But there are all kinds of transportation devices using hydrogen in production today.
Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out.
I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear.
Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2]
Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium.
There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3]
[1] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/fi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
[3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it.
"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
"In 2019 the US EIA revised the levelized cost of electricity from new advanced nuclear power plants going online in 2023 to be $0.0775/kWh before government subsidies, using a regulated industry 4.3% cost of capital (WACC - pre-tax 6.6%) over a 30-year cost recovery period" [old 2, sourced from new 1]
The response to you was a separate opinion on the role of government in the energy sector. After all, we've put trillions of subsidies into fossil fuels the least we could do is put money into something that solves problems instead of creating new ones. I also said I don't care whether it's public or private funds that are used to construct it.
Really nothing at that scale is built without subsidies, but the 7.7c/kWh rate was before subsidies.
Did I miss something? I thought I answered your question with that figure and its origin, it sounds like exactly what you wanted to know. I don't know which precise power plants they included but it's probably in [1].
[edit] I guess it's weird that we're so stuck on this one specific technology. What's the un-subsidized cost of oil power when the price of oil is set by OPEC, externalities aren't factored in, and every time it goes up we unload the Strategic Oil Reserve? How do you price in drilling in ANWR?
Coal, I mean, it's all unpriced externalities - death, environmental toll.
Solar 90% of the panels come from China, how much does the PRC subsidize the plants and materials that go into making the panels for their own geopolitical goals? Rare earths for wind? They all come from China too. Lithium for storage?
My question is sort of more "can anyone name any utility scale power project of any type that was built by a private entity without government subsidies of any sort? Why would they do that if they didn't have to? What does that even mean? And really, does that even matter?"
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
That's not a technical issue though.
Cost efficiency of nuclear energy has actually declined over time...which, unless science is devolving, should tell you something hinky is happening.
Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong. The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disable them if a false positive happens even once and costs them money.
For this reason nuclear has a LOT of regulation and red tape. It has far more than any other kind of energy, because even though the risk of accident is low the outcome of an accident is worse than any other kind of energy except hydro. Hydro has fewer things that can go wrong that are cheaper to check however, so regulations there tend to not be as expensive.
That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail.
The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough to run, but it isn't.
Also I should mention, part of what makes them passively safe is there is a plug at the bottom that melts if the reactor overheats. This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
Let me introduce you to the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment[1].
What you probably meant is that none have been built commercially. That is true, but again as I mentioned, not because of their technical drawbacks but because of politics. In fact, the inventor of the light water reactor, Alvin Weinberg[2], was a strong proponent of the molten salt reactor over his own invention. So strong that he fired was from ORNL because he was claiming that light water reactors are inherently unsafe and that MSR is a better design.
Nixon ultimately sacked him because he (Nixon) chose to support LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) because it was being built in California, and in return he got political support that he needed. MSR ultimately lost due to pork-barrelling.
> This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
I mean you're shifting goalposts here. The "operator" has a specific meaning - someone controlling the reactor from the control room. They don't have access to the freeze plug during normal reactor operation.
But even if they did do what you're suggesting, the pressures inside the MSR are so low (on the order of couple of bars) that the damage would be quite limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.
By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor.
Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude.
> Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities with coal (as well as some obviously differences).
But this thread isn't about coal vs nuclear.
Frankly, if you don't actually see the difference between the relative importance of superconductors vs copper wire and nuclear vs coal then I really don't think I have anything to say that will interest you. Suffice to say that nuclear didn't change the world all that much (except in a weapons sense) but superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Even if true I still don't think it would be in time to help us address some of the more urgent problems we are facing. Neither does nuclear. And come to think of it: if this tech is real (big if) then it will actually probably cause a revolution in nuclear as well because it would allow for nuclear power to be transmitted the world over without the non-proliferation headaches associated with shipping reactors to various countries. It wouldn't solve the waste problem (though there are some interesting reactor designs now) and it won't happen overnight but it would make a difference.
Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?
They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.
Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy).
You need an energy source to make hydrogen (eg out of water, or you make it via fossil fuels etc). When you use up the hydrogen, you get some energy back out. A lot less energy, to be honest.
So it's equivalent to a battery. Not to an energy source.