Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

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It’s interesting that advanced geothermal energy is mentioned first in that sentence.

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 That’s an outdated idea that relies on the assumption that we don’t decarbonise transportation and industry.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)

Cheap geothermal seems like tremendously easier problem to solve than cold fusion, I wish that more effort was put into it.

Cold fusion is perpetual motion.

Geothermal is not sexy. It's incredibly boring.

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".

Especially because cold fusion doesn't exist.

Geothermal at least has the advantage of actually existing.

> And you won’t have the regulatory hurdles of nuclear energy.

Good joke.

I lived near a major geothermal plant in Hawaii. Trust me, there is nothing that crunchy NIMBY's can't justify obstructing.

Without technological refinement, solar wind battery will probably drop 1/3 on economies of scale.

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

> Regardless. Nuclear is dead.

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?

> "clean/green energy shill"

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.

> While Germany has been able to cut dependence on Russian gas

Wasn't that by using coal plants?

No, it was by importing liquefied natural gas. You can't convert the myriad applications of gas to electricity in a matter of months.

The weird thing about those people is that they probably are self-professed conservative pro-economics rationalists. And yet nuclear has absolutely no economic argument right now and hasn't really for a decade.

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

Western construction business is incapable of delivering what they promise. They build something that resembles it, which is not good enough for nuclear reactors. The inspectors see something that does not match the specs and is full of of flaws, and they tell the construction company to dismantle it and try again. That keeps repeating, the budget runs over, and the construction takes decades to finish.

I've read once that the cost of building nuclear plants is logarithmic in time, as cost of fuels and especially regulations increase at that rate.

Electricity production is only about half of carbon emissions. 100% nuclear electricity would make a significant dent, but climate change would still persist.

Is it even half? I expected way less.

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.

Well what if we had committed to solar and wind in the 1950s as opposed to the 1990s?

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

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