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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

> The Ritsumeikan study found "circular economy strategies" could halve resource demand or maintain it at 2015 levels.

> Vehicle electrification can be achieved without increasing resource use if a set of circular economy strategies is concurrently and ambitiously implemented."

So a big dig to get the materials in the first place and then fall off once we get enough of the materials out of the ground and good recycling systems in place. As opposed to continuing to go with oil where we will just constantly need more and more and more to burn.

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Metal recycling is critical for both the metal resources themselves and the carbon reduction. Secondary aluminum production is much less carbon intense than primary.

New sorting technologies have been developed which enable fine separation of aluminum alloys. LIBS and XRF backscattering should enable the industry to take a step forward and get low quality Twitch products into higher quality fast and wrought products.

The industry has been slow to adopt these technologies because it’s hard! Sorting is difficult work and sensor based sorting opens up massive decision spaces.

It is definitely hard work, and it is even harder to make the economics work when you don't really have much of an easy to acquire steady source of materials. It is hard to scale when there just aren't the incoming materials yet.

I think we'll see a lot more growth in the recycling of EV batteries once more of this current generation of EVs are actually sent to recycling. They're just not very old yet, so there's not large flows of recyclable materials coming in quite yet.

The first Model 3's came out in 2017. I'd argue EV mass production wasn't really a thing until after that car's release and market acceptance. Not even a decade old yet for those cars, and it took a bit of time for those to really start shipping in volume.

Model Y's only came out in 2019 and took time to be delivered in volume. Mach E's started in 2021. Many of the other big legacy auto makers have really only started to ship decent volumes of EVs in the past few years.

> It is hard to scale when there just aren't the incoming materials yet.

There are a huge number of businesses already doing this today - there is plenty of incoming materials from just old cars alone. The amount of aluminum in this stream will be increasing in the years to come however.

> I think we'll see a lot more growth in the recycling of EV batteries once more of this current generation of EVs are actually sent to recycling. They're just not very old yet, so there's not large flows of recyclable materials coming in quite yet.

Battery recycling is very important, and one of the obvious consequences of EVs becoming more prevalent. Several companies are already tackling this at scale though.

The carbon impact of _aluminum_ recycling is much more significant than battery recycling. That's what I was referring to in my previous comment. LIBS/XRF backscattering are fairly new technologies that enable fine grained sorting of aluminum alloys which should enable much more secondary aluminum to be used for high grade alloys.

We still need to make the electricity.

Here comes the sun!

And the grid is getting greener and greener every year.

An electric car bought today that is powered by a coal plant today will be powered by solar/hydro/wind more and more each year.

A gas car will always run on fossil fuels.

Not necessarily, synthetic fuel is being developed for air transport and could also be used in internal combustion car engines. Not sure anyone is seriously working on it, and I don't know how the economics compare. One advantage would be that we already have the distribution infrastructure in place for liquid motor vehicle fuel. Our electrical infrastructure is going to need significant upgrading at least in places to handle charging if all vehicles are EVs.

An electric car is also more efficient and grid fossil fuels are better than a small ICE.

Still, I’m not really seeing the evidence that the grid is getting all that much greener. There’s a lot of solar capacity installed and yet every year we use more fossil fuels than the year before. It dents the growth a bit but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at replacing fossil fuels.

We need more gen iv fission, not more renewables, to meaningfully displace fossil fuels. And no, it’s not more expensive than solar even today if you add the cost of batteries which everyone seems to ignore when comparing solar/wind to fission. As for hydro, that resource is fully tapped; all the available capacity is fully in use at a significant environmental cost. Geothermal might be a good one but it requires a massive shift in where cities are located which limits its utility (HVDC remains extremely expensive).

Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...

TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.

The point of fission is that all that installed capacity is available 24/7. That isn’t true of wind and solar. So for baseload, fission is the only solution and that’s why China is building them. China fission prices have gone down by the way and it’s likely the world will soon start using their reactors because we let the coal industry kill our nuclear industry.

That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.

The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.

Then why are you here? If nuclear doesn't need subsidies, why aren't you just investing in the next great nuclear project and proving me wrong that way?

Because regulatory burdens have killed the US nuclear industry. That’s why China is 15 years ahead of us and pumping out fission stations at half the time.

Nuclear power needs a serious overhaul of the regulatory framework in the US and that starts with a broader swelling of support to overcome all the misinformed propaganda.

China installed more solar PV and wind generation in the first 9 months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear power stations under construction will provide (already adjusted for capacity factor.)

It's true that China is beating the rest of the world on nuclear construction. It is also unfortunately true that current-gen (non SMR) nuclear doesn't scale the way factory-built solar PV and wind tech does. Again reposting this very illustrative chart: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...

If solar and wind is meeting all the needs, why is China building so much nuclear?

Starting in the late 2000s China began investing in nuclear, renewables and storage all at the same time. The original (optimistic) plan called for nuclear to peak at 18% of their electricity generation by 2060. But that was before the recent breakout expansion of renewables and cost decreases in battery storage. Since then China seems to have pulled back a lot on nuclear [1], coinciding with huge price decreases and deployment surges in solar PV and wind. Even adjusted for capacity factor, new wind+solar are seeing about 60x the installed capacity of nuclear (as of 2023) and that number has been on an upward trend.

[1] "It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW between a new GW scale reactor and a 200 MW small modular nuclear reactor." https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...

> However, teething troubles mean that power grids are still struggling to absorb the huge capacity expansions and it will be a while before the new plants meet viable levels of actual power generation

> China's renewable capacity growth is yet to reflect in electricity supply, with coal still occupying nearly 60% of the country's generation mix

So basically China built a bunch of solar power plants that aren't connected to anything. Given how little transparency there is in China, it's entirely possible the plants were built because the country was generating way more solar panels than was useful globally & thus had to purchase it to prevent an absolute cratering in solar PV price.

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

Oh wait, https://www.economist.com/business/2024/06/17/chinas-giant-s....

> China's giant solar industry is in turmoil. Overcapacity has caused prices—and profits—to tumble

Non paywall, similar sentiment: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-blistering-so...

> The country's solar power expansion is slowing due to tighter curbs on supplying excess power from rooftop solar into the grid and changes in electricity pricing that are denting the economics of new solar projects.

It's really starting to look like 2023 was a fluke and solar projects are running into the headwinds everyone's been saying they will - no grid is set up to switch to solar and the more solar you install the more you destabilize the grid. And since panel prices have dropped so low because of global subsidies to rooftop solar, existing policies around rooftop solar turn into another headwind which slows down growth of grid solar & should see panel prices start to rise back up as people stop installing rooftop solar, pushing solar projects back out of profitability at either end.

In other words, we've kind of hit "peak solar" in the near term and the outlook for grid solar displacing fossil fuels is very cloudy.

Except that China is on pace to exceed 2023 deployment in 2024. They've already installed 45.7GW in the first quarter. You're drawing a lot of inferences from a phrase in one article. They're also installing massive amounts of grid-stabilizing storage: 35.3GW in just Q1 of this year, which exceeds the 22.7GW they installed in all of 2023.

You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are. It's a strange thing to be comforted by; in any case, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to become attached to.

> You seem to be comforted by the idea that China isn't actually deploying renewables at the rate they are

No, I'm concerned that for all the amount of renewables they're deploying, almost none of it is getting connected to the grid and the amount of fossil fuel usage is unaffected by all this solar capacity they've installed. I'd love it if solar actually helped us get the grid to net 0 by 2050. The problem is that right now we're way off track to achieve that goal.

According to https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-battery-storage-ca..., China's expected to install less storage in 2024 not 2023:

> Growth in China's battery storage capacity could slow down in 2024, according to an industry association, as energy storage struggles with low profitability.

Confusingly other sources claim that they installed 10 GW in 2023 so it seems like for all of this concrete reliable numbers may be hard to obtain. Anyway, the point still stands - battery + renewables remains a pricing challenge vs fission and renewables alone cannot supplant the equivalent amount of fossil fuels in the grid due to how complex the grid is & gris are fundamentally not designed for intermittent sources like renewables & the more you install the more unstable & expensive it gets trying to stabilize it.

Thus my concern remains that solar has failed to demonstrate a power to actually displace fossil fuels within the grid reliably at scale whereas nuclear has a demonstrated track record of doing so consistently. I worry that deinvesting in nuclear in favor of renewables is going to continue to pour good money after bad and thus result in a prolonged decarbonization plan. It'll be the irony of ironies when we'll end up buying Chinese nuclear reactors so that we can actually decarbonize our grid.

> wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid

You are offering this as a fact, but the fact is incorrect.

"Analysis: UK electricity from fossil fuels drops to lowest level since 1957": https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-from-fos...

"The CO2 footprint of the EU electricity grid was cut in half, from 501 grams of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour in 1990 to 251 grams in 2022." https://eu.boell.org/en/2024/04/03/100-renewables-way-forwar...

"China’s Carbon Emissions Are Set to Decline Years Earlier Than Expected" https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-carbon-emissions-are-...

China in particular deployed about 217GW of (just) solar PV last year, and they're on track to meet or exceed that this year. https://www.pv-tech.org/chinas-installed-solar-capacity-660g...

Right now everything looks set for continued exponentially-shaped curves on renewables deployment, which will drive coal and eventually the majority of fossil generation out of the grid. None of that is happening in nuclear, unfortunately.

UK is a misleading example since they’re also using 20% less electricity since the 1960s (https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom), probably due to their struggling economy. By comparison the US has increased its consumption by 1.6x. And even UKs data will turn out to be worse if they actually switch to EVs because that’s going to increase demand on the grid.

Yes, solar can supply a lot of daytime power as China has demonstrated. But all that daytime power generation is wasted for nighttime power needs. So overbuilding solar in that way will mean super cheap clean energy during the day and super expensive dirty energy at night (because that dirty energy will no longer have daytime demands). And the dirty power will be dirtier since it’s going to be plants that can spin up quickly instead of the baseload ones that are always on. Think about it logically - if solar was solving all their needs, why is China investing in turbocharging their nuclear industry? Answer: because baseload and a reliable backstop to the grid is super important and valuable and batteries won’t cut it to completely decarbonize the grid.

Renewables are popular because fossil fuel companies don’t find them objectionable - it’s a much gradual off ramp from fossil fuel dependence in the grid than with nuclear. And unlike nuclear, fossil fuels remain in use to handle low energy cases from renewables until batteries magically get good enough for the grid.

And even if an EV is powered by a coal plant, the air pollution is in industrial areas not the residential areas where people live, so there are health benefits regardless of the climate impact.

The sun gives that to us for free.

We need to figure out how to store and transport the electricity.

Batteries might work for storage, they have their own version of moore's law and will continue to get better and cheaper for a while.

Now if only there were a way to bundle that energy storage with a means of transportation...

You realize the irony of replying on a thread about an article saying we’ve grossly underestimated by 3x the amount of battery materials we’ll need? And that’s just for EVs, not grid batteries. Yes, there’s the far out idea of maybe we can use car batteries to do that role but our grid is not designed for it and there’s all sorts of other problems of that.

Fission is a much saner cost effective solution that requires much fewer ancillary changes than renewables would to fully move the grid.

If Fission is so great, go build it. I'm not stopping you. But use your own money or get off the podium.

That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.

If regulation is the problem, why is nuclear most successful in France?

And I've had solar companies in my portfolio for the last decade. They're a great investment.

Because France didn’t over regulate the nuclear industry at the behest of the coal industry like as happened in the US? Or are you making a blanket generalization about France without knowing anything about their government because you’ve associated socialism and regulation and France in your head?

As for solar companies stock prices doing great, how is that relevant at all?

It's relevant because you challenged me to put my money where my mouth is, as I'm challenging you. And I have.

You say you haven't because of onerous regulations and it's true, I associate France with a heavier regulatory burden than most Anglophone countries. If it's the coal lobby that killed Nuclear's profitability in the US, I have two questions:

1) why are you attacking renewables rather than the coal industry? If you think Nuclear could compete on an economic basis with renewables, surely you could make common cause with my side of this debate to properly price fossil energy's negative externalities and let the market sort out the winners once that's achieved.

2) Why not build a nuclear reactor in Mexico and export the power to the US? Or in any of the other low-regulation countries with a neighbor looking to import power? If it's regulations that make nuclear unprofitable, surely nuclear investors could regulation-shop.

1. I’m not attacking renewables. I’m highlighting the failing track record of renewables on the grid failing to displace fossil fuels. They have demonstrated an ability to absorb energy growth and displace fossil fuels within that growth, but the more renewables are installed, fossil fuels remain a requirement to try to keep the grid stable (not just at night time, but during the day too). I have no problem with fossil energy’s externalities getting priced in and we share a goal of getting rid of fossil fuels. I just believe nuclear is the only technology that’s actually demonstrated that for grid energy. You also seem to be pretending like solar isn’t receiving subsidies when it’s receiving significantly more subsidies than nuclear - like estimates are that by 2040 we’ll have pumped in nearly 5T worth of subsidies. Nowhere near fossil fuels but significantly more than nuclear. And also keep in mind that increasing energy prices will also mean that costs across the board rise which will be politically unpopular for taxing fossil fuels more.

2. There’s a few problems with your proposal. Mexico has even less experience than the US building nuclear power and gen IV reactor designs (which is what we should be building) are just exiting into real world plants. Also, Mexico isn’t a nuclear power and it’s permission to build nuclear power plants comes from the US and falls under the US regulatory framework anyway:

> Under the PSAs, each nuclear transaction from the United States to Mexico was an exceptional case to the legal requirements of the Atomic Energy Act. In addition, where the PSA nuclear cooperation required the explicit consent of the IAEA, as well as Washington D.C. and Mexico City

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

I’m not aware of any other low-regulation countries near the US - are you? As for regulation shopping in Europe, again the same problem. The US has exported its nuclear regulatory framework to many Western countries. France is about the only one that managed to evade it and generates a surplus of energy (with no nuclear accidents by the way) that it then exports to its neighbors. This isn’t something nuclear investors can fix - it needs a top-down shift in nuclear policy and pushing politicians in Washington to fix the regulatory requirements. The US used to have the most forward nuclear industry until they killed it in the 80s and it’s taken 40 years for China to buck the worldwide regulations that the US has been using to lock things down due to their concerns about proliferation weakening their advantage they’ve had on force projection.

My EV is charging at the moment. The current energy mix in my state is 24.3% solar, 15.2% wind, 7.4% nuclear. 46.9% of the energy going into my car right now comes from non-carbon sources.

What percentage of non-carbon/renewable energy sources are going into my ICE next time I go to the pump?

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix

This is all massively up from a decade ago. I wonder what percentage of non-carbon sources I'll have for my EV next decade. Do you think the non-carbon energy sources in my ICE will go down in a decade?

does your calculation include the carbon needed to lubricate the wind turbines? how about the carbon in the solar cells, and the carbon that will be needed to dispose of them when they fail?

I'd argue the mix of non-carbon energy going into your car is a lot closer to 7.4% -- just the nuclear. Wind and solar both require industrial processes, materials, and maintenance involving not insignificant amounts of oil.

also: why are you charging your EV in the middle of the day in Texas, in the summer? ERCOT asks people to conserve energy; this guy charges his car. Maybe save your grid strain for the evening?

does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the concrete in the nuclear plants? does your calculation include the carbon needed for mining and refining the uranium in the reactor? does your calculation include the carbon needed for all the plant operators to drive their ICE vehicles to the plant every day? does your calculation include the mining needed for long term storage?

Play enough games and throw no real numbers around and you can argue everything isn't renewable then. Are you really arguing that the lubrication needed for a turbine makes its overall carbon impact the same as natural gas or oil?

Also, good job showing your ignorance of the Texas grid. ERCOT isn't asking people to conserve electricity at the moment buddy. Real-time spot prices are $24.65/MWh. We're nowhere near the committed capacity. There's lots of electricity available. Maybe save your comments for things you actually understand?

Wind turbines don't burn the grease dude.

The amount of harvestable energy from sustainable resources is a few orders of magnitude more than what is/was available from all the oil and gas that ever existed on Earth. The amount of energy that hits the Earth from the sun in one week alone is more than all oil and gas reserves on Earth combined. Twice over.

We'll be fine.

Harvesting that efficiently is still a problem and requires comparatively large tracts of land. More importantly time shifting that daytime solar is a huge problem and you can’t handwave it away; this article is talking about how we’ve grossly underestimated the amount of resources needed for vehicle EV while grid batteries would shift that even more. We might get lucky with a totally new battery chemistry, but battery chemistry moves relatively slowly.

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