Working with utilities to create a new model for clean energy
blog.google
blog.google
One hit - I'm actually floored it made it into the article.
So the denialists have caught in the next best thing: nuclear power.
Invest in nuclear power today and see another 2-3 decades of unabated fossil fuel use.
It also seems to me that if there were sufficient political willpower that improvements could be made here. It’s a bit like how anti-solar folks complain about the massive cost while ignoring that it is possible to improve costs.
1: http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle...
that's 11000 potential pairs per year x 10 years = 110000 pairs = 2200000 MW = 2200 GW. total US usage is 4 trillion kWh for 2022 [4], which is 456 GW averaged over the whole year.
so in the 10 years that it takes to build 85% of nuclear reactors, the oil/gas industry could drill enough geothermal wells to satisfy 4x the electricity requirements of the entire US.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/965763/number-of-oil-and...
[2] https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-breaks-ground-on-the-wo...
[3] presentation in Denver May 2024 by fervo completion engineer said 40 total wells
[4] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
Even getting a finished reactor in the west is a good project. Most have either been cancelled or never progressed past the investment decision.
Through all of nuclear powers history we have seen negative learning.
The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
The following video puts nuclear electricity prices up at just under 100 USD/MWh for those who must have power.
I honestly think geothermal is likely to be far more important than nuclear within a decade or so. If it can be shown that advanced geothermal can be done at a reasonable cost, you’ll likely get both the political power and engineering expertise of the oil and gas sector on board which will accelerate the pace of transition to clean energy faster than anything we’ve seen. And you won’t have the regulatory hurdles of nuclear energy.
The big question is if Quaise can demonstrate that they can actually “drill” several kilometres down at a reasonable cost. Even without that I think horizontal drilling will unlock many promising projects.
Regardless. Nuclear is dead. I’d encourage watching Tony Sebas presentations on renewable energy. Not many people think about what happens if renewable energy and battery tech continues to improve at its current pace. There’s basically very little chance that any other technology will be competitive. And no. We don’t need “base load”. That’s an outdated idea that relies on the assumption that we don’t decarbonise transportation and industry. You can’t drive your car with a nuclear reactor.
(I actually love nuclear energy. The physics is super interesting. But I don’t see how it could be relevant. Unless Helion Energy’s fusion reactor pans out. Not counting space of course. Can’t do advanced deep space projects without nuclear energy)
I personally also think we should put a lot more effort into geothermal. Yet I've watched two orders of magnitude more videos on nuclear fission and fusions on YouTube. "Just drill deep and do it fast and cheap" is not as interesting as "if we can just melt and contain molten salts and diffuse the nuclear fuel into that salt we can do fission really efficiently and safely and here's a 100 interesting engineering challenges related to that".
Geothermal at least has the advantage of actually existing.
Whenever I hear nuclear is dead "clean/green energy shill" is the word that comes to mind.
If the world mostly the US and other developed countries had committed to nuclear the way the French did after the oil shock of the 70s would we be facing that much "global warming" today?
You have the Western countries complaining that it takes 15-30 years for a nuclear power station to come online when the Koreans and the Japanese have it down to 5 years. Why the difference?
From a purely technical point of view, I would personally love if the world built more nuclear energy if it made sense. Yet I routinely experience being called a shilled, or stupid online, for even daring to think that maybe nuclear doesn't make sense anymore.
The love for nuclear energy in social media isn't as much based on pure rational thought as its proponents would like to think. It's a super interesting and sexy technology with lots of incredibly fascinating engineering challenges.. and because of that the proponents are rationalizing why nuclear is the solution. That's my impression anyway. I say that because I sense those feelings within me myself. I WANT to believe nuclear is the solution. But if you look at the full picture, it's hard to see how it ever could be.
Just because France had some success building lots of nuclear when labor was super cheap and there was lots of synergies with nuclear weapons programs, doesn't automatically mean that nuclear makes sense in the 21st century.
France has recently had to import energy from Germany and is now aiming for at least 50% renewable energy. While Germany has been able to cut dependence on Russian gas, the Russian nuclear energy has been exempted from EU sanctions. And France's supplies of uranium from former African colonies is under threat.
> when the Koreans
Where you've had scandals around faking certificates related to nuclear energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
"Just do it" isn't a viable model for nuclear energy anymore. It has to be done 100% right.
I might agree it's not entirely rational. But even if you're an avid believer in nuclear energy you should absolutely support doing it 100% right every time.. because even one more disaster will make people lose faith in nuclear energy for another decade or three.
I'm sorry but people just don't think rationally when it comes to nuclear energy. Maybe Fukushima didn't kill anyone, but people would rather die a very slow death by coal than having to suddenly and unpredictably have to leave their home and whole life behind due to a nuclear disaster. It might not be rational. But if you're hoping that humans will suddenly become 100% rational you're in for disappointment.
Wasn't that by using coal plants?
There's this inertia that the pro-nuclear people have that they think that people oppose a nuclear just being these these Fringe green nutsos.
In reality, advocation of nuclear power is The realm of the rapid wackos and zealots. There simply isn't an economic rational case that's supported for 10 years now
Anyway it's absurd how meat industry gets away with their share of pollution.
I guess selling people to eat less beef is tougher than changing their power unit in the car.
Certainly wind would have been viable at its current price points 40 years earlier than we have it now.
I do think there does exist a world where nuclear power is competitive, but I don't think it involved solid fuel rods and pressurized water and gigantic domes. There probably is a MSR design out there that could probably compete but we would have had to have started funding that back in the '60s and '70s.
We went solid fuel rod in the '60s and that kind of was it. I don't think solid fuel rod can be competitive no matter what regulatory environment
Good joke.
I lived near a major geothermal plant in Hawaii. Trust me, there is nothing that crunchy NIMBY's can't justify obstructing.
Solar still has perovskites, batteries have solid state and sulfur techs still to go
I think in ten years all three of those are at least 50% cheaper adjusted for inflation
You are right, nothing else is competitive. The other forms are just inertia and niche.
I do think nuclear cannbe competitive in the right circumstances, but it won't be solid fuel rod and huge concrete dome. It'll be a ground up design with stabilized solar wind prices as a reference.
I base that only on the huge number of zeros in energy density
We just broke ground on America's first next-gen nuclear facility
Google Search will then use hydropower to index this LLM spam into our search engine.
Next, our wind powered Display Ads network turns visits to these sites into positive revenue.
We have achieved a purely self sustaining business run 100% on renewables.
A first for Google, and a first for the industry.
But there’s more.
Without the need to feed, house, and support human content generators we are making even bigger cuts to our impact on the planet.
By close of 2025 we aim to eliminate thousands of jobs, leading to huge carbon savings across the board.
Google is the most vulnerable of the Mag 7 stocks.
Edit - karma losing posts should still be spelled correctly.
But which groups do you think have a track record that qualifies them to take on this kind of work?
'generase' is one of the weirder typos I've seen