hacker News Reader

China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors

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261 points1cvmask354 comments

If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. And I think that actually is the primary motivation. They need lots of power and they need to stop killing their citizens with smog from coal (as well as our planet).

I think it will cost them financially though. This won't come cheap. Half a trillion for about 1200 GW of capacity is a lot and not necessarily the best value for money. However, they have about that amount of coal to replace as well. The issue with wind and solar is that we're only adding in the order of a few hundred GW per year. China needs an order of magnitude more just to get rid of coal.

The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. Not trivial; and China is already going as fast as it can with this. But also not impossible. It's going to be a close race.

China might simply be betting on multiple horses here; which is the smart thing to do. I don't think they are picking winners here; just losers. Which would be coal. It needs to go, hence the need to fix 1000+ GW of power demand while also accounting for continued economic growth. They aren't ready to commit to that at COP 26 just yet. But the timing of this announcement is no coincidence either.

Another horse in the race would be fusion. Apparently there is some serious money flowing into some companies now. Helion just did a 500M series E: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-energy-will-use-500.... That may or may not work but it's kind of a really big deal if that hits commercial viability this decade rather than in 2050. And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), nuclear is less urgent as a solution. And unlike nuclear, fusion actually might have a shot at being cost competitive with other renewables. Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.

That pollution is to make the stuff you buy in Walmart. As long as you as a consumer do not demand a label such as "made with green energy" and prefer those products, the polluting manufacturers will prevail.

That's definitely part of it. But the flip side of that is that as the U.S. tightens emissions, production outsources elsewhere, possibly where emissions standards and many other environmental standards are much lower, which could lead to an overall net harm.

Thus if you have 3 countries, it may be worse for just one of the countries to pass environmental constraints on the production of tradeables. Either all three countries do it, or none do it, or you don't trade at all with those that don't do it.

Why people don't take these arguments to their logical conclusion is beyond me.

A label would help. It transfers the responsibility to the consumer.

If you have a dozen of regular eggs, a dozen of cage-free eggs, and a dozen of pasture-raised eggs... If you pick the regular choice you know you are contributing to less humane conditions for chickens. Now it is your choice.

To a point - if you're going to have labeling you'll already need some kind of regulation and enforcement. Seems to me like if you're going to set that up, you could just turn the knobs a little farther and make the 'bad' choices cost 20% more than the 'good', for example.

Adding a tariff to goods has three drawbacks

1. very easy to cheat. E.g. during Trump's tariffs on China, there was mass cheating as goods were imported into Vietnam, relabelled as made in Vietnam, and exported to the U.S. When there is big money at stake, the incentive to cheat goes way up. Trying to audit every exporter's Asian supply chain in search of Chinese inputs is tough.

2. Imposing a country-wide tariff does not incentivize any producer to adopt more efficient processes. Imagine if the EU decided the US gas taxes were too low, and so they slapped a tariff on American cars. Would that incentivize Americans to use less gas? Would it make Americans favor an increase in gas taxes?

3. They lead to retaliatory tariffs by the other side. There's no such thing as pure one way punishment, no matter how justified you think you are. The other side will punish you by the same amount, if they can, in order to punish what they view as your bad behavior in trying to punish them.

Now I'm a big fan of trade reductions, but that's because it's part of my personal war on globalism. But make sure you are signing up for the same mass trade restrictions - e.g. blanket bans on certain products coming from all of East Asia - because that's what this is. Don't think you can wage a war against CO2 without also waging a war against globalism. International conferences are fun, but they have no teeth and don't get the job done.

I don't disagree about encouraging onshoring for example (much easier to make those regulations stick that way). But I was mostly responding to the parent's idea that shifting the burden/choice to the consumer was a positive thing. My instinct is that, if we're talking about humane treatment of chickens, it would be best to impose regulations so that all the eggs met a minimum requirement - so consumers couldn't "choose wrong". But of course that makes them all cost more...

Yes, I know the point you were making and it's a fair one. I was just elaborating. It's unfortunate that your post was downvoted, there is nothing wrong with it, IMO. I was taking this as a discussion.

Nuclear follows a learning curve too.

The reason why it got so expensive is because we fell down the curve. Intentionally. So that we could fill our atmosphere with CO2 while we waited 40 years for wind and solar to become viable. The mind boggles.

Do you mean we lowered the scale of nuclear after accidents, thus increased cost/Kw generated?

He means when you stop building reactors, you lose the tribal knowledge to build reactors. No different than when folks try to reproduce WWII vehicles and discover the plans don’t actually reflect the real build process because things were adapted on the fly and never written down because everyone “just knew”. Oh that weld? We actually need plates and bolts to reinforce it due to stress cracks in the field.

Exactly.

When you are building one offs, and something goes wrong and you redo it, you don't gain benefit from knowledge of not making same mistake again. As there isn't next time. Now when you have done same mistake before you won't repeat it. And these mistakes are the reason behind delays and part of cost over runs.

Not really, nuclear power is one of those things which has had a negative learning curve.

The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

China absolutely does need to replace its coal-powered electricity plants.

But it also needs a great deal more electricity, for a few reasons.

Away from the coast and the mega cities, there is still a lot of energy poverty.

If China is going to replace coal in iron smelting and steelmaking, it needs to electrolyze a lot of hydrogen.

It also needs electrolyzed hydrogen to replace fossil methane for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for wintertime peak electricity plants (and possibly for engines for ocean-going ships, if it can't use nuclear for them).

If it's going to capture the carbon from its cement plants, it needs power to do that.

Electrolyzed hydrogen and captured CO2 will have to be the new feedstocks for many industrial chemicals and plastics.

I don't think it's either-or with nuclear and wind/PV, it's not hedging bets, it's whatever works locally, ASAP and AMAP.

I think you answered your own question: energy policy is a multi-layered approach. There's no one silver-bullet, at least this century. It will take a lot of small steps. This is one of those instances where authoritarian governments can move faster.

Although that is a LOT of nuclear waste they will be creating. Hopefully the also advance waste storage technology in parallel.

The thing about nuclear waste is that even a lot of it is not a lot in absolute terms.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

"In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."

...and that's from generating 20% of the US's energy the whole time.

I understand what you're saying, especially when compared to trillions and trillions (quadrillions?) of tons of CO2 and particulate pollution of coal and oil burning.

OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored that way. But that concentrated football field can be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage, exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure, terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000 years?). Now it seems much bigger.

Not really. Almost all current nuclear waste is stored on site in casks and does fine.

Fly ash produced by coal just in the US dwarfs it in both volume, total toxicity AND total radioactivity, and is in the 30+ millions of tons a YEAR. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Disposal_and_market_...]

Thankfully a lot of it is used in cement and similar that entrains it decently safely (dilution is the solution), but just the portion that doesn’t on any given year outweighs all nuclear waste ever produced

Yes a loaded headline. It could have read “China pivots to carbon clean nuclear power”.

What would the world be like without the media scaremongering every headline eh?

Shame we'll never find out.

It is a pity that nuclear power is such an emotive subject. Nuclear energy has killed a lot less people than dams or coal mines (possibly even if you include the 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, I haven't done the sums).

The forever cost of a failed nuclear plant is a heavy burden.

> Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.

Does Helion have a demonstrator plant or a pilot? Or even a prototype? All I see is ... nothing.

It is impossible for them to be in commercial operation in nine years even if they did have a working demonstrator. NIMBYism, fear of H-bombs, and the slow speed of regulation guarantee it.

They're a company that's showed nothing so far and claims to know how to do something that's apparently eluded a dozen other fusion power projects with quite literally 1000 times more funding. The likes of ITER and Wendelstein, or the NIF.

Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in the field of energy innovation is basically chump change.

I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.

They’ve shown nothing to you.

That doesn’t mean investors haven’t seen prototypes.

If they had something substantial it would make sense to patent it, instead of keeping it hidden and the potential for it to be stolen as an option. Either the principle their reactor will work on isn't conceptually done yet or they're being seriously irresponsible with their achievements.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that US fusion companies would have the same patent policy as SpaceX.

Elon is quoted in HBR, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."

Or even the US government. Good luck to SpaceX asking the government to enforce its patents against... the government itself!

Wait, what? The Government protects you against the Government itself all the time. What exactly is tha Bill of Rights?

That's the whole point of patents: to be used as a recipe book.

The deal is that you provide the recipe book in exchange for legal protection and a short-term legal monopoly. The other side of that deal is not honored by China, which is Elon's point.

The legal monopoly (which is the same thing as the legal protection) has always been geographically limited, and has always existed at the pleasure of the government granting it.

Patents usually take a few years to issue. In the US, for the first six months, the patent application is confidential

Relatively tiny budget is not a sign of weakness. The history is teemed with well-founded ventures beaten by much less funded ones.

Well I sure hope that ends up being the case, but unfortunately history is also teeming with startups promising the world, getting funding and then collapsing while getting nothing done.

ITER is commonly cited as the most expensive science project of all time. I just don't believe a start up is on the forefront of research that even everyone involved with ITER is behind.

ITER is committed to a certain large scale design.

Helion is trying to do something very different and much smaller.

They announced a $500M - $2200M series E funding round on Friday:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/

They have serious funding, so they have more than nothing. Given the investors don't seem to be naive idiots, I'd say they are making a calculated bet and there might be more to this than wishful thinking.

You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be right.

Heard of Theranos?

They have built several prototypes, but none of the size necessary for useful energy production. Their prototype planned for 2024 is apparently also just supposed to be useful He3 production, but not useful energy production (though they do want it to produce more energy than it consumes).

They also have the local mayor and governor saying good things about them, and given that they're aiming for aneutronic fusion I wouldn't expect regulation to be a huge hurtle, it's a very safe scheme with very minimal waste.

(Just based on googling them a lot yesterday, and mostly from comments on /r/fusion)

An optimistic take is they may be keeping a bit quiet on the details to avoid competition? Some results "first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius" from their Trenta prototype and Altman says "...they and their team have built a generator that produces electricity. Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024..."

The design is quite interesting - twin electromagnets shove plasma at a million miles an hour into the middle chamber and then hopefully fusion flings it out again pushing back on the currents in the electromagnets and producing electrical output directly. Bit like a petrol engine where the piston / crank compress the mix and then after ignition it shoves back harder adding energy to the crankshaft.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210622005366/en/Hel...

> The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick.

This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes. Even the new iron-air tech is still very expensive - $300 million for enough capacity to power 50,000 homes for just one day.[0] By my rough calculations that's 28 trillion dollars to buy enough batteries for all homes in China, assuming 600 million homes, and 7 days of capacity.

But that's quite optimistic, because it's not that hard to get more than a week of unfavourable weather, and you don't want your country to shut down every time that happens.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-batt...

Things get cheaper if you order for a trillion.

This logic only works if the production capacity is available.

If you have to rebuild your entire supply chain to handle that kind of demand you're prices will start to go back up again.

For China (and quite a lot of other places, including the UK) the alternative to building a battery supply chain is to build a supply chain for something else, not to keep the existing and increasingly pointless coal-based supply chains.

(That “something else” can be nuclear).

I think if you install 28 trillion dollars worth of batteries you're going to have a waste problem that will dwarf storing the waste from fission plants.

No, just a recycling problem.

On that scale you might have both. In the case of the Fukushima tsunami, how much environmental damage was caused by e.g. the (lead) batteries in the cars which were trashed? Sure, lithium isn’t lead, but that (along with arson and crashes) are important to plan for at this scale, not just the ideal product end-of-life.

Your concern seems entirely baseless to me.

Probably no damage was done by lead electrodes in Fukushima. Lots was probably done by dry-cleaning establishments, hardware stores, machine shops, pesticide inventories (in factories, stores, and farms), paint factories and stores, etc., but metallic lead? Lead is so stable that even bullets inside people's bodies, where they're constantly exposed to hot, salty, corrosive bodily fluids, usually don't cause any toxicity. Even lead sulfate (the mineral anglesite) is somewhat challenging to get a toxic dose of.

Lithium is a relatively abundant element in Earth's crust, about the same abundance as nitrogen, and more abundant than boron, tin, tungsten, or iodine. It's fairly nontoxic: the lethal dose of lithium salts for a person is measured in tens of grams, and it doesn't bioaccumulate. There are a few lithium minerals that can form (lepidolite is a lithium phyllosilicate, spodumene is a lithium aluminum silicate) but probably most lithium ions released would remain soluble, spreading into the environment. But it would take an enormous lithium release to cause problems: there's 230 billion tonnes of it in the sea without causing any toxicity. In the USA, the EPA hasn't established any limit on lithium in drinking water. The usual therapeutic dose of lithium is about a gram a day, a few times lower than the usual intake of sodium or potassium. 7-Up used to be full of lithium.

I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.

There are a lot of ways for me to be wrong given I’m not a chemist; the point, to misuse a famous quote, is that safety requires me to be wrong about every concern and danger only needs you to be wrong once. So far we’ve not got enough stuff for any hazards in any of the components to rise to the level of significance, and indeed they may just be fine even at the level we need to use them; but in the 1930s I think I could say the same of CFCs?

Scale matters, and while I’m optimistic about batteries etc., I want us to solve problems rather than ignore them — we can only do that by being open about them, and I’ve seen enough occasions where others have claimed risks “don’t exist at all” to be more comfortable with a claim of “1% risk” than of “0% risk”.

> I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.

I’m more concerned with the effect than the cause, the cause was a mere suggestion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7FXeaahRsg

I agree.

28 trillion? A 3000 km long by 1m^2 cross section solid aluminium conductor would only cost 22-ish billion, and that lets you put the PV in Gobi desert with minimal losses.

But overproduction and diversity of the type of renewable is probably even cheaper.

> This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes.

This is bad engineering. One would not use batteries for that sort of long timescale storage, one would use something like hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is much lower, but with the much smaller number of charge/discharge cycles that doesn't matter. The effect of efficiency on the cost of storage scales inversely with the average storage time; it's important for diurnal storage, not important for seasonal storage. The energy capacity cost of hydrogen storage could be maybe $1/kWh of capacity.

For a timescale of a week, thermal storage is an option, with sand heated to 1200 C. Round trip efficiency would be 53%.

Excuse my ignorance, but where did you get the 500 billion price tag? And why do you say it's expensive? It's rather cheap.

People keep saying how solar is the cheapest capacity to install, at 1 dollar per Watt. 1200 GW would be 1.2 trillions, and only offering around 240GW "constant" production, whereas nuclear is half the price to build but more like 1000 GW constant production

Not OP, but you're wrong about cost. Nuclear is more than twice as expensive as photovoltaics [1], so it's not cheap at all. And that doesn't include dealing with risks like proliferation and extremely hazardous waste for hundreds of years.

the half trillion comment came from the original article, that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

Well, nuclear is twice as expensive in the US. China's economics might be a lot different.

For one thing, they can strong arm suppliers to give them the best price. On the other hand, regional corruption might also raise the price up.

China's economics on solar might also be a lot different, but given that it doesn't publish these numbers all we have to reason about are the US and maybe Europe.

Btw, ask France about cost of nuclear, I've heard their new reactors are absolutely in time and budget ;)

Reading that link, levelized solar plus battery storage is twice the cost of nuclear. It is cheap to generate the electricity, but only when backed by natural gas or hydro.

yes, solar and wind energy generation is intermittent, that's no surprise to anyone. but it is much much cheaper than nuclear energy.

This misses the point. You cannot compare solar and nuclear directly, because they serve different needs.

Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway.

To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.

Here's solar+battery for $40/MWh. https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.

your link does not include nuclear, it only includes an elusive "advanced nuclear". This is not for China, which I have the feeling has a different take on "advanced". In the US, existing plants have much lower costs, around the same as cheap coal and gas.

PV capacity costs about 1 dollars per Watt and achieves a 20-25% capacity factor. In the article they say less than 0.5 dollars per watt of nuclear. If they can achieve that, it's obviously cheaper to go nuclear than PV. Nuclear has higher operating costs, true, but also a 90% capacity factor, meaning you need 5 times less capacity installed than PV. 1200 GW of nuclear for 440 billions is the equivalent of 5000GW of PV for 5000 billions. This is just to produce the same amount of energy, at any time during the day/year, before considering the cost of storage or intermittent power on the grid.

I truly hope China can pull this off at the advertised price. Because of the sheer size of the initiative they might be able to just do it using the economy of scale. France did it in 10 years in the 70s-80s, no reason China can't do it today.

We need all the energy sources, being PV+wind+battery purists won't be enough.

I found this article with a more global take https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

Apparently France managed to build it's nuclear plants at a cost of 1 dollar per Watt. Going to 0.5 dollars today might be a challenge for China, even with economies of scale. The article estimated 2.5 per Watt.

Even at 2.5 USD per Watt installed, that would still be about the same price as PV installed. But you gain stability in the grid for a slighter higher operating cost.

That PV cost of $1/watt is the levelized cost. In other words, it already includes the cost of batteries and the capacity factor adjustment. So 1200GW of nuclear for $440B with a capacity factor of 0.9 is equivalent to 1080GW of levelized solar at $1T. But solar+batteries is halving in cost every 4 years or so, whereas economies of scale / learning effect doesn't appear to apply to nuclear, or at least it didn't for the French. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...)

You're confusing Watts, which is power, with levelised cost, which is price of energy over the lifetime of the plant.

It costs 1 dollar to install 1 W of solar PV with no batteries. To include a 2-4 hour battery it's double that. Long term storage for day to day or seasonal is much much more, and likely impossible to do with the current tech.

And in regards to France, compare France's electricity cost with Germany's, Nuclear clearly beats PV and wind on cost. People will say that wholesale prices are the same, and Germany pays such a huge price solely because of taxes. But the point is...those taxes are so high in order to support renewables subsidies.

This being China, all comparisons are moot. They can reduce costs significantly, like they showed with the PV modules. They are the ones that truly commoditized the modules.

It costs $20 to install 1 MWh of solar PV[1]. That's 18 cents per watt averaged over the 8760 hours per year. And since the sun doesn't shine at night, that's 18 cents for at least 2 watts, probably 3-5.

It costs $40/MWh to install solar with batteries[2]. That's 35 cents per watt.

1: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/888004cf-1a38-4716-... 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

Again, you're confusing MWh with MW. MWh is not something you can install, it's something you produce over time. Also, I don't know how but you end up with the ridiculous number of 18 cents per 2 Watts? That is crazy, the module alone is 20 cents per Watt.

I think you should understand first what MW and MWh mean. One costs 1 million dollars to install, and then will proceed to produce 8000 hours per year divided by the capacity factor. So about 2000 hours * 1 MW = 2000 MWh per year. At a price of 5 cents per KWh, you can sell that for 100k dollars.

I figured out my mistake, I was assuming that MWh is an annual figure.

MWh is a much better figure than W when comparing disparate technologies because it takes into account capacity factor, operating costs and disposal costs as well as installation costs. It also relates directly to the price consumer pays. It's also why all the links are pricing in MWh.

So 1 watt of PV with a capacity factor of 33% and 30 years of lifetime would generate 86.7KWh. $20/MWh is thus $1.80/W total for installation, operating and decomissioning costs.

If China can build 150 reactors for $500 billion when it costs the west over $20B to build a single one, then yes nuclear is cheaper than solar.

MWh makes solar look very good because they can pump cheap energy during the day, but none during the night.

33% capacity factor is unheard of, US is around 25%, and even that is higher than most of the world. Not even excellent desert states in the US don't break 30% https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019796/solar-pv-capacit...

Currently the West has massively inflated prices because there is no economy of scale. A planned economy + economies of scale might just pull it off. Especially if they're going to build the nuclear plants in factories, like the west is trying to do now. We'll see.

I'm personally rooting for all the technologies, except coal. Even gas is good as a temporary measure - it allows us to get off coal faster.

CSP solar in California is 33%.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343184782_Capacity_...

My main objection against nuclear is the time scale. I'll happily endorse any nuclear project that comes online before 2030. Even if solar/wind is more expensive than nuclear (and I don't believe they are unless the 150 plants for $500B number is achievable), it's still better simply because they can come online quickly.

People significantly overestimate the amount of batteries that a solar+battery project requires. All you need is enough batteries to handle a single night (and demand is low at night), and enough overcapacity to handle a moderately cloudy day. That'll get you above nuclear's 90% capacity factor.

Those batteries only add $20/MWh to the project. https://www.energy-storage.news/battery-storage-at-us20-mwh-...

The cost picture is complex. Using nuclear they can build the plants next to the industry centers, replacing existing coal plans. They don't need to build batteries to address the intermittency of renewables. In addition 150 power plants being built at the same time might gain some benefit of scale, and might attract other countries to follow suit.

We need to compare the cost to what other countries are doing to achieve similar goals. Countries like Germany is planning to create green hydrogen in order to replace the current natural gas plants, and we don't know the price tag for that. Europe is currently also seeing the consequences of relying on natural gas and energy trading, with record high energy costs for the end consumer, despite building a lot of solar and wind farms. The high demand for natural gas is also creating additional problems for industries that depend on that limited resource, like agriculture. With uranium there isn't many other industries that compete for that resource.

High gas prices are short term very disruptive but actually speed up the agenda of relying less on it. Which is why it is a good thing IMHO with some bad/unfortunate impact on people with lower incomes, You can bet, a lot of home owners that haven't already are now considering heat exchanges, solar, and batteries as ways to have less exposure to high energy prices. Additionally, high gas prices push gas power plants towards being less profitable. Most European energy companies are already investing heavily in wind (particularly) and solar. So, you could argue that investing in gas plants just got a lot less attractive than it already was.

High cost would actually still be manageable if it was predictable. However, that is becoming exactly the issue. It swings between too low for exploitation to be even profitable due to over supply and then too high because of Russian and OPEC policy resulting in supply disruption. Kind of a bad situation to be in if you are dependent on that. The smart move would be to eliminate such dependencies as soon as possible. Energy companies are going bankrupt right now because they are locked into contracts with consumers they no longer can afford.

> And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade),

Am I reading that right that the US has less then 4 years of coal output ?

Given how dependable and safe nuclear is combined with the reduction in carbon it is well worth it. This move is much more sensible than expanding wind and solar on the same scale, and also much more predictable.

> If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great.

China is set to build 43 new coal plants in 2021, and they have a big power supply problem. So shutting any plants down is not happening anytime soon.

https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/

China shuts down lots of coal plants all the time; it's just that they're also building them. In 02020 they built more than they shut down. I'll be surprised if that's the case in 02021.

I suppose another geopolitical aspect of this is that China doesn't want to be dependent on other nations for fuel. If they became involved in a war or even just anger their trading partners in some way, the rest of the world can shut off their energy supply.

For that matter, even if they're on great terms with all their trading partners, those trading partners might ask themselves "why are we selling coal to some other country so they can get the benefit when we have to live with the CO2 emissions as if we had burned it ourselves?" To be honest, I don't understand why the U.S. exports coal at all; it just doesn't seem worth it. (Though I can see where the coal lobby might have something to say about it if such legislation was proposed.)

The other thing that might need to grow is multiple supply chains into specialized nuclear components by an order of magnitude. My gut says it’s actually easier to scale solar and renewables by an order of magnitude than those items.

Of course China might have the same motivations of many nuclear powers have - which is a desire to also maintain a baseline manufacturing capacity for nuclear technologies in general.

I don't get the hope for ramping up production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels 'fast enough'.

Supposedly this is all about climate change and limiting or even stopping emissions, to counter climate change, yes?

While these emissions can be especially annoying when they are near you, they work globally because they give a shit about borders. Supposedly, Yes?

So, from a global ecosystem point of view, considering 'cradle to cradle' without any externalizations, what exactly is won by that, considering the emissions from producing and transporting all that stuff?

Wind turbines require large concrete foundations, you can't put them into the ground like a toothpick into a piece of cheese.

If not in some flat desert, stable roads for the construction and transport, requiring cutting down parts of the forest.

Same for the cables, no matter if over land, or underground transmission.

At Sea it's even more complicated and material intensive.

Solar is requiring large areas to be effective, similar considerations apply.

The production and transport of all that stuff, and the mining and refining of the necessary raw materials is causing emissions.

While of intermittent use, without storage, which again requires mining, refining, transport, production, transport, construction, maintenance, causing more emissions again.

Whose intermittency could be lessened by large HVDC super smart grid, but again, 'this doesn't grow on trees'!

One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. At which magnitude of more emissions, counted over the whole lifecycle from mining raw materials, refining, producing, transporting, constructing, decommissioning?

Compared to a few 100(0) reactors, be they modular/small/gen-whatever/fast breeder/liquid salt/traveling wave/fusion/I don't care.

If the goal is to reduce emissions globally, nuclear it is!

If need be maybe implemented in a Hyman Rickover way, not some crazy lowest bidder contractors. That worked for the US-Navy, so far. Why shouldn't it for the world?

If this is The Emergency as it's supposed to be, it needs an emergency answer.

Solar/Wind it isn't.

Solar is cheap. Wind is cheap. They're cheap like cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants, even without subsidies. And the costs are dropping rapidly, especially for solar. Meanwhile, nuclear is expensive. Like $6B to $8B per GW capacity.

If we throw a big pile of money at the problem, we get more bang for our buck from renewables. And, since wind and solar are on cost learning curves such that the more we build the cheaper it gets, the money we throw at wine and solar gets multiplied in the future by private industry.

Wind construction is fast. Solar construction is incredibly fast. Nuclear construction takes 8-15 years.

Renewables also require batteries and transmission. Batteries are getting cheap too, having dropped 89% in price since 2010. Transmission is a bit more politically tricky, but I think it's doable.

We might be able to get the US grid to 40% renewables by 2030. I doubt we'll have more than 5 GW of additional nuclear capacity in the US by 2030. The revolution will be well underway before nuclear can get its boots on.

Yes. But the farts emitted by the revolutionary masses, aggregated over all affected sectors(cradle 2 cradle, remember?) will counteract the stated goal of reducing emissions.

Make work! Make more work! Make more workers make more work, so that even more workers can make even more work!

And money, of course.

If they do thorium then I am all for it. If not (so can feed their nuclear weaponizations) we all pray for the people over there. Their track records of industry accidents aren't that proud of.

> about 1200 GW of capacity

Since 1GWa* ≈ 8 million tonnes of CO₂ †, this is about a billion tonnes saved every year.

Sadly, we're about 3,000 Gt of CO₂ in excess in the atmosphere.

*: GWa: 1 GW 24h/d, every day, for a year

†: or about 1 Giza pyramid

As far as I know China didn't announce anything. Where is the official announcement?

The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).

Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.

Complements: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

(Thanks to Y. Marignac for part of the data)

Previous discussion, 5 days ago (20 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29094422

Yeah, great. We all forgot how to do nuclear in western démocraties because we were afraid of accidents and did not trust indépendant oversight.

Now all the nuclear plants will be in state-controlled dictatorships with a disdain for truth.

But I'm pretty sure Greenpeace will organize mediatized flash mobs in tienenman square, sure ?

What could possibly go wrong ?

Good for China. I hope it works out for them. China seems politically stable and already has nuclear weapons so there's really no additional risk here. I'm happy to sit back and learn from their mistakes.

I'm honestly surprised at the rose-coloured glasses many on HN view nuclear with.

Like even if the US was all-nuclear, the change in global emissions wouldn't be that high because the US accounts for <20% of global emissions and probably only a quarter of that is from power generation.

But here's another factor: if the US wasn't a consumer of fossil fuels, the only thing that changes is it becomes cheaper for everyone else and that probably increases consumption to the point where the emissions are near net-neutral.

And for that we have a bunch of reactors with terrible failure modes and unanswered questions about long-term reprocessing and/or storage of enrichment byproducts, the same for waste and we'd need to trust governments and corporations to manage it all.

The resistance to wearing a piece of fabric on your face while out in public by a significant portion of the population should tell you everything you need to know here: no amount of altruism will solve climate change. Economics will.

My bet is the long term future here is solar not nuclear. That's a deep topic. Those pointing out that sometimes it's night aren't factoring in expected improvements in energy storage tech nor thinking long term enough. You put the collectors in space and eventually run transmission lines to the ground. And no, I'm not kidding. If you feel like going down this rabbit hole, look up orbital rings.

If people lose their minds at tiny specs of satellites used for musknet then imagine the outcry at this idea

It seems China figures out what's the best thing to do, and then just does it. There's no doubts or unnecessary debate about it.

It has been clear to anyone who is paying attention that nuclear power (even fission) is vastly superior to every other method in the long term. It is cleaner than coal/gas, more reliable than solar/wind, less environmentally disruptive than hydro.

Then why isn't everybody doing it? At least the countries with the know-how should be all in on it. USA, Germany, Japan, India, France, all of these should be building a hundred new reactors every year. But instead we are sitting on our assess while China marches on.

Uranium stocks have been soaring since 2020, some have 10x gains already. Check UUUU, DNN or if you want ETF then maybe URNM.

Are these holdings? Mining companies? Production?

Nuclear reactor manufacturing is not a simple thing to ramp up quickly.

China is buying reactors from the US, France, Russia, and they have their own designs. They need to reserve pretty much all manufacturing capacity that exists and add more.

I have been saying this for quite some time: The future vision of an all-electric ground transportation system is between impossible and untenable without a massive scale-up in nuclear energy generation in places like the US.

Years ago, as I was trying to understand the reality of electric vehicles, among other things, I put together a model that simulates a fleet of 300 million electric vehicles charging across our various time zones. The model accounts for various percentages of vehicles slow charging overnight (typical at-home charging scenario) and the balance fast-charging. The model uses Tesla charging data (rate of charge, energy requirements, miles per kWh, etc.).

The result indicated we need 900 to 1400 GW in order to support a full transition to electric charging.

This is IN ADDTION TO what we produce today, which is in the order of 1200 GW. In other words, we need to ADD capacity, we can't magic-wand our way into this reality. In essence, we have to produce the effective energy provided today by gasoline and diesel. By this I mean, once you account for efficiency, the bottom line is gasoline/diesel are used to move a certain mass of vehicles a certain distance in a certain time every day. Whatever is required to do the same with electrics, that's what we need. This is new energy, we can't pull it out of the existing infrastructure.

And, speaking of infrastructure, it is important that this is, in many ways more about power than energy.

Why?

Because it takes power to charge N cars simultaneously in a given geographic region. Even if everyone slow-charges, the time period is finite, say, 8 hours max. This still translates to a requirement for power. The energy is what fills the bucket. Power is how fast you fill it. With so many vehicles plugged in at the same time, you need power over a reasonable period of time. Our grid cannot currently handle such a step change in power transportation. To put it simply: We need larger pipes.

This could also mean we need far more than the 900 to 1400 GW I think we do. That is because you have to deliver power, not energy over 24 hours.

Solar?

No. Not really. It can help, but, at scale, at the scale we need, I think I can very easily make the argument that if the goal is to have clean energy, solar at this scale is far from clean. I can't even imagine the billions of batteries we would need. And then, every N years, you have to deal with recycling or disposing of them.

This isn't a simple problem at all. Yet nuclear is, in my opinion, the ONLY technology that can actually deliver on a future vision of an all-electric transportation system.

Here's the problem: I don't know about Europe. In the US, in the time it would take us to build a single nuclear reactor (30 years?), China will likely build 300 of them, if not more. The efficiency and focus with which they execute on the obvious plan to achieve economic and technical superiority across the board is nothing less than awe-inspiring. While our politicians burn clock cycles with stupid power games and nonsense, China wakes up every day and puts one foot in front of the other. The only way to think of this is that they deserve the success they have achieved through hard work, focus and perhaps the most impressive national-scale entrepreneurial drive in the history of humanity.

I work with Chinese companies (as suppliers in the context of manufacturing) every day. The difference between us and them is absolutely unimaginable to anyone who isn't in this business. All I can say is that, if people in the West don't wake up and start voting for politicians who actually know what they fuck they are doing, the story of what's ahead isn't a good one. Notice that I am not identifying any specific party. In fact, a good starting point would be to fire almost everyone in government and bring in new blood with a new mandate.

I better stop here. I get too worked-up about this stuff. It pains me to see so many hard-working people suffer because the people in command of the ship are constantly engaged in power games and bullshit and ignore the fact that the boat is filling with water and will eventually sink.

> our politicians burn clock cycles with stupid power games and nonsense

If you actually look into local chinese politics you see a lot of stupidity, nonsense and power games there too. A combination of factors makes this less apparent to the typical chinese or american observer although, in different ways.

And yet they manage to move forward. If you timeline any major Chinese city going back 50 years and see what has been achieved during that time, well, it's hard to argue with results.

Don't get me wrong, I do understand there's a lot wrong with Chinese politics, their system of government, human rights, etc. There is no perfect society anywhere on this planet. Not justifying any of it, just stating the obvious.

However, when you look at a place like the US, you have to slap your forehead and ask what we are thinking. The "we" being voters, of course. We hand over the reigns to people who would be ambulance chasers and used car salesmen and expect good results? That's not even fair, ambulance chasers and used car salesmen are probably better than the people in politics.

I don't want to sound partisan, because I am not. You look at people like AOC, Schummer, McConnel, Trump, Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc., etc., etc., and you really have to ask: Are these folks truly a representation of the best this nation can offer. I would be shocked if anyone intelligent though any of them (and the rest) are. Garbage-in, garbage-out. Simple as that.

Simple example: Go back N elections. Say, n=15, that's 60 years. Dig-up videos and speeches. If you can hold back your projectile vomiting, watch a few. They have been promising solutions to healthcare, education and myriad other topics for decades and decades. I can understand that things aren't as simple as they might seem from behind this keyboard. That's a given. But, 60 years and we are still saying things are broken? What the hell have these people done in 60 years?

Simple: In a conspiracy-theory world, if you keep these issues alive you can use and reuse them election after election to divide the population into groups on on either side of the issues and get votes. If you actually fix problems you have to work hard for other things to get done. It is far easier to make promises and then drop people on their heads after you get elected. I know this is a cynical view, but the proof is in the pudding as they say. The fact that, decades later, we are still saying that everything every politician always runs on is broken means these people are not doing their job.

If you think about this from the perspective of any other profession it becomes obvious. The difference is that outside politics these kinds of negative results get you fired.

Getting back on topic. We need to become rabid supporters and exceptional builders of nuclear power or we need to forget about the utopia of a fully electric transportation system.

The sixty year old promises failed or were rolled back because of the 40 year old ratcheting towards neoliberalism removed the ability for government to conceive of meaningful action, as a bipartisan consensus with no alternatives.

How would we build 150 reactors today? We would get together "industry leaders" to consult, who would suggest half of that be some non-nuclear nonsense to line their pockets, then we would provide incentives to companies written by those companies with loopholes, would take that money and make half assed attempts that allow them to keep the largest portion of taxpayer money possible with the least effort, and then abandon their efforts to shell companies embroiled in lawsuits.

Little would get done at the cost of massive amounts of public money flowing into private hands. This is by design, and its the only thing politics is aligned to do. When it works out in some area, it's fluke for the system and fortune in a sea of failure for the people of the nation.

Despite all of what you said being true....would we even have the manpower in this country to accomplish such a feat? Majority of this country is overweight, ~42% is obese and the median age is ~38 years(I guess this is OK? Getting kind of up there for physical labor).

People have to understand that different development stage will have different priorities. In developed world, efficiency should not be the first priority, fair is the first priority.

It seems like you are forgetting the creeping corruption that has been occurring at least since Nixon. That alone explains why nothing is moving forward. The US is currently being picked alive by as many vultures as possible that can get their hands on a piece of flesh. I don't know where this will end once the carcass is completely gone.

There is a lot of stupidity in the politics of all countries.

The nice thing is that they're stupid about different things!

So if the US blunders on nuclear power, China can succeed. In the end the world can use the solutions from countries who got things right.

This is one reason I think World Government would be an enormous disaster, with all of humanity within a single point of failure.

How do you feel about offshore wind? It seems like a potent power source, each one can produce several MW of power. If we need 1TWh we need a few hundred thousand turbines.

> If we need 1TWh we need a few hundred thousand turbines.

I think the problem is that once you start analyzing the issue at scale the only solution that could be real today would be a widely distributed nuclear power generation system across the entire country. If we use a 1 GW reactor as the baseline, that means over a thousand power plants need to be built. While the distribution would not be uniform, for sake of easy numbers we can make this assumption and divide by 50 states. That means we need 20 new 1 GW class nuclear power plants per state. California might need 50, while Montana might be able to do with 5. Don't know, I did not model it to that level of detail.

The point is the scale of the requirement is absolutely massive. Almost unimaginable. And so, we have people in politics talking about no more internal combustion engines in 25 years and everyone conveniently ignores the physics that makes this absolutely impossible unless we start doing serious work immediately.

Solar sounds interesting on paper until you live the reality of solar. My 13 kW array is grossly inadequate for charging electric vehicles because the energy capacity I need has to be in excess of what we are using to run the home. We do a shit job of building efficient homes, so things like cooling your home in the heat of Southern California can easily run 5 kW for much of the day. The fantasy of a 13 kW array is that it is a 13 kW array. Well, it isn't. My peaks are around 8 kW on average. I reach 10 kW during a very narrow window of time in the year, the rest of the time this is what it looks like (actual data):

https://i.imgur.com/LTMNDO1.png

So, if you have two electric vehicles, an air conditioning system pulling 5 kW and other normal things in a normal home, well, this system is not adequate. I would have to probably install a 35 kW system to service all of it.

How many people are going go install 30+ kW systems on their homes to join the electric vehicle revolution? Even better: Most roofs simply don't have that much room. Add to this the fact that solar viability diminishes as you move north and you quickly realize solar isn't a magic-wand solution.

And, of course, now comes the problem of only having energy available while the sun is up. Which means you probably want a massive battery bank to store it and use it to charge your vehicles at night. AC to DC power conversion is in the order of 80% efficient. Charging, depending on technology, is about the same. So, you go from solar to charging and probably store about 65% of the energy you collect. Then you have to charge your vehicle at night. You have to convert it one more time. This means another 20% to 30% efficiency hit. In other words, the store-and-forward model is likely in the 50% range for energy (panel output to energy level in the car).

Physics is really heartless about this stuff. Most of the people (and politicians) pushing this stuff never bother to do any math, and, if they do, they conveniently ignore it.

To answer the obvious question: No, I am not going to upsize my system to 35 kW. That would be ridiculous and, in Los Angeles County, the building permit and regulatory issues you'd run into to put such a system on a home that more typically ends-up with a 7 kW system would be insane beyond description.

EDIT: One of the reasons for which my array peaks out at 8 kW is that the Los Angeles County Building and Permit department would not allow me to tilt the array to the optimal angle (about 34 degrees if I remember correctly). The array was built with the approved tilt angle of ten degrees. This is due to what I am going to call arcane regional planning rules and other issues. They also made me install --no bullshit-- 64000 lbs of concrete footings and design the array and structure for 200 mile per hour winds. The entire experience was beyond surreal and ridiculous. Want to talk about "clean" energy? Care to guess the CO2 contribution of making 64,000 lbs of concrete, which should include all the processes required to procure the raw materials, transport to the plant, make the concrete, mix it, load it into massive trucks, deliver and install it? I haven't done the math, but I would not be surprised if it exceeds the environmental benefit of having "clean energy" at home. Live and learn.

> They also made me install --no bullshit-- 64000 lbs of concrete footings and design the array and structure for 200 mile per hour winds.

Wait, what? Can you elaborate on why this was necessary? Thank you also for the useful data.

The system is built on what they call a ground-mount structure. In other words, it isn't on our roof. The entire thing is supported by eight columns. The county decided we needed over a cubic yard of concrete under each column. By the time we did the math and the realities of digging holes (hint: contractors don't use Solidworks to dig holes), the average footing worked out to about 8000 lbs of concrete.

Once the plan checker got his mind set to these dimensions it was over. There was no way to convince him to apply any kind of logic to it. He quoted stuff like the 200 mile per our wind rating (also ridiculous) we had to certify the structure for. I even hired a nationwide civil engineering firm to try to apply pressure for a change. No. he would not allow us to proceed unless we went with his requirements.

It went beyond that, they issued insane fire rating requirements for the entire thing. My guess is that the project went $50K over budget because of these guys. Which means it will never pay for itself...ever. I would have done a million times better if I burned half the cash and put the rest on Bitcoin (which, at the time, would have felt like burning it).

So, it is a beautiful system but it was a complete waste of time and money. It made me wonder about the overall realities of solar in practice. If I knew then what I know now I would have never moved one finger to install solar.

BTW, I have neighbors with solar regrets for different reasons. One has to wonder.

200 mile per hour wind is basically the world record for wind speed..

Yeah, and, in Los Angeles, it would require a nuclear explosion somewhere nearby for this to even be plausible. These people were so full of shit it was insane.

A friend of mine is an architect. He told me the footings they had me pour would allow me to build a four story building on the same site.

As a libertarian/classical liberal this experience fed further confirmation of to my lack of interest for big government running everything. I can't even imagine the same level of surreal bullshit applied to, say, healthcare.

Oh wow. It almost feels like the structure is missing a house underneath it.

You shouldn't be installing a 30KW system, but it's entirely reasonable for utilities to deploy 30KW of utility-scale solar on your behalf. According to 2021Q1 numbers that's $23-26K of capital investment. Plus I imagine with some logistical effort the utilities can deliver it to wherever your car is parked during the day, rather than bothering with a second set of batteries. Not sure why we're comparing utility-scale nuclear to artisanal home solar power.

I have solar too, but I don’t really expect it to meet 100% of my needs. I’m just contributing to the grid being greener. I don’t even have batteries — I just sell green energy to the grid which means the natural gas power plant can run a big cooler.

Or cater to the crypto market.

Mining crypto with the high cost of electricity in Mass would be a big mistake

Actually people have analyzed the issue at scale and concluded it's doable with renewables. It's not that difficult to find these studies, if you actually care to look for them.

Whether you believe those studies or not is immaterial, though, because the economics of renewables are going to win in the end. Ten years ago you could have reasonable discussions about whether that was the case or not, but the trends did continue. The other day I saw a forecast of 0.04 USD/kWh for offshore wind within a few years.

Care to provide at least one link for one of these studies? I have read many. I am not in the habit of opening my mouth unless I have done enough research to confirm my hypothesis. I can still be wrong, yet, based on what I have seen in the domain, most of these studies have an element of "then a miracle occurs" in them. This can take the form of highly theoretical --when in real life things are never linear-- or a bunch of hand-wavy stuff that can't support the conclusions reached.

I made some adjustments to my models and was able to get the cost of solar with batteries down. However, to be fair, I now need to factor in the actual solar generation efficiency (meaning, panel rating vs. what you actually get at the peak) as well as to account for the fact that the actual output power curve is roughly an inverted parabola. The energy produced by the system, then, would be the integral of the power curve over the period of solar production (roughly 7:00 AM until 5:00 PM).

One must then take into account that system efficiency (DC to AC conversion, battery charging, battery discharging) must consider a range of variables. For example, the Tesla Powerwall 2 is rated at something like 90% efficiency while only drawing 3.3 kW at what I would all laboratory-type environmental conditions: 25 degrees C. I am having trouble finding data on actual efficiency under real environmental conditions, hot and cold.

Beyond that, the efficiency of the cells (for any battery, not just Tesla's) degrades over time. In Tesla's case, they guarantee 70% over 10 years.

This means also modeling the replacement of millions of battery packs per year at or around the ten year lifespan range. Losing 30% of energy production would be a problem. So, you either overbuild or replace everything as soon as it drops below a certain threshold.

Over the 20 year deployment model I created, 5% of the battery packs would have to be replaced every year starting somewhere around 7 to 10 years after installation.

Then there's the lifespan and behavior of solar panels. I'll make the assumption that at the 20 year warranty expiration point, most solar panels will be at about 80% production. This assumes no other environmental factors are in play (dirt, scuffing of the glass, etc.). To finish the model one would have to include the negative temperature coefficient of panels: As the operating temperature increases, output decreases. A typical panel might have a coefficient of about -0.35% measured from a baseline of 25 degrees C. At 35 C, the panel produces 3.5% less energy. Panels can run very hot (60 C) because, well, the sun will heat them...they are not white reflectors. At 60 C the loss can be as high as 12%.

This, BTW, is why I installed three large (~6 ft diameter) fans under my solar array. I haven't done the math yet but I suspect they pay pay off in efficiency during the hottest periods of operation.

The model would have to allow for both failures and replacement due to degradation. I have friends with arrays consisting of around 15 panels who have already had to replace two or three panels after ten years. Once again, reality is far more stochastic than data sheet specifications.

Anyhow, the point is that the real-world model of solar energy systems is far from the simple idea of a solar array delivering power consistently and at peak performance.

> most of these studies have an element of "then a miracle occurs" in them.

I wonder how many of them have been updated to take into account constant wildfire smoke blotting out the sun in peak summer months.

It seems insane to me that we keep doubling-down on weather-dependent energy generation when everything we know about the weather is now in flux. Especially when we have a perfectly safe, scalable, and practically zero-carbon way to generate power sitting right next to us collecting dust.

This is why I like HN. "My point of view is going to be borne out as being correct; if only you bothered to investigate you'd have it too." "Well, I have, and I've done it in practice, and I understand the maths, and here are my concerns."

That is beyond crazy. I am at loss for words.

The US and Europe’s problem is that the major economic interests have become too powerful and entrenched. China’s government makes their economic interests kneel down before them, which has resulted in the greatest societal transformation in history. We in the West have weak pathetic governments happy to argue over which corrupt interest should get tens or hundreds of billions in loaned tax dollars to do nothing much this year, rather than destroy these corrupt power centers and transform society. Doesn’t help when society has been conditioned to resist any central planning. Frankly the only reason the West is wealthy is because Europe and then the US were able to take advantage of huge historical transformations (industrial revolution, WW2, natural resource discovery) to get where we are. Though you could argue China mostly took advantage of one that hurt us (offshoring/globalization). The question is whether they’ll be able to consciously guide their society into prosperity in the future.

Nothing like a country crumbling under the interests of its most powerful corporations to make one at least consider the viability of Marxist-Leninism. I definitely lean a lot more libertarian than most MLs, but when it comes to an existential crisis, I'll probably take survival over my personal freedoms.

I am interested to see where China ends up in the next few decades. They promise socialism (as in, a socialist mode of production) by 2050. I wish them success, and in the meantime, maybe they can lead the charge on not being complete morons when it comes to energy generation.

I don't see how they can overcome the population bomb that is coming for them in 10-20 years. The US is able to make up for its deficiencies via immigration(well kinda sorta and for now at least). That is not happening in China, no way.

Haha, now imagine being in Germany. Shutting down nuclear power plants and also coal now. The stupidity there is on another level.

The mix of sources for electricity in Germany in H1 2021 was like 41% renewables, 26% coal, 17% natural gas, and 12% nuclear.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Yes, and if nuclear's share had remained where it used to be they could have got rid of coal almost completely by now, for instance. Instead, coal is still a major source and gas has actually increased.

IIRC, Germany emits almost twice as much per capita as France...

All this without blackouts. Imagine that.

Well yeah, they fire up the coal and gas plants at night or when it's cloudy. No blackouts.

Read what the GP wrote. Either way, their usage of fossil fuels is going down. Could it have gone down more? Yes, but we don't live in that universe.

Just barely. There have been a few close calls, lately.

Exports aside, those happen in 'good times'.

> I have been saying this for quite some time: The future vision of an all-electric ground transportation system is between impossible and untenable without a massive scale-up in nuclear energy generation in places like the US.

Through the 20th century, the US doubled its electricity production ~every 20 years.

What makes you say doubling its electricity production is impossible over the next ~20?

> Through the 20th century, the US doubled its electricity production ~every 20 years.

The US has done that using fossil fuels though.

> What makes you say doubling its electricity production is impossible over the next ~20?

Whether the US can do the same thing with net zero emissions is the big question.

> The US has done that using fossil fuels though.

In that time period, non-hydro renewables were an order of magnitude more expensive than fossil fuels. They aren't anymore.

> Whether the US can do the same thing with net zero emissions is the big question.

Actually, even if it does so by building new coal plants, it would be done with net-negative emissions, because utility energy generation is more carbon-efficient than a tiny ICE burning gasoline (Which also requires a mountain of energy, and, uh, doing other ethically questionable things[0], to extract and refine.)

The problem to solve is not that of energy generation. We know how to build power plants. We haven't built as many in recent years, because electricity demand has temporarily peaked.

The problem to solve is figuring out the politics of getting electric vehicle infrastructure rolled out across the country[1]. Because it concerns land use, there's a lot of stakeholders that need to be on board for this. Fortunately, there are market pressures (people buying EVs, demand for charging infrastructure) that are pushing on this.

[0] Prior to the fracking boom, your taxes paid for imperial adventures in the Middle East, the primary purpose of which was oil security.

[1] Actually, I think the problem to solve is getting people out of cars and into scooters, mopeds, bicycles, buses, and trains, but that's neither here nor there.

> What makes you say doubling its electricity production is impossible over the next ~20?

Easy: It takes us decades to build anything of any significance any more. A nuclear power plant could take 30 years, maybe 50 at this rate. We need over a thousand of them.

In addition to this, the cost to build anything in the US is so high, I am not sure we have the financial means to build 1400 GW in energy generation capacity and the massive infrastructure upgrades this would require in order to be useful.

The famed California High Speed train is the perfect (and saddest) example of just how incompetent we have become. It was promised at a price tag of about ten billion dollars. It was going to bring forth an era of amazing energy-efficient transportation up and down the State. We are at about a HUNDRED billion today. We have only built TEN miles. Which are NOT OPERATING. And, if we did have a running train on these ten miles, I believe the top speed would be limited to somewhere around 50 MILES PER HOUR.

Yeah. No. I think a massive shift in leadership, national focus and philosophy has to occur before we can even dream of a future where our 300 million vehicles are electric.

What's going to happen is that --and I hate to put it this way-- those in the upper-middle class and above might be able to migrate to electrics while everyone else is stuck with gasoline powered vehicles at $10 per gallon. In other words, the poor get shafted once again. Brilliant.

I only follow the California High Speed project from a distance and not in detail, but it was my understanding that the plan called for a route through a 2000 m (6000 ft) high mountain range.

Most actual high speed lines in the world try to avoid such terrain as much as possible. The ones that actually need to cross comparable mountains (like the Alps) take decades to build (so called Basis Tunnels, in Switzerland and Austria) and the cost is staggering.

Where there is the will, there is a way!

If the political will was there to build better public transport and reduce the need for car journeys then that could dramatically reduce energy usage requirements for transportation.

Our cities are not designed for European style public transportation. I don't know why people keep saying this. Public transportation at scale in most US cities would be a nightmare. Los Angeles is a good example of this. People work 50 miles from where they work. They shop 10 or 20 miles away. Etc. Nobody is going to walk five miles to go to a bus or train station. That would be silly. And then, what do I do when I need to take my three German Shepherds to the kennel, or the vet? Or when the family wants to go kayaking at the lake?

Private vehicles are not going away. Self driving vehicles might alleviate some of this, but we are likely decades away from that reality.

Many EU cities were designed for the car too and made the switch successfully.

> Our cities are not designed for European style public transportation. I don't know why people keep saying this. Public transportation at scale in most US cities would be a nightmare.

Counter-point: In spite of car-centric development, every city, suburb, and rural area has good public transportation that runs twice a day and only services minors. It's possible, we just don't fund it.

> Los Angeles is a good example of this. People work 50 miles from where they work. They shop 10 or 20 miles away. Etc. Nobody is going to walk five miles to go to a bus or train station. That would be silly. And then, what do I do when I need to take my three German Shepherds to the kennel, or the vet? Or when the family wants to go kayaking at the lake?

This is why we must also focus on land-use change (i.e. densification), as it strongly correlates with how well public transportation infrastructure scales.

Somebody also said "redesign the cities". Once again, this all sounds good until one starts to attach realistic math to these ideas.

Simple example: The neighborhood where I live is relatively new. It was built about 25 years ago. I watched it being built after we effectively chose the lot where we wanted the house built. I visited the construction every single weekend for about a year until the homes were ready to go. I watched was they trenched over half a mile of would-be-roads to install sewage, power and communications lines underground. I watched as they built the roads, sidewalks and, eventually, the homes. I even paid the electrician on the side to run two CAT5 cables (4 total) from the garage to two opposite corners of every room (including the bathrooms).

When you see a neighborhood go up like this from scratch you quickly realize this isn't going to be ripped-up and "redesigned" any within at least a lifetime. It's easy to wave a hand and say "redesign the cities". Sounds great. Yet, sadly, it is a fantasy. Even a small town would be a grotesquely expensive and logistically impossible undertaking.

The best approach would be to do it right with new developments. Not sure we have the leadership necessary to take that approach, at all.

>When you see a neighborhood go up like this from scratch you quickly realize this isn't going to be ripped-up and "redesigned" any within at least a lifetime.

Cities and NIMBYs have to go out of their way, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of man-years drafting ever-complex zoning laws and BS lawsuits to block any and all market-driven densification, nearly anywhere and everywhere it happens.

> Somebody also said "redesign the cities". Once again, this all sounds good until one starts to attach realistic math to these ideas.

It won't be the government literally tearing down and re-building hundreds of square miles in a one-shot, hundred-trillion dollar effort.

It'll be a decentralized, market-driven effort. All you have to do is have the local city government erase segregation-era anti-density zoning codes. No square foot minimums on apartments, no parking minimums, no Floor Area Ratio requirements, no cap on building height, and dedicate 1/8th of current transportation infrastructure to non-personal vehicles (Buses, bikes, rail, etc.).

We're talking about this in the context of environmental reform. The idea of decentralized change is good for change over time, but not when it's to avert a crisis, unless everyone thinks it's a no-brainer decision, which they don't.

The market thinks higher profitability is a no-brainer, yes. It is more profitable to build an apartment block and collect rent from thousands of people than it is to build maybe 30 monoplexes on the same space.

It is even more profitable when developers don't have to waste space to accommodate massive amounts of parking, or follow any of a dozen other needless zoning laws.

Rome was not built in a day. The market won't solve everything, but in the limited circumstances where it very obviously can, we should abolish the laws that forbid it.

> It'll be a decentralized, market-driven effort. All you have to do is have the local city government erase segregation-era anti-density zoning codes. No square foot minimums on apartments, no parking minimums, no Floor Area Ratio requirements, no cap on building height, and dedicate 1/8th of current transportation infrastructure to non-personal vehicles (Buses, bikes, rail, etc.).

Nice thoughts. Sadly, not realistic at all.

The things you mention would require such changes as doubling the size of the sewage handling system, power delivery, gas, water, etc. You can't build stuff without having the underlying infrastructure to support it with the required services. Hate to put it this way, but that approach is a trip straight into third-world living.

Cities are very complex works of engineering. While not perfect, you can't just double or triple occupancy or density without suffering serious consequences.

As is always the case, there number of variables at play are far more than simple idealized concepts might lead one to believe.

Take fires for example. Density and fire risk are related. In a place like Southern California you have to be very aware and equally careful about something like this.

You don't have to rip-up the roads, you can just replace (some of) the buildings around them. Replace one house in a residential neighbourhood with a grocery store and you've already drastically reduced the amount people need to leave the neighbourhood.

> Our cities are not designed for European style public transportation.

They were, before we bulldozed them to make way for highways and parking lots. Some still are. (Hello from Philadelphia!)

> Our cities are not designed for European style public transportation

So redesign the cities. Obviously this won't happen overnight. But we're likely talking about decades-long timescales for any of these solutions.

The OP didn't mention reducing ownership levels. They mentioned reducing usage.

If it makes you feel better, EVs and reneweables are a pretty great match and are much more efficient than what we currently use.

Of course, China seems to be doing both of those better than the US too, since they’re not captured by fossil fuel interests.

But this is simply wrong. One can easily imagine a 100% renewable system of that kind. At current costs in the US it would likely be cheaper than a nuclear solution.

>One can easily imagine a 100% renewable system of that kind.

Yeah, we have been doing too much imagining and too little execution.

Less imagination is needed than in the nuclear scenario. There, we have to image spending 12 digit sums to get the nuclear industry off its deathbed.

> But this is simply wrong. One can easily imagine a 100% renewable system of that kind. At current costs in the US it would likely be cheaper than a nuclear solution.

Sorry my friend, in order to make assertions like that one has to take the time to do some of the math. I have. The gap between what people are imagining and reality is quite large.

Assuming a 1000 GW requirement, in other words, we need that much power and we do not currently have it...so we have to build it:

Using 325 W panels, considering their cost, cost of installation, wiring, structure costs, permits and battery (without them the whole thing is kind of pointless), the total cost of the system is in the order of $40 trillion dollars.

A 1.1 GW nuclear power plant costs about $9 billion. We would need 910 of them. That total cost comes out to $8.2 trillion.

In other words, nuclear is about 1/5 the cost of the equivalent solar system.

However, the story does not end there. This is still very much hand-wavy until we look at other numbers.

For example, how long would it take to build these systems?

Assuming it takes 10 days to install a solar a 10 kW system, and we manage to install 10,000 solar systems at a time (simultaneously) across the entire nation. In other words, every ten days 10,000 new systems come online. Well, we need one billion systems, which means this will take 2740 years. Imagine that: We bring online 365000 systems PER YEAR and it still takes nearly 3000 years. Check my math please.

Nuclear? If we had a mandate to start building nuclear plants tomorrow and we took the time to setup a the process and controls to achieve a run rate of 1 year per plant...and we build one plant per state per year...that means 50 per year. Which translates into 1000 plants in 20 years. If I am off by 100%, this means we do it in 40 years.

To me nuclear --with commitment and a no-bullshit united effort to execute-- seems like the only viable solution.

There's more...

How many cells would be needed for the aforementioned solar solution. Assuming approximately 1200 cells per battery pack (Tesla 2170's), this means we need nearly 3.5 trillion cells. I am not even going to get into what this might translate into in terms of minerals, mining, transportation, CO2 generation, environmental damage, etc. I don't even know how long it might take to make 3.5 trillion cells and how much energy it might take to make them. These are numbers I need to research and put into the model at some future point. Right now, given what I've looked at, the whole thing seems entirely ludicrous on first inspection.

Even better, the above calculation for solar assume 100% efficiency. In other words, a 10 kW solar array that actually produces 10 kW 24/7, which is ridiculous. It also assumes inverters and energy conversion equipment that is 100% efficient...which is equally ridiculous.

What I am trying to convey, going back to your comment, is that we can imagine anything at all and it can sound fantastic. Until we take the time to do the math there is no way to know if reality and these imaginary solutions actually align in any way.

I don't think I am wrong at all. I could be off by some amount, sure, yet I think the difference still dwarfs solar by far. If we want electric ground transportation, I think the only path forward is a massive commitment to nuclear.

Speaking of utopia: It would be fantastic to see the worlds nuclear arsenals being converted to nuclear energy generation. From destroying humanity to improving life all over the planet. Not sure that kind of leadership exists anywhere.

BTW, without batteries the same solar system would cost about ten trillion. However, because you would be subject to the realities of solar power generation [0], the actual system would probably have to be at least three times larger...which brings us back to the 30 to 40 trillion range.

[0] Real 13 kW system daily output

https://i.imgur.com/LTMNDO1.png

Are you assuming batteries as the only storage to get to 100% renewables? If so, please don't make that bad assumption. It will be cheaper to shave off the last 10% or so with hydrogen rather than batteries. Also, adding wind to the solar reduces storage requirements.

You cant make statements like that without looking at the math. That's the problem. Every time I look at the reality of implementing such systems I run into the reality that the cost, complexity and timelines just don't align with the imagined benefits.

I could be wrong. You could be 100% correct. I just have not found evidence to support these ideas. It all sounds good until math and physics do their jobs.

Let's look at math. Specifically, let's look at the cost for renewables + storage to provide synthetic baseload, a drop-in replacement for baseload source like nuclear.

https://model.energy/

The $40/W figure you get is utter nonsense.

I think at scale, the method used in Chile with the Cerro Dominador[0] using CPVCSP could be adopted. Their system was about $1B for 210MW and has ~17.5 hours of storage.

So ~$4.76B for 1GW or ~$4.76T for 1000GW.

This also ignores future upgrades with would use sCO2 turbines vs typical steam and higher delta_C molten salts (typical delta_C now is only 300 for KNO3 + NaNO2 + NaNO3, but systems using CaCl2 + MgCl2 would have a delta_C of ~1500, and meta-material salts could be engineered with even higher delta_C) so the same solar fields can have even higher outputs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Dominador_Solar_Thermal_...

Utility scale PV fields in the US southwest today cost $0.89/W(dc) installed (were you using US residential PV costs instead? Bad boy!) Assuming you were talking of peak power, that's less than $1T for 1 TW. If you were talking about aveage power, the capacity factor there is above 30% now (single axis trackers), so about $3T. How you got $40T from that, god only knows.

You will note that the levelized cost of power from these fields is maybe 1/3 that of your nuclear figures.

> Assuming it takes 10 days to install a solar a 10 kW system, and we manage to install 10,000 solar systems at a time (simultaneously) across the entire nation.

Absurd, since utility-scale systems are orders of magnitude larger than that. There are individual PV fields that have capacity larger than your 10,000 tiny systems.

Your argument from incredulity about manufacturing these systems is not worth anything.

I have to point out that you neatly avoided main point in the original post - comparing costs of something that never been done (storing energy at national scale) with something with known price and been done before (powering industrial nation with nuclear)

"Nothing can be done if it hasn't already been done" is not a valid argument. If anything, the large scaleup that would be needed would help, since it would drive batteries way down their experience curves. It's a shame nuclear, unlike renewables and batteries, has not shown good experience effects.

You cant meaningfully compare prices of something that was not ever done with something that is already done and existing.

South Korea would argue with you on the experience part, as well.

> "Nothing can be done if it hasn't already been done" is not a valid argument.

That wasn't their argument. It was that comparing imagined costs to real ones is not valid.

> Utility scale PV fields in the US southwest today cost $0.89/W(dc) installed

That's just not realistic. Not at scale. And, of course, you have to have batteries or the entire thing is pointless. The issue with electric car charging is stressed by power demand. In other words, calculating energy alone does not solve the equation. If you want to charge your electric car in 2 hours vs. a slow 12 hour charge you will need at least six times more power at the socket.

Remember that at higher power (generally meaning, higher current) the power losses increase with the square of the current. Fast charging requires more power than the simple ratio of (time_for_slow_charge/time_for_fast_charge) due to these losses. Super simple hypothetical numbers: If you slow charge at 1 A for ten hours and want to fast charge at 10 A in one hour, your copper losses (energy lost to heating the wires that get the electricity to the plug) are proportional to the square of the current times the resistance of the wiring.

Example:

0 AWG wire can carry 150 A.

It has a resistance of 0.093 ohms per 1000 feet

At 100 A, the loss over a 1000 foot run is: 100 x 100 x 0.093 = 930 W. Almost 1 kW.

This is not meant to be a calculation of actual charging of a vehicle. It's just an illustration of what happens as we face the reality of millions of vehicles fast charging and slow charging on an infrastructure that simply isn't designed to support what we would need to do. I don't even want to think about how much power would be converted into heat on the grid in this all-electric future. Things people just don't talk about when electric cars are put up on a pedestal as examples of a clean "green" future.

Why is it not realistic at scale? What part of it could not be scaled up? There is plenty of space for the PV. There is plenty of space for storage. The US west has effectively unlimited capacity for off river pumped hydro, for example.

The business about cars is weird, as car charging will be needed in a nuclear powered grid too. How is this an argument against renewables? If it's that renewables require more distribution capacity (due to a desire to charge vehicles during the day), then it's also the case that solar can be dispersed to reduce the need for distribution. And if solar + grid level storage provides synthetic baseload more cheaply than nuclear then the distribution argument collapses entirely.

I am not making an argument against renewables. I am saying that the math does not support the idea of making a 100% transition to electric vehicles using just renewables for energy. Nuclear is the only way to get the bulk of what we need without making a mess of things.

You have to consider all the variables that would be affected when you start talking about solar at such massive scales. For example, if I understood you correctly, you are suggesting pumping water to altitude using solar power and then using that potential energy to spin turbines on the way down.

OK, great, sure, Physics 101 problem. Theoretically, yeah, that would work. In practice, you would cause such devastation to the ecosystem doing something like that --again, at scale, not a small lab experiment-- that the entire concept is turned on its head.

The mining and all other things required to make batteries at such massive scales isn't something anyone would want to be around, much else highlight as "green".

BTW, I want electric vehicles. I really do. However, we need to figure out how to do it without hiding a stinking rotten ecological mess somewhere in China so we can feel great about our little "green" electric car on the driveway in Los Angeles.

It's almost like the issue of child labor in China and other places. It's OK so long as our t-shirts are nice quality and cheap? Of course not. Well, the same should apply to the realities of solar and electric vehicles.

Right now my perspective is that we'd be swapping one rotten mess for another. Solar panels and batteries would have to be replaced in massive quantities every 10, 15, 20 years, depending on who you want to believe. At scale, that's billions of, well, everything to trash. Even if we recycle, again, at scale, not a pretty sight.

I don't have all the answers. I probably don't have any answer. I just know that there's a lot of hand-wavy, feel-good, save-the-planet stuff floating around and nobody seems interested in doing the math. It's far easier to convinced the unthinking masses that "green is better" and we need to "save the planet" than to put-up a few slides in a presentation and discuss the reality of having to adopt nuclear power with gusto if we want any of those things to become realities.

In other words, the politicians who have been anti-nuclear can't bring themselves to now be pro-nuclear because that would mean losing votes. Which means we don't do the right thing because politicians want to keep their jobs, not because there are viable alternatives.

Remember that this thread started with an article about China building 150 reactors. Why are they doing that? Because nuclear power, done correctly, is the best option for constant, reliable, consistent and long term energy. If you do that math, including total cost of ownership, this is pretty much indisputable.

> Speaking of utopia: It would be fantastic to see the worlds nuclear arsenals being converted to nuclear energy generation. From destroying humanity to improving life all over the planet. Not sure that kind of leadership exists anywhere.

Ahem...

May I introduce you to the

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor ?

( singing voice: "It started with a hiss...never thought it would come to this..." )

From the Wikipedia page:

"US president Barack Obama canceled construction of the agreement-supporting US MOX fuel fabrication facility in 2016, citing cost overruns and for financial reasons proposing instead that for the US share of plutonium, it be diluted with non-radioactive material and disposed in the underground WIPP facility.[9][10] However, the dilution could be reversed, and the material reconverted into weapons-grade plutonium.[9]

On October 3, 2016, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the agreement to be suspended because the US did not meet its obligations.[11]"

Great! <sarcastic>

OK, well, maybe we do what Elon Musk proposed and send all of our nukes to Mars, blow them up and start an atmosphere?

The fact that the world "leaders" can't come-up with a way to de-nuke the planet is further evidence that politicians --world-wide-- are not the best and the brightest among us.

Don't get me started on that tangent.

Great rant thanks for posting.

Let me provide some counter points to consider.

China is going to experience a population implosion in a few decades as they are not at replacement rate and cannot make up the numbers like the US does via immigration(for now at least).

Here is China's population pyramid

[1]:https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2021/

Compared to the US:

[2]: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

As you can see the ages between 0-30 there is a large enough decrease. The US is not perfect as we have been starting to decline but we are nowhere near China.

>In fact, a good starting point would be to fire almost everyone in government and bring in new blood with a new mandate.

Were you following the Bernie campaign? In addition to running for president in 2016 he inspired the creation of several organizations to help do just that. Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress. These groups were the drive behind electing people like the Squad. Their focus is on electing politicians that don't take any corporate money. Now 5 years after 2016, I can clearly say that the efforts have been borderline impossible to achieve. Politicians like AOC are the exception and not the rule and electing people like her were borderline impossible. I watched as they threw everything at her and she only won because her opponent had not taken her seriously enough at the beginning. There is a whole movie on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCSo2hZRcXk

I saw with my own eyes in 2018/2019 how difficult it is to remove existing elected representatives when we tried. They have the whole party fight tooth and nail against any newcomers and they will spend every last penny that they have to defeat you. You are also up against the media machine that will help bury you if you get close to winning. Combine that with a significant chunk of the population that has just given up and won't vote at all and you have our current situation.

I don't know where the US will end up but my hope is that the coming population implosion in China will give the US a fighting chance long term even if the journey will be utterly painful because of our current short-sightedness.

> Were you following the Bernie campaign?

Sorry, I can only put it this way: Bernie is a moron. So are AOC and everyone pushing socialist utopia. Letting these people have control would be a disaster.

Having lived the real-life reality these people are pushing I can tell you Americans who support this have no clue what they are standing behind. I have lots of friends who have lived in and experienced these realities at various levels and in different countries. Do you know why they are in the US? Because they wanted to get as far away from that crap as possible. They cannot believe American academics and politicians have actually convinced people that these are good ideas. Not one --not a single person-- who actually lived it would say this is good for the US or, in general, humanity.

Some of the things he says sound great. Of course. Who doesn't want free everything for everyone? And yet, once you implement such things, it ends-up being a massive train wreck.

>Sorry, I can only put it this way: Bernie is a moron. So are AOC and everyone pushing socialist utopia. Letting these people have control would be a disaster.

I think you need some perspective on the reality of the situation.

These few politicians are they only ones who are not taking donations from the corporate donors that are propagating the mess the US is in right now.

In particular, AOC wrote the green new deal which if you look at it is exactly what you have been ranting about in your earlier comments. It calls for world war levels of investment into manufacturing to reorient the economy to actually be competitive with China. Right now we sell apps, services and marketing fluff. Whatever little hard core manufacturing that is left is being continually eroded by China's gains and we are just letting it sink. The GND is a golden opportunity to turn the ship around before its too late. Thats exactly what you are complaining that we don't do.

Bernie also leans in this direction. His primary goals include empowering workers by decoupling healthcare from employment which would serve to embolden people to take more risks and start new businesses. Don't you realize that the current healthcare system serves to limit innovation? When healthcare is a ball and chain tied to your ankles, the only people that are taking risks are single people with a safety net to fall back on Ie. The current crop of techbros. And at the end of the day who does it benefit? The bloated middleman of insurance companies that collect these premiums and dole out as little healthcare as they can get away with. Combine that with making serious reforms to curb all this corruption is the only shot we have against China.

Your response shows that you are part of the same collective that is sinking the country because you succumbed to the right wing/centrist talking points instead of actually looking into the bills.

I don't understand why people are focusing on nuclear now, and not 5 years ago or 10 years ago. What has changed?

If I understand correctly, technology hasn't changed. People want nuclear because either they don't think renewables can scale up quickly enough or because of the base load problem (renewables can't always provide energy on demand). Has any of that changed? Renewables generally are cheaper and have more scale now.

If we'd started 10 years ago, we might have some plants coming online soon.

I mean... the technology has changed, but it is hard to argue that it has changed in a way that makes the decision different.

Because China encountered major setback on their nuclear ambitions due to the US ban (China was previous planning to use US technology for their nuclear plants). It took a few years (>5) for them to mature domestic technology and scale up nuclear plants.

It is the last death throes of an industry coupled with some tech minded people thinking it's controversial and cool, even though the tech in reality is old and boring. The "silver bullet" to fix climate change, much like we saw with all manner of things last year with Covid.

The one chance to revive nuclear power in the west through Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Hinkley Point C, Flammanville and Olkiluoto 3 failed miserably with several of the major players now bankrupt.

China keeps dipping it's toes in nuclear to keep the option open but no real commitment, and this announcement of 150 reactors is no real change to the long term plans either.

In 2019, China had a new target of 200 GWe of nuclear generating capacity by 2035, which is 7.7% out of predicted total electricity generating capacity of 2600 GWe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

So with about 50 GWe from 50 reactors today adding another 150 gives you the same goal of about 200 GWe.

FWIW, Vogtle 3 is on track to come online next year.

https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/overcoming-delays-hot-func...

In case of China, after Fukushima they decided to suspend generation 2 reactors and only build generation 3 reactors. But that didn't go smoothly and there were lots of delays. By the time generation 3 was ready, the trade war hit and a bunch of Chinese nuclear companies got blacklisted by the US. So they had to ditch foreign IP (French designs) and create their own IP (Hualong One) which also took time.

These 150 reactors we see today are the end of a long pipeline.

David Fishman is an expert on this topic. Thread: https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/12939610958922792...

Pretty simple, we were in the middle of a nuclear renaissance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_renaissance_in_the_Uni...) in the US prior to Fukushima. Instead of informing the public of the facts (The plant was an antique, didn't meet safety standards, was built on a fault line), the media in the US used it as an opportunity for scare-mongering and politicized it.

> Instead of informing the public of the facts (The plant was an antique, didn't meet safety standards, was built on a fault line)

Knowing these facts makes it even more scary. We can't move countries away from fault lines, so plants are going to be build in these places again. Everything new is going to be old eventually. There's no reason to expect meeting safety standards in the future if we can't do it right now.

Everyone seems to forget that it took a freaking tsunami that displaced hundreds of thousands of people to take out a 60 year old reactor design. While coal is killing people every day.

Of course it should take a freak event to take out a nuclear power plant, it shouldn't happen every second Sunday. But I would also expect it to be an event that doesn't happen regularly every few hundred years [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html

If anything this can be ascribed to resilience of nuclear generation. The tsunami in question killed (in a first world country, no less) many thousands of people.

The outdated nuclear plant located in the midst of the disaster killed none.

We should hold nuclear to the standard of hydroelectric power. The potential energy of elevated water behind a dam is on par or greater than nuclear accidents, and past dam failures has costed way more lives than nuclear has.

In 2017, California had a major accidents with their Oroville Dam and evacuated of 188,000 people living downstream. This can be compared to the 154,000 evacuated from Fukushima. The United state and the state of California can be compared to Japan and the Fukushima Prefecture. Why did both countries, wealthy as they are, fail to meet the safety standards that a required of them? Both occurred during unexpected natural events.

One occurred during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began 100 years ago. The other occurred during Northern California's wettest winter in over 100 years. I suspect the first one to be more rare, through both include "hundred years" as a key factor.

I suspect however that the wrong conclusion to make is to define both dams and nuclear to be inherently unsafe technologies that we can't use because people might die. They are dangerous, and historically a lot of people has died, but they are also significant safer than burning fossil fuels. More people has and will die because of fossil fuel, and until we stop burning fossil fuels we should deploy any and all alternatives.

> a major accidents with their Oroville Dam and evacuated of 188,000 people living downstream. This can be compared to the 154,000 evacuated from Fukushima

You're being disingenuous here. The waters would have flowed to the sea and most people would have been back inweeks if not days. No one's going back to Fukushima's neighborhood in decades.

You have it wrong if you think people could return back to their homes in a few weeks after a catastrophic dam failure. Flooding like those don't leave any homes or cities to return to. Land slides and wave takes everything in its path, buildings people and animals alike.

In 1975 when Banqiao Dam failed, 26,000 died from flooding, 145,000 died from subsequent famine and epidemics, and 11 million became homeless. When the waters flowed back to the sea, it took a bit longer than "been back inweeks if not days". The flooding did not leave any radiation, but the human toll was still very high.

I was referring to the Oroville dam in the GP comment. The 180k people displaced started returning literally 2 days later with zero casualties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis

Yes two generations ago (that's how old the China disaster you're referring to is) especially in developing economies, there were major dam disasters. You don't really quite see them today - especially in developed largely economies which are also likely to have Nuclear as an option

Not just developing economies had dam disasters: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teton_Dam

It is only with hindsight that we can say that loosing control of the Oroville dam did not have a catastrophic result. They lost control and issued a evacuation exactly because they did not know what would happen at that point. In hindsight it only caused minor flooding and debris that was addressed downstream, and then the weather improved.

I have not heard of a nuclear accident where they lost control of the reaction, issued an evacuation order, and then later managed to regain control with only minor damage. If it happened we should still not describe such accident as acceptable since people could literally return a few days later. Loosing control of a destructive force is unacceptable regardless of outcomes, and anything else would just result in deviation of acceptable risk.

More than displaced, the tsunami killed 20,000 people.

It was also the biggest Earthquake in 1000+ years of recorded Japanese history, and hit a small area where it could produce a tsunami overflowing the tsunami walls.

In the 99.99% likely world where this didn't happen, we'd have a much healthier nuclear power situation. But now we're in this world...

I think I understand your point here, but it also seems to me this line of thinking also denies the laws of evolution...

From your Wikipedia link:

"A 2017 assessment put rising nuclear construction costs, low gas prices and improving renewable generation economics as the three main causes of the failure of the nuclear renaissance in the United States."

While Fukushima may have made the public image worse, I believe, although I'm certainly not an expert, that its primary problem for the nuclear industry is that it demonstrated that a certain failure mode having to do with backup generators for the cooling circuit needs to be taken seriously in the design.

I think this is one of the major sources of cost in nuclear plants. They need meticulous planning and execution to ensure safety.

I believe it is way before Fukushima, don't forget Chernobyl and Three Mile Islands. Chernobyl is fresh on a lot of people minds back then because of how disastrously it is. It took years to get people to start to be comfortable with nuclear plants after series of regulations and safeguards to ensure maximum safety to avoid another Chernobyl. Until Fukushima fked it up for everyone else. It is not because people don't want another Fukushima, it is because people don't want another Chernobyl and its severe fallout spread to Europe and Asia. Also it didn't help when the government, USSR, tried to keep it a secret from the rest of the world and refused to take responsibilities. I don't blame the citizen for not trusting the governments when it come to nuclear power plants due to those disaster events.

10 years ago was Fukushima. Which caused a reversal in nuclear production.

The 10-30 years before that (1980-2000) most of the environmentalists were campaigning against nuclear. Especially in light of Chernobyl and three mile.

The difference now is there's significant efforts into smrs (even if little think it's about thorium, it isn't), which means that nuclear could become scalable. If that happens, then it is a game changer because it's the only real downside of the technology.

i think people are more desperate for change (and imo, rightly so)

Nuclear power has very long lead-times. If you want to convince the public to build uranium fission power plants, you have to do it now or the time in which they would be relevant to the climate crisis will pass. That assumes the public will want current-generation uranium fission plants, which they did not want in the past.

>What has changed?

Wind and solar were rolled out at state and national scale.

People forgot the last set of nuclear boondogels. Nothing sells a pyramid scheme like 10 years without one...

With all the renewed interest in Nuclear, do we have enough uranium reserve if say US, China, EU and India decided to go big on nuclear ?

Fuel is miniscule part of nuclear energy cost. With increased demand it will be profitable to prospect for more, and uranium is not a rare element.

This is a really shoddy article: It is in a "small caps" newsletter, mentions a couple specific small cap mining companies, and does not provide any sources for the assertion that China will build 150 nuclear power plants. It just jumps to "Buy these stonks."

Also, reactors are necessary to make weapon-grade isotopes.

sometimes I think that this is a much bigger reason for nuclear electricity than anybody would ever publicly admit. to the point that if you remove all apperances (politics, marketing, etc) this is THE biggest drive behind the push to nuclear

Not really, while yes any nuclear reactor could in theory be used to produce weapons grade material, in practice designs optimized for plutonium breeding are radically different from power generating plants. Further, you don't need nuclear reactors for weapons material production, you can just enrich uranium. In fact, enriching uranium in sufficient quantity for reactors actually requires significantly larger and more expensive set ups than would be needed for weapons production. There might be some small states that want to disguise their weapons programs as peaceful power generation programs, but for countries like China and the US which are already well known to possess such weapons, there's really no incentive.

I fail to see how this is relevant.

China can already make nuclear weapons and presumably has a MAD amount. Nobody needs more than a couple hundred thermonuclear weapons, there's nothing left to hit with the next 100.

10 countries with nuclear weapons. 2 of which don’t have nuclear power.

35 countries with nuclear power. 27 of which don’t have nuclear weapons.

If my estimates about the reactor size are correct, they're just going to make nuclear keep up with solar in terms of additional GWh delivered annually by the newly build plants, so it's less a focus on nuclear and more a diversification of their mix.

20 years ago I thought we are on the verge of cracking the fusion process and are about to get very cheap energy.

20 years later we still use not so efficient fision technology.

In what sense are you using the word "efficient" here, and why does that sense matter?

This is good news if they follow through. Likely to have a number of beneficial effects directly in China and as follow on effects globally.

apparently China chose to lead the future.

A better Soviet Union is still a Soviet Union. Totalitarian success is not human environmental friendly.

In case of war those are really weak points for china, "In case of war".

Maybe something like this will inspire the US to do something similar.

"The cost of China’s new nuclear ambition has been estimated at US$440 billion." But it doesn't say how much power that is, just that it's 150 new reactors, so it's about US$3B per reactor. https://archive.md/A5B6S shows that the article didn't say how much power it was 9 hours ago either. So, is this 15 GW, 150 GW, or 1500 GW?

PV modules are about US$0.2/Wp, so if it were PV panels, US$440B would buy them 2.2 terawatts peak. At an average capacity factor of 20% (though, as pfdietz points out, most new utility-scale solar has single-axis tracking, which pushes it to 30%) that would be 440 GW, but China's historical PV capacity factor has been terrible, more like 12% IIRC (maybe due to a Chinese version of the irrational misregulation robomartin documents in California in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155094). 12% would make it more like 260 GW. But a PV power plant includes things that aren't panels; balance of plant (inverter, wiring, grid connection, monitoring, mounting, security) is typically roughly equal to the module cost. So it would be more like 130 GW. (Total costs of utility-scale solar in the US are about twice that in China <https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Articles/20...> at about US$0.89/Wp according to pfdietz <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155644>.

In the US, nuclear plants cost about US$8/We. If China's program was at the same cost, it would provide 55 GW. If it was closer to the cost of US nuclear plants in the 01970s about US$1/We (and if the US$440B number is correct), it would provide 440 GW.

The threads at https://birdsite.xanny.family/pretentiouswhat/status/1293961... and https://birdsite.xanny.family/pretentiouswhat/status/1318838... provide some more context, suggesting that the "HPR1000, aka Hualong One 华龙一号", is the reactor being used at these 150 sites. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580991... says the HPR1000 is 3.050 GW thermal, 1.070 GW electric, net. (See also https://www.ukhpr1000.co.uk/the-uk-hpr1000-technology/hpr100... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One.) So 150 of them would produce 161 GW electric, which (if that's US$440B) would put the cost around US$3/We, about twice the cost of the same generation capacity via PV with single-axis tracking, not including any cost of storage. But maybe that's 150 power plants, each with nuclear reactors, not 150 nuclear reactors?

There is that alternate timeline where the US built the 500 reactors we were planning to build by 2000 and in which, in 2021, global warming was seen as a minor issue rather than a "climate crisis".

Any idea why didn't the US keep to that plan?

Nixon left.

I’m guessing Three Mile Island + Chernobyl. Maybe start here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_the...

I long thought that the simultaneous release of "The China Syndrome" and TMI led to public fear of nuclear power (TMI happened two weeks after the movie debuted!). But apparently people have studied this and these disasters really didn't have a major effect -- public sentiment generally stayed the same around the time of the accidents[1]

[1] - This link only covers Chernobyl and Fukushima: https://www.ans.org/news/article-321/new-polls-show-substant...

The passage of PURPA in 1978 had a bigger effect. Suddenly utilities were opened to competition. Combined with a slowdown in growth of electric power demand and the window closed on new nuclear.

Fossil fuels are too cheap and approval times for new fossil fuel power stations are surprisingly still much faster than for nuclear. Even though the health impact from the latter has historically been orders of magnitudes (at least 1000x) higher.

1. The conversion of airplane gas turbines to power generation which have about 1/10 the capital cost of the steam turbines used for coal and nuclear plants. (People still quote the cost of coal as if it was a benchmark but it has been uncompetitive since 1980. So much in energy research is like a stopped clock.)

2. A wrong model for what causes nuclear accidents (e.g. the pressure vessel doesn't burst, instead the power goes out like it did at Fukushima.) Existing plants and new designs had to be retrofit -- U.S. power plants went through post-TMI and post-911 upgrades, but Japan did nothing.

3. Racism and islamophobia. When Pakistan got the bomb the fear of proliferation exploded, putting an end to research in new nuclear reactors (which could have a gas-turbine based cost structure) and sustainable nuclear fuel cycles. (e.g. it's possible to not just use Plutonium as a fuel, but even destroy the most pernicious fission products.)

The generation that had a great fear of nuclear bombs due to duck and cover exercises in schools when they were kids started coming into political power (the boomers) and have been in power ever since. Most people don't really separate the idea of a mushroom cloud going up into the sky and a nuclear reactor meltdown in their head. The nuclear power industry should have taken a clue from all of the other industries that use nuclear/radioactive tech and removed the word nuclear from the technology description. Maybe call it isotopic power?

Hopefully younger generations, that seem to be completely unaware that we still live 15 minutes to nuclear armageddon, won't have such a visceral negative view of it and see it as a viable zero carbon energy source.

I thought it was well known: Building nuclear power stations has been extremely expensive and time-consuming.

Why would anyone invest in that? The answer is climate change, but conservatives in the US have opposed any action on that issue, so there hasn't been political will.

You are getting some truly bizarre responses. The real answer is that the same crowd of people obsessed with climate change today were against nuclear power yesterday.

Only if the rest of the world followed suit. And I highly doubt 100% of other developed and developing nations would have. It also doesn’t fix emissions from cars, planes, shipping vessels, etc. If carbon levels were 50% what they are I also doubt the propaganda would be much different.

We are hearing crazy talk about using Fischer-Tropsch chemistry to make jet fuel for the same reason we are hearing so much about direct air capture and other pipe dreams.

If we really decarbonized everything easy to decarbonize (including cars) we'd have very little to worry about.

Moving the focus to airplanes and other science fiction, we create an excuse to not decarbonize what can be decarbonized.

Also, next generation nuclear reactors like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_salt_reactor

run at high temperatures which can produce hydrogen which can be put to all kinds of climate-protecting uses.

This is just false. There's a lot of sectors that produce emissions besides electricity and transportation. They aren't exactly getting their energy through other means, which still produce emissions. The climate crisis is a very difficult problem to solve and it isn't helping pretending that the only thing we need to do is get electric cars and convert our electric generation sources to zero emission sources. It is far more complicated than that. We also have to do it in a way that the rest of the world (which is 85% of emissions) can afford.

Fully agree. As a pro nuclear person, I don't get why people do this propaganda. It only hurts our position as it is very dishonest. Though I also really dislike how Americentric the global climate crisis is. Yeah, America is a big contributor, but only 15%. I don't see anyone else really stepping up to solve it. If America isn't going to act, why isn't _your_ country stepping up? It's the global equivalent of "well the rich guy isn't playing fair, so why should I?"

I only have a limited understanding of nuclear reactors, but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we currently don't have any long-term storage plans for. Not having storage plans for this waste (beyond "put it in pools of water near the reactors, or maybe send it to south carolina) suggests to me that nuclear power may not actually be a workable solution. Sorry to sound ignorant, but it seems like building 500 plants would exacerbate that problem dramatically.

Doesn't it seem like solar + batteries is a much better solution? We could cover large parts of the US with solar panels, store it during the day, and charge large fleets of electric cars overnight. Then, the issue is one of non-radioactive toxic waste storage instead of radioactive toxic waste storage, which seems a bit more tractable.

Storing nuclear waste is a problem, but seems somewhat exaggerated. We have been doing it quite successfully. Waste reprocessing drastically reduces that amount too.

Renewables + batteries, why not. This technology is not at a stage yet where we can use it. There are literally no “guaranteed power on demand” facilities from renewables+batteries.

Nuclear technology is mostly old and boring by now.

> I only have a limited understanding of nuclear reactors, but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we currently don't have any long-term storage plans for.

We currently have an inefficient long-term storage plan for it - store it on-site.

We had an efficient, cheaper long-term storage plan (Yucca mountain) that failed for political, not technical reasons.

Nuclear waste is not waste.

The LWR extracts about only 1% of the energy from uranium. Next generation reactors like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ApH-0YHkA

can burn much more of the fuel and even destroy much of the dangerous fission products.

Looking at it that way we've already mined enough fuel to run our civilization for a few hundred years. It's good news.

The cost of batteries is declining rapidly, but it is still an order of magnitude too high. Will it get low enough? We don't know.

Most of the time you can get away with a relatively small amount of storage but sometimes you get an extended "dry spell", so you might need two weeks or more storage to be entirely reliable.

Renewables have been workable so far because of low-cost gas turbines fired by methane that take up the slack: we know now that methane is 80 or so times more potent a global warming gas than carbon dioxide, so if you lose 1% of the gas in handling it is a big problem.

The fact is that nuclear waste is not waste. The light water reactor extracts about 1% of the energy that a fast reactor could extract from uranium. In fact, molten salt fast reactors can not only consume plutonium and other actinides but also destroy a good fraction of the most dangerous fission products.

Coal and oil also release methane as part of the production process. Gas isn't as good as renewables, but a shift to using gas produced electricity for heating and EVs etc with or without renewables is still a good move.

> nuclear waste is not waste

There is a lot more to nuclear waste than just the fuel rods. Lots of materials that are either used by workers at the plant or part of the plant become radio active and can no longer go to a regular landfill of other trash processing facilities. That is why some energy companies are trying to default rather than pay for decommissioning plants once they have reached the maximum age that they were constructed for.

There's a much bigger problem with solar than storage: Energy Density. And energy density isn't a problem we can solve, it's bounded by the laws of physics.

An average nuclear power plant puts out 1GW of energy in under 2.5 square kilometers, or 1 square mile. To achieve the same output (Since you'd need double the panels + storage to produce energy at night) you'd need to destroy 450 square kilometers of natural habitat to generate the same energy with solar panels. Realistically you'd need much more than that to account for cloudy days, and even more to offset electrical transmission losses because no one is building a solar farm in latitudes that see 100+ cloudy days per year.

Detractors of nuclear will argue "Why don't we do rooftop solar".. well, 56% of the world's population lives in cities where that's not possible, and that number isn't decreasing. NYC for example uses on the order of ~50GW or 51 Terawatts per year. You'd have to cover 15% of the state in silicon glass to get anywhere close to powering it. Personally, I'd rather take a chance on nuclear in lieu of the the massive amount of environmental destruction required to power modern society with solar energy.

Doing a quick sanity check, I think you're off by about 10x.

93% capacity factor nuclear [0]

1 GW

8700000000 kWh/year [1]

440 Wp @ 1960x1308x40 mm [2]

1.96 m

1.308 m

2.56368 m2

440 Wp

0.85 kWh factor for the Netherlands [3]

374 kWh per year

145.8840417 kWh/m2

59636406.42 m2 for to match nuclear

59.63640642 km2

[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab...

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+GW+to+kwh+per+year

[2] https://www.enfsolar.com/pv/panel-datasheet/crystalline/1049...

[3] https://www.tentensolar.nl/semi-overheid/dossiers/item/zonne...

Excellent sanity check, and I'll add another calculation for comparison.

449 nuclear reactors in the world [0]

2 disasters leading to large exclusion zones

average area of those exclusion zones 1300 square miles [1]

average exclusion zone per reactor (very roughly) 5.8 square miles

15.0 square kilometres

So solar panels use up about 4 times as much space as "average" nuclear reactors (not including the relatively small area used by the plant itself[2]), but of course the value of land with solar panels on is much higher than radioactively contaminated land.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-that-have-t...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152930

[2] https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwar...

To some extent, for a fair comparison, you should also use old sole panel efficiency here. Nuclear power plants have progressed tremendously in terms of safety.

There’s also widespread reporting that the evacuations and exclusion zones, in Fukushima at least, were excessive.

That "dry spell" storage doesn't need to be batteries. It will have a low number of charge/discharge cycles, so what you want is low capital cost, and you don't care much about round trip efficiency. Hydrogen burned in turbines serves this need rather well compared to batteries.

Nuclear waste is waste. That's what's sitting in big piles in pools all around the country. My point was entirely political, basically if the obama administration can kill a good idea like Yucca after a decade+ of research, it's clear we don't have the political will to deploy nuclear in the US.

> but IIUC these would have produced nuclear waste, which we currently don't have any long-term storage plans for.

As with most of America's problems, this is an entirely political problem, not a technical one.

> in 2021, global warming was seen as a minor issue rather than a "climate crisis".

I just want to push back on this. The US isn't the sole contributor to climate change and I'm tired of pretending like it is. We need to stop with this Americentric thinking, this is a global crisis. Nor is electricity the only factor. The US is about 15%. We'll round up to 25% assuming the EU follows the US. That's still 75% of the emissions not coming from the west. We need to also look where emissions are coming from. In the US that is 29% transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry, 13% commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.

If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't mean we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy). It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these things to become more popular. For example, with cars the battery technology is a big example of why we see them now and not in the past. There may have been more pressure for this, but it isn't an assumption we can make.

So if we're just talking the US, that's 25% (electricity) * 15% (US global contribution) or 3.75%. Let's say electricity and transportation and industry, that's still only 11.55% of global emissions, and that is an absurd overestimate. Yeah, 10% of emissions (I'll say conservative estimate that includes EU) would be a big deal, but it wouldn't turn climate change into a minor deal. Though we would have a large leg up from our current position as we'd be able to focus less on clean electricity production and more on all the things that produce emissions and carbon capture techniques/technologies.

All sources are from EPA.

Edit: I'm not sure why people think I'm anti nuclear or even uninformed on it (many people that know my account will know my expertise here). I'm also not sure why people don't think I care about China's emissions. I'm saying that the problem is much bigger and complicated than any single country. Even if one country should be picking up the mantle and leading the way, they aren't. So what do we do then? That's my complaint. Because "what do we do" has been mostly complaining.

Edit 2: To be clear, my quip is about global warming being a "minor issue" if we had just built said reactors. This is just flat out wrong. If the US was 0 emissions, there's still the other 85% being produced. France is doing great, I know. They are an amazing example (I'm not anti-nuclear?), but they aren't 0 emissions either. No one is?

Electricity is an energy carrier. "Transport", "Industry", "Commercial" and "Agriculture" are categories of use.

We could use more electricity in all of those areas.

Next-generation nuclear reactors will operate at much higher temperatures and be more economical as a result. Some of the high cost of nuclear energy is because low-temperature operation is expensive. A PWR has huge steam generators inside the confinement vessel because using hot water to boil steam and spin a huge steam turbine is wasteful.

Next-generation reactors will have a gas turbine powerset that fits in the employee break room of the turbine house. Next-generation reactors will make hydrogen for fuels and fertilizer using processes like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle

There is no reason the rest of the world couldn't follow if the "Union of Concerned Scientists" wasn't afraid of a Muslim Planet. (It was Pakistan getting the bomb that put the kibosh on advanced reactors are sustainable nuclear fuel cycles.)

I still think you're oversimplifying it. Let's look at one common technology: cooling. Our current cooling solutions aren't carbon free. They use 6% of US electricity and are nowhere near carbon free. These aren't amounts that can be ignored either nor are they the only emitting technology we don't have a great solution for (heating you can pump hot water to homes, which nuclear provides a great solution to generate said heated water). It's worse because the feedback loop.

You also can't talk about next-generation reactors because they don't exist right now (at least in production).

What I'm trying to say here is that this doesn't help our pro-nuclear case. It is cherry picking post hoc analysis. Climate change would still be a real problem, even with our leg up. Because frankly, climate change is much harder than getting solar, wind, and nuclear everywhere. It is also bigger than America, the EU, and China (total of 54%).

>Our current cooling solutions aren't carbon free.

Are you referring to HVAC cooling (refrigerators, heat pumps, etc.), or reactor cooling (cooling tower, etc.)? Neither has any intrinsic carbon emissions though. HVAC needs electricity[0], but has no emissions other than incidental CFC release[1]. Nuclear / industrial equipment cooling typically needs water, but doesn't release any carbon.

[0]Ostensibly nuclear in the context of this thread.

[1]Mostly a non issue post Montreal-Protocol

Nobody's pretending the US is the sole contributor to climate change. China's emissions exceed those of all other developed countries combined[0]. And, when you look at the top 20 companies in terms of carbon emissions, it turns out that 12 of them are state owned (thus, non-US companies), and, unsurprisingly, all of them are energy companies[1].

OTOH, the US is not at all blameless here. If the US military were its own country, it would rank 55th in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, beating out 140 other countries[2].

---

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57018837

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed...

[2]: https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...

Honestly? A lot of people are. Don't get me wrong, the US is a big part of the problem. I'm not trying to state otherwise. As a single country we are the second worse, and the worst on a per capita scale. To be clear, I'm not trying to say that the US is not a major contributor. We definitely are and should be leading the way to solve this problem.

The issue is that we aren't leading the way, despite the best efforts of many of its citizens. But I also don't see anyone else stepping up. I also don't see people considering that the rest of the globe that isn't electrified is making the choice of "clean energy or a hospital." We know what they'll go with every time and we shouldn't blame them.

This is the most complicated problem that humankind has ever faced. We are doing a disservice by over simplifying the problem. We are doing a disservice by turning this into a political "shoulda-coulda" or "but they waste more" game. At the end of the day it doesn't matter, emissions still happen even if one person is more at fault. The worst part? The countries that emit the most will also be able to deal with the crisis more easily, and thus have less incentive to actually solve it.

I'm not saying the US isn't to blame. I'm saying the problem is far more complicated than the US and it's going to take more than them to solve it.

You're absolutely right. However, I'd argue that per capita emissions is a misleading metric here, in light of the fact that when you drill down even deeper and look at the top 100 corporate polluters, which are collectively responsible for 71% of our greenhouse gas emissions[0], virtually all of them [1] are energy companies.

Now, yes, individual people consume energy, thus forming most of the basis for this "per capita emissions" metric, but, in the alternative timeline where the world got serious about clean energy 20-30 years ago, guess what happens to that metric? It drops in direct correlation with the amount of investment in clean energy.

But, as to the rest of what you write here, the solution, at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if not easy: developed countries must invest massively and immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration technologies, as well as properly pricing carbon emissions via carbon taxes so that that negative externality is included in every single consumer decision. Further, developed countries must engage in clean energy technology sharing and development projects throughout the world[2]. We need the entire world to be on the same page, and, China, the US, and Europe need to be leading the way.

So, yes, absolutely, the problem scope vastly exceeds the US (it's global), so, therefore, the solution must be global as well.

---

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

[1]: Perhaps literally all of them. I had to scroll down to about number 75 before I saw one that might not be an energy company, just from the name.

[2]: This solves the "clean energy or a hospital" problem.

> But, as to the rest of what you write here, the solution, at least in my mind, seems fairly simple, if not easy: developed countries must invest massively and immediately in clean energy and carbon sequestration technologies

This is something I actively fight for. I often state that the US (and west) don't need to be carbon neutral by 2050, but carbon negative now. That's how we unburden the developing world. That's how we pay back for the damage cause mostly by us.

But CCS is still a complicated subject and highly debated within the green communities (just like nuclear is). People think we can get away with just planting trees, but the research and experts don't think that's true (especially since new growth forests are carbon sources (fact that surprises many people) instead of carbon sinks (old growth forests are major sinks btw)). We're going to need a wide breadth of methods to solve this and we shouldn't be taking any off the table as long as the result is that we're carbon negative[0].

[0] The arguments against CCS tend to be that if we have them then the coal and ng companies can still operate. Though this obviously misses the point since we care about the resultant emissions more than the source.

It’s also a matter of seeing your spheres of control. There is basically nothing a random peep can do about China as it’s state run. But at least in the US you can maybe have some marginal effect. Besides the US is nowhere near where they need to be just because China is worse

China will be the problem in the future. The United States has been the problem for decades.

The US remains responsible for a large plurality of the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the largest emitter, but it's not particularly close to the US yet if you integrate that function over time.

> If the US military were its own country, it would rank 55th in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, beating out 140 other countries

It's a valid point about the military, but all militaries run on fossil fuels and a handful of big carriers/subs that runs on nuclear.

During WW2, we ran petrol/oil pipelines from the UK under water to Normandy. Each pipeline was a steel cable rolled up along an enormous floating drum called a conundrum that weighed as much as a destroyer. There were 7 of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pluto

Then we extended those pipelines on land as we pushed East. There were 73 allied divisions, each requiring an average of 7 tons of supply each day, with 2/3 of that being fuel. The USSR had something like 600 divisions.

Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty. Oil and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare at the moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or jets on the horizon. So that's not going to be an area where will be reducing much CO2 any time soon.

Long term, perhaps hydrogen might be a replacement for vehicles, and smaller nuclear reactors even for combat ships?? But we'd need to be able to make a lot of hydrogen very quickly, and have something like a strategic hydrogen reserve for wartime. The explosive nature of hydrogen is also a challenge when you are being bombed and shot at, and there are supply chain issues as to what operation Pluto would look like if it was hydrogen.

If the world was run on Uranium and Thorium which are universally distributed in the earth's crust and in the ocean people would have a lot less to fight about.

TIL WW2 was fought for oil. I guess Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan were about oil, too? I'll grant that Iraq was about oil.

More likely, if the world was run on Uranium and Thorium then people wouldn't be able to blame wars on oil.

There'll always be land.

> Modern armies need even more oil as jets are thirsty. Oil and gas infrastructure is critical to modern warfare at the moment, and I don't really see electric tanks or jets on the horizon. So that's not going to be an area where will be reducing much CO2 any time soon.

Well, we could just not maintain military bases all over the goddamn planet, and retain a mostly defensive military. More realistically, I suspect that significantly reducing overseas deployments would also significantly reduce the military's carbon footprint.

I do concede that this may not be geopolitically realistic. I also agree that nuclear seems like a realistic solution for carriers and combat ships. Just eliminating diesel-powered aircraft carriers would probably go a long way, I would guess.

Hey, I'm all for reducing the presence of U.S. bases abroad. I don't think we should be policing the world.

But at the same time, let's not kid ourselves - this will result in more wars, except it wont be U.S. ships and planes burning the fossil fuels, the fossil fuels will be expended by foreign troops and all the rebuilding necessary as a result of more conflict.

Here is an article in the WSJ about the significant increase in coups in Africa as a result of the U.S. pulling back and Europe also easing off of its policing role due to covid:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-coups-in-africa-at-hig...

I feel like you’re arguing a straw man; is anyone actually saying or thinking that the US is the sole cause of climate change? Everyone I talk to about climate is under the impression that China is the big bad wolf (although that’s overly-simplified and not true either).

The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate policy.

On your point, keep in mind that American consumption causes a tremendous amount of off-shore emissions. We have artificially “low” emissions because we outsource them to regions like Southeast Asia.

> The US is influential, for better or worse; I think many people rightfully expect the US to be a leader on climate policy.

This is the root of my problem. Yeah, the US _should_ be the leader on climate policy. But we've been failing for the last 20 years. At what point are we going to acknowledge that someone else needs to pick up the mantel. And as you've mentioned, it isn't like China is going to do it (you can shift my comment to China + US and the sentiment will hold true, but maybe I conveyed my thoughts poorly. Communication is difficult, especially over heated topics).

I totally agree that China isn’t going to step up on climate. I don’t think there is another power able to drive international consensus like the US on this issue. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse is mostly a matter of perspective :)

I genuinely believe that we can change course on climate policy, but it won’t happen in one or two national elections. Electing people who care about sustainability at every level of government is necessary for big changes to happen federally and internationally. We’ve got a lot of work to do!

> Yeah, the US _should_ be the leader on climate policy. But we've been failing for the last 20 years. At what point are we going to acknowledge that someone else needs to pick up the mantel.

If nobody has, then everyone has been failing, not just us. So the US might as well do the right thing "after we've tried everything else", as Churchill didn't actually say.

Yes, the OP did literally argue that if the US had transitioned to nuclear power, global climate change would have been "minor."

The US has been responsible for a large plurality of the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. China is now the largest emitter, but it's not particularly close if you integrate that function over time.

Looking at the data, it doesn't seem like the US transitioning to nuclear would have made climate change a "minor" problem: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

For nearly all of the time before China outstripped the US, the EU (if you include EU-27) was a larger contributor than the US anyway. And much of the early US emissions edge came before nuclear power was invented. Global warming itself was poorly understood prior to the 1960s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-glob...

A transition to nuclear would have helped, certainly! But climate change would not be "minor."

People seem to be missing that this was my entire point... The OP made too strong of a statement.

> The US isn't the sole contributor to climate change and I'm tired of pretending like it is.

The hypothetical being discussed is "what if the US had went the same route as France and built an electricity grid with the majority of power being generated from nuclear rather than fossil" and for that we would consider the impact to the total (or cumulative) emissions during those decades.

As such, here is an "Our World in Data" article on the cumulative CO₂ emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

In particular, the nominal cumulative emissions of the US were approximately the double of China. (A higher factor if considered per capita)

If the US had built nuclear technology many other countries (particularly NATO) would have also seen a higher nuclear adoption.

This would have accelerated some trends such as electric ovens and stovetops, electric trains (maybe even nuclear-electric rather than disel-electric), and local micro-nuclear generators on industry such as in metalwork.

Let's say the US went to 0 emissions. That's 15% of the global emissions whipped out (note, France is doing awesome, and setting a great example, but not anywhere near 0 emissions). If the US was 0 emissions since 2000, we'd still be in a climate crisis. That is essentially what I'm saying. It would be decreased from where we are, yes. But it wouldn't be a "minor issue" as the OP stated.

If the US had built 500 nuclear reactors, I have no doubt we'd be exporting tech and basing trade agreements on getting other countries to buy our reactors. China might still use coal, but US manufacturing would be more attractive with practically free electricity. There are lots of reasons what OP posited would be true.

To where? The EU? Yeah. I kinda mentioned that. But South Africa? Brazil? Pakistan? I doubt that very much.

So you're saying this wouldn't have helped because only the industrialized countries would be using nuclear and that would still leave the industrializing countries using carbon? And this is a point worth quibbling over, since they produce hardly any of the carbon? If so, you're wrong, climate change would indeed be a minor issue if this had happened.

Honestly I feel like you're trying to pigeonhole me and ignoring major parts of my comments.

South Africa, Brazil, and Pakistan all already have nuclear power. South Africa and Pakistan even developed nuclear weapons, though SA gave theirs up just before they ended apartheid. IMO the proliferation concerns are a little irrational and overblown, so if we're positing a counterfactual where US policy wasn't governed by an irrational fear of nuclear technology, I think it's fair to assume this would change as well.

I'm very aware of the proliferation issue. To be clear, I have worked in the nuclear space.

But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on nuclear power.

Those countries weren't said as examples of countries without nuclear power. They are examples of countries that have it but still likely wouldn't have had any exports from the US. I thought the Pakistan example made this abundantly clear. Maybe I confused people by including Brazil, but there was pressure on them during the cold war.

> But that still doesn't mean that fears of proliferation would have disappeared if we had a larger reliance on nuclear power.

Not necessarily, but you're positing a world in which the widescale adoption of nuclear power has no effects at all, and I think that's an unreasonable assumption. Right now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports because we see nuclear as some dangerous fringe technology rather than as the default energy source for a 21st century civilization.

> you're positing a world in which the widescale adoption of nuclear power has no effects at all

No I'm not. I'm saying that if the US went highly nuclear that it does not directly follow that the rest of the world would also. I'm saying it is a bad assumption to make.

> Right now we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports

It still is a big deal, but it was even a bigger deal 20-30 years ago (the timeframe we are talking about). As a good example, less than 10 years ago I was working on a project that involved nuclear technologies and a university partner. I was not allowed to talk specifics to any of the international students that were _directly_ working on the project (you bet they were smart enough to figure out what they were making). While nothing was classified, it still fell under ITAR and the FBI was talking to me several times a year. Nuclear technology exports are still a very big deal.

> I'm saying that if the US went highly nuclear that it does not directly follow that the rest of the world would also.

I agree that it does not directly or necessarily follow. But I think it would be more likely.

> Nuclear technology exports are still a very big deal.

Sorry, I think my comment came across the exact opposite of what I meant.

When I said "we don't see it as a big deal to restrict nuclear exports", what I meant was, when we restrict the export of nuclear technology, we don't see it as an unfair imposition on other countries to deprive them of nuclear energy the same way we might see depriving them of food or natural gas. In other words, exporting nuclear technology is a big deal; depriving the rest of the world of nuclear energy is not a big deal. Sorry for the confusing phrasing.

Right now, American voters and policymakers don't think of nuclear energy as the primary power source for a modern civilization. When we have those annoying ITAR regulations that you had to follow, everybody thinks that's perfectly reasonable because nuclear technology is spooky and scary mad science that nobody actually needs anyway. That's not the same attitude we would have if we switched to wholesale nuclear energy in the 1970's.

Am I saying export laws would necessarily be less stringent in this scenario? No, but there are probabilities between 0 and 1, and you seem to be implying that since the probability is <1, it must be 0.

The odd thing was that the proliferation fear hit suddenly when Pakistan hit the bomb.

Iran under the shah, for instance, got a small-scale kit for reprocessing plutonium. High enriched uranium wound up in research reactors all over the place. It's nice stuff, makes it very easy to get a critical mass in a small space.

The EU and India/Asia would go a long ways toward solving the carbon pollution problem. Where we don't sell the reactors, then we'd sell the power using underwater HVDC cables (i.e. to Central and South America).

US also influences policy adopted by other countries, so if the US adopted the French nuclear model, we would influence other countries.

I think we're hurt by our domestic oil and gas reserves here. We have powerful interests who want the US to use its domestic oil and gas reserves, so a large-scale shift TO nuclear and AWAY FROM gas seems quite difficult to execute.

This is quite limited though and is why I talked about also including Europe. The limitation is that the US isn't going to let developing nations have nuclear power or they'll limit it, a la Iran Deal. The technology isn't really being exported, so that influence wouldn't be exactly global. Just to rich trading partners (i.e. the west, Japan, and Korea).

> The technology isn't really being exported, so that influence wouldn't be exactly global.

China has started exporting their Hualong One reactor with at least two Pakistani Nuclear Power Stations building a total of 5 Hualong One reactors: Karachi and Chashma.

Argentina is expected to start building a Hualong One reactor by next year and it is under consideration in the United Kingdom.

> Most reactors on order or planned are in the Asian region, though there are major plans for new units in Russia.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...

> China is planning at least 150 new nuclear reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

If it goes anything like their buildout of high speed railway China would probably end up doubling the reactor capacity built by 2035 over this plan.

The article mentions Turkey as well, using Russian tech. When a NATO country chooses nuclear tech from the country that brought us Chernobyl, the US is definitely asleep at the wheel.

Why not? Most developing countries don't want nuclear weapons. They're a liability. If I were a country like Jordan (random example), I would be perfectly happy signing a (presumably good) deal for nuclear power, even if it came with anti-proliferation controls.

Exporting technology for reactors is tricky business. While yes, you can build reactors without proliferation concerns (see Iran Deal), there's the issue that if you're learning to build reactors you're going to export the knowledge necessary to build weapons. That's the tricky part. And if you have any nuclear technology, we're going to have to spend more money to spy on you to ensure that's all you are doing.

Nuclear weapons aren't always a liability either. It is one of NK's greatest defenses. Specifically that if attacked they know they will lose and have no real reason to not use the hail mary. This helps their chances even if China decides to no longer protect them. Obviously this is country dependent though and depends on a lot of factors. But just trying to say that it isn't always a liability.

I was always under the impression that the US gets the most negative press about emissions because we have the highest per-capita (no way we were ever going to top China in total emissions lol). However, the US doesn't even appear to be top-10 on the per-capita chart [0], even coming in under some large countries likes Canada and Australia.

There's a bit of a cognitive dissonance here though. The US is the leader of the world and everyone looks to us on how to build their countries. No one wants to admit it but everyone wants to be as good as us. However, when we fail to live up to our reputation, the rest of the world is right to call us out for not living up to our reputation (that, to be fair, we regularly leverage). If you're in the US and you don't want to be criticized, that's fine, but then you can't also claim that the US is the best/strives to be the best.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

The US should lead the way. The problem is that we aren't and can't get our leaders to do anything. I'm also not concerned with the criticism, as it is warranted. I'm concerned that the problem still persists and no one else will pick up the mantle. This is just kicking it down the road and saying that someone else should solve it. Even if that's true, it doesn't mean the problem isn't getting worse in the mean time.

To be fair it's not even your leader's fault. Most of the people are against doing anything about green energy. Hydro quebec produce TWh of green electricity but failed to bring it sucessfully anywhere.

here is the lastest failure.

https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/baker-hydro-corridor...

IMO they will fail in new york as well.

> If the US (and EU) grids went highly nuclear that doesn't mean we'd also have more electric vehicles or more electric appliances. We would look a lot more like France (in energy). It isn't just the price of electricity that has caused these things to become more popular. For example, with cars the battery technology is a big example of why we see them now and not in the past. There may have been more pressure for this, but it isn't an assumption we can make.

I don't know that the original poster is implying there's a certainty about this, but it's certainly a possibility. If the US had bet heavily on nuclear, there's a lot of dominoes that would fall with this. There'd be more investment in nuclear and potential benefits from that. There'd be less demand for fossil fuels, consequently less exploration & development of fossil fuels. It would also have changed positioning and strategy when it comes to global climate change initiatives. It's at least conceivable there'd be a dramatic global impact, but modeling the systemic consequences of one decision is problematic at best.

The US (and EU) are largely deindustrialized, having offshored nearly all of their grossly polluting industries to the Global South and Asia. It doesn't feel particularly fair to point fingers at the developing world when we've externalized nearly all of our pollution onto them.

(That doesn't, of course, excuse China's coal-fired plant growth, or any other form of egregious pollution. Only to say that these things don't happen in a vacuum.)

this is a point that seems to be largely overlooked overall on the impact a specific country has on global emissions.

Overall, the US has a bigger impact than a country like Spain simply because you need to also factor in the supply chain emissions that come with it (in this case, a lot of it being generated somewhere else but being consumed in the US).

To call the US or EU deindustrialised is hilariously wrong. It manufactures more than ever before in its history. It's less polluting because it pays to process waste and designs processes to minimise waste, not because manufacturing is done elsewhere.

> The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009 Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

A common narrative but also wrong. Even when we take into account the externalized pollution the US and EU still have lower emissions compared to 30 years ago. 87 % of China’s emissions is caused by their own needs. 13 % for playing factory of the world. Asia has a lot of people, no surprise they pollute a lot.

Part of the reason to be critical of the US isn't just our high overall carbon emissions, but our per-capita carbon emissions. US citizens emit far more carbon per-person than Chinese people do. That is worth criticizing

This is just standard CCP propaganda to deflect from the fact that China is the world's highest emitter of CO2. While US emissions have been trending down for the last 10 years, China's emissions have been trending up.

And at the end of the day, CO2 molecules have no nationality: it's why we don't waste our breath criticizing Qatar for having the world's highest emissions for capita when it produced just 0.1% the total emissions of China.

> And at the end of the day, CO2 molecules have no nationality

...which is why per capita is a better measure than per country. Here's a comment from a while ago that shows the math [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040704

> CO2 molecules have no nationality

if that's the case, why do you think american citizen deserve to pollute a lot more than Chinese citizen? why would being born inside US border somehow makes it ok to pollute more than if you were born inside china

By your logic, if China were to split in 150 small countries, they could pollute as much as they like because technically each of them would be low on the list of highest emitter.

it's so obvious that per-capita metrics are a far more practical metric to use that I am convinced those repeating this flawed argument have no real interest in tackling climate change

I'm willing to bet that per-capita, the US produces far more economic output per KG of CO2 than most of the rest of the world. Like with any statistic, you can slice and dice it any way you want to fit an agenda.

Here's a chart of carbon intensity vs. GDP per capita for various countries:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-vs-gdp

Why don't you slice and dice that based on your agenda and tell us what we should conclude?

Uh...why not the proper comparison, which is GDP per kg CO2? While I believe that GDP is Θ(1) bound to CO2 emissions, any comparison should include those constants. Your chart is missing the connection between kWh consumed and GDP generated.

> the connection between kWh consumed and GDP generated

If you don't mind those numbers being normalised by population size, and CO2 emissions being used as a more relevant metric than kWh, then this chart might be helpful:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

Do you know what percentage of the non-western sources are outsourced emissions or if that was already included?

France is phasing out nuclear, their goal is to reduce nuclear from 70% to 50% by 2025.

Will they use the German plan, and replace nuclear with coal? Or will they use the California plan, and replace nuclear with rolling blackouts?

Germany has not replaced nuclear with coal. They have massively increased rennewables, as should everyone who isn't a paid shill or from the 80s.

Thank you for your alternative facts, now go collect your paycheck for that dumbass statement.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

https://energytransition.org/2018/01/german-energy-consumpti...

I am ecstatic to see those numbers, which are very different from numbers I've seen in the past. My bad. (Probably.)

Sorry about the vulgar comment... I am always getting really riled up about people dragging Germany through the mud for its energy policy.

Not because Germany doesn't deserve it. It absolutely does. But we should stick to facts - Germany simply should have gotten rid of coal before nuclear but of course the government (CDU/SPD parties) historically cared more about existing coal jobs than potential new jobs in nuclear - especially in the 80s.

I'm not sure I'd call 70%->50% "phasing out". I'd call it "reducing dependence." I see nothing wrong with this. It would still be one of the most heavily nuclearized countries. So that term is misleading.

I wouldn't call anything "phasing out" short of a plan to denuclearize.

France is still going to be the green model. Mixture of zero emitting sources. The energy problem is complex. As one example, a big reason for this change is that France heavily relies on others to get its uranium.

You might be right on the minor local point that we would still have a climate problem if the US went all-in on nuclear, but it would be a lot easier to get the US to pass border adjustments (“carbon tariffs” if you will) on China or whomever if our emissions were in good shape. We wouldn’t have a fossil fuel industry lobbying hard to preserve pollution and there wouldn’t be as much pearl clutching about the effects of the economy. Moreover, if we had 70 years of investment in nuclear, we would probably be able to quickly and cheaply stamp out safe, cost effective nuclear power plants all over the world (think about how much progress on SMRs could have been made in the same amount of time). Moreover, abundant, cheap energy would have almost certainly precipitated the electrification of everything from heavy industry to transportation to indoor heating/cooking/water-heating/etc (on the near-certain assumption that nuclear would be far cheaper than fossil fuels).

Well the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying. So I'm not sure we can really make these conclusions. It is post hoc thinking. As much as I'd love to live in an atomic punk era with SMRs being prolific. Luckily there's been a lot of investment lately into them and we're starting to see good results. So it isn't too late.

> Well the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying. So I'm not sure we can really make these conclusions. It is post hoc thinking.

I think you misunderstood (or maybe I'm misunderstanding). I agree that "the whole reason we don't have nuclear is because of the fossil fuel industry lobbying", but I don't see how that invalidates any conclusions.

> Luckily there's been a lot of investment lately into them and we're starting to see good results. So it isn't too late.

Well, it's certainly too late to help us meet Paris Climate Agreement targets, which largely depend on our emission rates b the end of the decade (there's no way we're going to start cranking out enough SMRs to put a serious dent in emissions because we started reinvesting in nuclear too little too late). SMRs might play a role several decades out, but it's too late for the short term (and of course the short term is going to have a lot of ramifications for our future climate).

> Nor is electricity the only factor....In the US that is 29% transportation, _25% electricity_, 23% industry, 13% commercial & residential, 13% agriculture.

That 25% figure is not fully independent of where the electricity comes from.

The primary baseload energy source for US electricity is natural gas. If you're using natural gas for electricity, it's wasteful for people to have electric ovens, electric ranges, electric hot water heaters, electric heaters, and other electric household appliances that primarily work by generating heat. It's more efficient to use gas directly, both economically and ecologically.

Where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, the primary power source is hydroelectric. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've lived my whole life without utility gas, and I've lived in a lot of different places. Other places have district heating systems--Iceland, for instance, can support district heating easily since their primary energy source is geothermal. Nuclear energy makes solutions like that more viable. It can also be a source of process heat for industrial applications.

If we went highly nuclear, I think we would have more electric appliances, for the same reason we already have more electric appliances in parts of the country that don't use natural gas as a primary source of energy. In that world, I think climate change would be, maybe not a "minor issue", but certainly less major than it is now. It would be more major than the mitigations we adopted to fix the ozone layer, but aside from transportation (which we are currently electrifying anyway), it would be a lot more straightforward than it is now.

You mean the alternate timeline where whole regions in the US become devastated by nuclear fallout?

Look at this. Look at it as long as you like: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3886475,30.0983731,1302m/dat...

https://www.satimagingcorp.com/gallery/worldview-2/worldview...

Of course, noooo, can't happen to us. Our nuclear plants and waste disposal facilities are totally safe!

Oops

https://web.archive.org/web/20200118022609/https://www.abqjo...

Chernobyl exclusion zone: 1,004 mi²

Fukushima exclusion zone: 1,600 mi²

I can't seem to find great numbers of how much land we expect to lose to climate change, I expect it will be quite large.

I'm personally pro nuclear, but it's pretty clear we were building fairly dangerous plants back when Chernobyl & Fukushima were built. I still don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the world would be worse or better if we had built many of them in the US.

The Fukushima incident shouldn't really be compared with the Chernobyl incident. Chernobyl was very preventable. As for Fukushima, the earthquake science didn't realize that such a quake was possible in the region until pretty close to the event happening, meaning little time to act in it. While people will point out early reports and hypothesis, that's not how science works. We need to peer review. The science has come a long way since then (specifically from computational modeling), but that's different from building reactors with the potential to explode (something the west didn't do) and pushing it's bounds (even if we didn't know about xenon spiking at the time).

Chernobyl NPP wasn't really dangerous design if run by competent people, many of those kind of NPP reactors are still working decades without a major incident. It was a mistake of the chief of the shift to proceed with unsafe test caused by the failure of the Soviet political system to maintain proper level of understanding and safety in the NPP. The personnel did not have the correct mental model of the device.

Fukushima was a bad plant because they built it in a tsunami zone. Otherwise its design isn't dangerous either. But it got destroyed by unexpected tsunami. People should have expected the tsunami can happen and not build the plant there. People were stupid, NPP design would be fine if built far from tsunamis.

The US accounts for 18% of global emissions. In fact China and the US together don't account for even half of global emissions, tendency falling. The world is a little bit larger than those two players, even if not reflected in US discourse.

I am curious what would be the number if you take into account that good chunk of the world is servicing US and Europe. Basically the developed countries outsourced the pollution.

Yeah I wish we had gone more into nuclear power. Oh well. We’ll just pay through the teeth for power in the future.

In this alternate reality, why didn't the entrenched fossil fuel interests delay it as they delayed, in this reality, any attempt to introduce pollution controls, banish lead from gas, efficiency mandates, recycling, renewables, trains, sensible city design and belief in science generally (all widely accepted to have happened) and also nuclear (the world seems split on whether to blame the same fossil fuel groups for this, or, and I feel this is where you were heading, those damn hippies and environmentalists who, coincidentally I'm sure, have been under attack for decades from the very same groups).

Oceans rose 400 feet in past 20,000 year. We have been exiting an ice age.

Climate change will continue regardless of people. Only possible change is the rate.

Of course it will reverse course eventually and the ice sheets will be back.

> Climate change will continue regardless of people. Only possible change is the rate.

The rate is the problem. No one is proposing massive, economy remaking, changes because of the planets nature ebb and flow. It's because the rate of warming we are causing is absolutely terrifying when you compare it to what would be expected naturally.

> Of course it will reverse course eventually and the ice sheets will be back.

And you're evidence of this is...? I don't see where you'd get it from considering current trends are so ridiculously out of whack from the natural record there isn't any analogue to compare.

Not really: nuclear only impacts electricity production, which only covers 25% of greenhouse emissions in the US [1]. So even if that went to zero, it would be a huge help, but there's still 3/4 more to improve on.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

100% is too optimistic, yes.

25% is too pessimistic, though. If you have universal nuclear power, EVs don't ever have to charge from coal plants, so you've got a direct path to attacking the transportation 25%. Gas heating and cooking have electric alternatives, so you have a direct path to attacking that 25%. As for industry, I suspect a very decent fraction of its 25% consumes energy (and, therefore, could be readily substituted for electric) rather than hydrocarbons.

In any case, the many gigatons of CO2 we put into the atmosphere by killing nuclear are completely indefensible.

> In any case, the many gigatons of CO2 we put into the atmosphere by killing nuclear are completely indefensible.

I cannot defend that. Big Oil is tough competitor.

Agreed. I actually think China might be able to lead on climate in a matter of decades even though they aren’t on a good trajectory. They don’t have to worry about anti-nuclear activists. Also, a dictatorship does have the benefit of not needing to wrangle so many people to make a decision like this.

This also means that they lack crucial self corrective capacity should something go wrong - their environmental track record is ugly, and that's just what is known.

Dictatorships can cover things up, and with something that has potentially global consequences like nuclear, it's better to have a transparent, cooperative collective decision, not a paranoid "yes or death" regime mandating that everything is fine.

I'm not advocating for dictatorships, I'm saying that the unilateral decision making authority can actually work out under the right conditions.

Yes, China's environmental track record is ugly, but China also tends to undercommit and overdeliver. If Xi Jinping's administration wants China to be overwhelmingly nuclear by 2050, it can probably get it done. Moreover, it's probably a good move for China--they'll be able to meet emissions targets while having abundant energy to cement their position as the world's manufacturer while the west is fucking around with unreliable renewable energy. Not only will Chinese goods be cheaper, but doing business with China will actually help western countries reduce their carbon footprints.

Our failure to appropriately invest in nuclear will accelerate China's rise to global dominance.

that's fine, our new trillion+ infrastructure bill will enable the government to extend 25mbps broadband to a dozen rural schools, repave approximately four miles of roads, six miles of new sidewalks, and another lease on life for Califorinia HSR so they can finally bring rail to Turlock

bridges are out, that would have required another two trillion

I feel you.

The mainstream approach to industrial policy and infrastructure investment in the US is so embarrassing. It's painfully obvious that the US could sink 10s of trillions into infrastructure without over-investing. And infrastructure is almost always net-positive, meaning it pays for itself.

We can literally just print money to do this and the economy will _improve_.

> Uranium race

Are you sure it's not a "Plutonium race?"

China is the nation with the fastest growing nuclear arsenal today.

China should reduce their stockpile to 1/3rd of US's.

I see what you did there :p

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