No startup is going to do didly-squat about the climate. If you want to reduce CO2 you will need nation-state commitment to nuclear power. Nothing else matters.
That’s why my startup is working on catalysis models, so that we can get some catalysts to dramatically decrease the energy requirements of these enormous industrial processes. Also things like green chemistry (another project we are working on) is going to remove the need for a petroleum based chemical and replace it with an organic one that comes out of discarded orange peels.
Yep sure, I’m not going to have a nation-state level of impact, but the discovery of the right catalyst can often change entire industries.
So I’m trying as hard as I can, every day, to push towards a sustainable future, if enough people do it, we might be able to start to move the needle
Chemistry is an enormous field too, you would have to concentrate on a much smaller section, I have been self studying for about 8 years now, (+ I have 20 years software development experience) and I think I'm getting to the point where I have complete understanding of the current SOTA and am pushing at the boundaries -- most of the ideas I am implementing are coming out in papers weeks or months later, so I feel like I'm at the edge.
Self study requires an enormous amount of discipline though, which is partially why universities exist - because most people do not have the discipline to stick at something for 3-8 years, and I am doing it 7 days a week, almost every day of the year - because I just love this stuff, it's not tiring, it's exhilarating!
> Nothing else matters
I assume you're writing this as hyperbole, but for readers who may not realize, this is definitely not true. Even if the entire grid was nuclear, there are still lots of other greenhouse emitting sources that need to be decarbonized. For example, building materials (like concrete) and livestock emissions account for ~10% of emissions alone [1]. Not to mention that many sources of transportation (16.2% of emissions) are currently not capable of running on just electricity (i.e. aviation) and need technology innovation. This problem is too complicated to be fixed by one single thing.
I think OP is correct that we have to get behind nuclear in a big way. A way that we haven’t even started going down. You’re also correct that it’s not sufficient.
However. If you have a lot of nuclear capacity (and I’m talking a massive overbuild in capacity), suddenly spending gobs of it on CO2 recapture isn’t a big deal. That’s probably why OP is saying nuclear at this point is the only viable path forward. Because if you want to do recapture at scale (and you have to go try to even try to arrest the growth), nothing other than nuclear can provide the capacity needed.
- we dont have enough trained staff to build and operate them
- it takes 5-10years to build one
- we dont have infrastructure to supply them all with fuel and dispose waste (even new ones that can run on previous waste MSR)
- we are too divided as a spiecies and too occupied with worthless disputes (are you pink or blue? Yada yada)
Ppl at the top realized that they cannot stop changes, so instead are preparing for alternatives. We cannot stop it nor reverse, so all we can do is adapt.
There is not much place left to run to, so better get trained now to defend yourself and your family.
Ps. Yes, millions if not billions of ppl will die. Top does not care. It wont be them.
Ps2. To recapture CO2 we have all energy we need provided by sun. All we need is to reforrest half of the land globe.
How about this. It’s ok to declare nuclear a failure once we actually make a serious attempt to do it in the first place.
The best time to focus on developing already invented renewable technology was over a decade before the first fission reactor. The second best time is now.
Nuclear has had trillions of public money and countless lifetimes of research spent on it. And cost trillions more in externalities. A tiny fraction of that investment that finally started getting spent in earnest in 2010 has overtaken 70 years of nuclear construction with the buildout mostly happening in the last five years.
It's not "too hard, don't do it" it's "stop trying to hold back the thing that's working to chase a failed dream".
Renewables like solar and wind don’t work at grid scale to supplant base load provided by fossil fuels without batteries. Regardless of the details, batteries have only just started to be able to be used for that, primarily due to smartphones and now electric cars increasing demand. You were never going to get there faster. And batteries, still, have terrible displacing base load because they’re not energy dense compared with fossil fuels. Oh, and batteries are NOT renewable, requiring strip mining precious metals that will get more and more expensive as easily accessible resources are depleted.
I have no problem with renewables and we SHOULD be investing in it. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear can turn generation on / off pretty quickly without issue. So the more renewables are able to provide, the less we run the plants (it changes the unit economics of course, but we should be ok running nuclear at a loss, and yet we insist it must be profitable). But we should be honest about the reality and the consequences of going down the route of renewables without nuclear. Battery technology is great and improvements go faster than nuclear. That’s for sure. But
a) it’s still veeeeery early days for grid scale batteries
b) batteries are tiny bombs with potential for runaway chemical reactions. As density increases and larger battery installations are made, those are essentially massive bombs and fire risks. I’m not sure that’s less risky vs nuclear unless it’s in the middle of nowhere. I would personally feel more comfortable living to a nuclear plant than a massive battery (eg look at why fly wheels aren’t used even though they have insanely better density than lithium ion and as battery density increases, I suspect you’ll just approach flywheel behavior). Radioactive materials by comparison are more stable outside the reactor.
Look. I don’t disagree that nuclear had challenges to handle. However, to me they seem solvable because necessity is the mother of invention and we know that nuclear can meet all the every needs of earth many many times over. That seems harder with batteries because it starts way further back and requires meaningful R&D advances to make renewables viable to maybe take on current energy needs.
And your FUD about cAn'T mEeT bAsElOaD is just false. Even with just existing hydro most countries can meet the overwhelming majority od demand https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Finally your point about meeting the world's needs many times over is also blatantly wrong. Existing designs run out of fuel almost immediately at a few TW, and the more burner reactors you build the longer your fictional breeder fleet takes to start.
For example, take a model of
aX + bY + cZ = m
X,Y,Z are known values a,b,c are parameters
A parameter is usually selected as a mean value of a range of potential values, a statistical distribution. So the parameters form an N dimensional space representing their ranges. In the given example it is three dimensional.
When the parameter ranges are not well known the area of the N dimensional parameter space increases because a weak estimator requires a higher confidence interval than a strong one.
So the question in complex modeling, and climate modeling is highly complex, is how close is the parameterization selected to the real parameters?
Wide parameter spaces across high dimensions are really fragile because the space is so wide. Good models account for this by spanning the parameter space, i.e. taking all the combinations at intervals and running the models multiple times.
The problem is, climate models are so big, and and have so many parameters that you cannot calculate them all on a human lifespan timescale.
If we are in a worst case scenario with climate change then we should be thinking 100% in terms of mitigations. More green and sustainable pathways make more sense with longer timelines.
Under any condition it does not look like Russia, India, and China are willing to cut their carbon profile in the future which means we really should be focused on mitigation and sensible sustainability projects.
Modeling is a very useful and valuable tool but it's easily misused and manipulated, and policy decision makers generally do not understand it's frailties.
As for BRI related issues this is good: https://thecradle.co/Article/Columns/20037
If you listen to what the BRICS+ nations are discussing it's not COP and IPCC topics. There is a lot of dependence on petroleum both as an energy source and a revenue generator. They show no evidence of movement on zero carbon absent free money from the west.
Afaiu, the only option is to reduce the quantity of energy the Sun sends towards us by 3%.
Don't know how, btw.
Massive volcanic eruption.
(Joking, but I do wonder what effect such an event would have, or more likely CO2 would become the least of our worries)
For example: https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi...
> Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined. This latter claim was wrong, [...]
Yeah, I'm not a climate change skeptic but I've basically become skeptical of any claim I read about it now.
One of these days I'll actually read the IPCC report so I can hopefully sift through the claims myself.
> Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. [...]
> There is also a highly unequal distribution of land use between livestock and crops for human consumption. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.
[1] https://bze.org.au/research_release/rethinking-cement/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
We’ve been waiting decades to replace all the coal power plants.
30 years of “it takes too long to build nuclear power plants” and “solar is almost ready” and now we’ve got what looks like an unavoidable problem.
Oh wow, what an amazing coincidence that the only thing that will work is directly tied to keeping the specific people in power and universally subscribing to their tax plan.
The devil is in the details
[0] - https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/14440088233506037...
Not if you’re a for-profit VC firm looking to invest in an area with changing regulation, which could lead to trillions of dollars of economic opportunity.
Once we have these two, full electrification become possible