Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Three things seem true to me.

1) The debate around climate change is the worst piece of rhetorical garbage that has ever been foisted on mankind in the last couple of decades. Look at the terms in this essay, which is admittedly a more balanced judgment. We have environmentalists and anti-environmentalists. Who that breathes does not like breathing? Are there folks who wish to poison themselves? Please, spare me the "rich folks are out to destroy the planet on the backs of the poor" argument. Everybody is an environmentalist, at least when it comes to being a living human. Political groups which have no logical opponents do not add productively to the public discourse.

2) The more energy and freedom poor people have, the better we all are. Poor workers with cars can drive to find jobs. Poor people without water can use energy to extract water from deep in the ground, the air, or the ocean. Poor people with cheap energy can rebuild houses, move, go to school, live a better life. More freedom and cheaper power to as many poor people as possible.

3) Intelligent carbon-based creatures that exist in dry areas of the habitable zone of solar systems will evolve into their intelligence based on the backs of millions of years of built up hydrocarbons. These creatures will release this energy by burning -- this is as natural as a fish swimming in the ocean. Is such a release part of The Great Filter? Or is such a release part of the inevitable journey from the swamp to the sky? I don't think we have enough evidence to say one way or another. I am concerned by those who feel otherwise.

I think worst-case scenarios around climate change emphasize the need to productively develop all of mankind as quickly as possible. That probably means hundreds of new nuclear reactors being built. Worldwide. I see no effort anywhere for that to happen. Instead I see various proposals that always end up with expensive energy for poor people. This is only going to make the problem worse. We are going to take away the tools that poor people and nations need to grow capabilities to deal with things when they change. And while we're doing it, we're going to rob them and their children of a better future. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.

> I think worst-case scenarios around climate change emphasize the need to productively develop all of mankind as quickly as possible. That probably means hundreds of new nuclear reactors being built. Worldwide. I see no effort anywhere for that to happen. Instead I see various proposals that always end up with expensive energy for poor people. This is only going to make the problem worse. We are going to take away the tools that poor people and nations need to grow capabilities to deal with things when they change. And while we're doing it, we're going to rob them and their children of a better future. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.

I really have to disagree with you. After reading about the decline in nuclear power across the world, the inability to get traction on Thorium-based LFTRs, and so forth, nuclear is not the answer. I mean, it could be if we as a species didn't suck so terribly at managing it as an energy source. We are not that species yet (note we still keep a coal-fired generation plant operating near Congress in DC due to politics).

If you'd like to debate this in depth, check my profile; my email is there. The Earth Policy Institute (holla Lester Brown) has shown how quickly China is bringing online solar and wind generation resources that already outpace their nuclear generation capacity. Bloomberg reported Friday that the US is on track to add an additional 35 percent of solar capacity this year alone.

Nuclear plants, coal plants, all of these central generation facilities all require massive capital outlays, they require corporations to manage them, staff to run. Solar and wind require none of these (except utility-scale, there be a bit more work required there).

It's simple, so very simple! We should be build solar and wind flat out as fast as possible, selling it to those who can afford it and giving it away to those who can't.

Solar Electric Light Fund http://self.org/

"SELF's mission is to design and implement solar energy solutions to assist the 1.5 billion people living in energy poverty with their economic, educational, health care and agricultural development."

Wind vs Nuclear in China: http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2014/highlights4...

Bloomberg Article I mention: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/solar-as-f...

Deutsche Bank Predicts Grid Parity Of Solar Across All Fifty States in 2016: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/29/solar-grid-parity-us-sta...

We might be at the point today where solar and wind are more economically efficient than nuclear. That doesn't erase the tremendous damage that "environmentalist" groups have done by spouting FUD about nuclear power for decades, the primary result of which has been to keep us on coal.

Maybe this is just my Silicon Valley-centric, rarefied group, but I have genuinely never met a rabid environmentalist hell-bent on shutting down nuclear power.

I know many environmentalists, including career activists. The worst they could be accused of is not making nuclear power their number one priority. But, abstractly at least, they all support increased nuclear power in principle.

I know many people against nuclear power. They, however, don't have many political or scientific beliefs, and their intelligences lie elsewhere than scientific or conceptual thinking. None would identify as green or environmentalist.

The biggest problems with nuclear power seems to be (a) the inertia of leftover regulations and bad vibes from the 60s-80s and (b) nuclear power is really, really expensive and requires a great deal of capital outlay and time to build and even to recover the energy costs of building it. People are also more sensitive to the worst case failure modes of a nuclear plant (which has happened like once in history) than they are to the failure modes of coal power (which are when they function like they're designed to).

Rebuttal:

http://www.sierraclub.org/nuclear-free

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/nuclear...

Sierra Club and Greenpeace are two of the largest and well-funded environmental groups.

I don't disagree, but at this point, its more of a historical footnote now that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear (similar to how Thorium was thrown under the bus in the 50s-70s by staff in the Navy).

Solar and wind with natural gas backup are cheaper than conventional nuclear.

For solar and wind to run civilization without fossil backup, you need a lot of extra infrastructure. A couple years ago, one study looked at what it would take to run a certain section of the U.S. electric grid on 99% wind/solar. They had a computer try 10,000 combinations and picked the cheapest, which was to overproduce energy by a factor of three, and add a little storage. That's not just overcapacity, it's actually producing that much extra energy to make sure you always have enough to meet demand.

On the nuclear side, molten salt reactors and factory-produced modular reactors have the potential to reduce costs quite a bit, if we can get the regulators up to speed.

> On the nuclear side, molten salt reactors and factory-produced modular reactors have the potential to reduce costs quite a bit, if we can get the regulators up to speed.

MSRs, even module, require at least a decade of approval through the NRC. You won't see a new reactor online, modular or not, for at least 15-20 years, by which point solar, wind, and utility scale battery storage will have slaughtered nuclear.

How do you compete against a tech that can be deployed in weeks or months? And that has no licensing time? Nor requires $1-2 billion just to start.

Hence my comment about fixing our regulatory process. Canada for example is much more streamlined, which is why Terrestrial Energy is starting out there.

Let's figure out just how much area we need for solar panels.

The US consumes about 19.05M barrels of oil per day. Each barrel of oil is about 1.6 MWh of power.

So this is 31017210 MWh (3.1 x 10^10 kWh) of power just in oil every day..

The solar constant is 1.36kW/m^2 on average. Solar panels convert solar energy into power with roughly a 14% efficiency or about 190W/m^2 or about 2.2kWh/m^2 in 12hrs.

Taking 3.1 x 10^10 kWh/(2.2kWh/m^2) I get 13 x 10^9 m^2. Converting this to miles gives us about 5240sq miles of solar panels just to get the same amount of energy we consume in oil.

Hopefully I did everything right above.

You're comparing a barrel of oil directly to electricity, a fallacy. Electric vehicles are extremely efficient photon to road compared to combustion vehicles.

"Tank-to-wheel efficiency of conventional Otto cycle car is only 16% as illustrated fellow. Here, Otto cycle engine loss is 72%, standby /idle loss is 10% and drive line loss is 2%. Accessories loss, such as air conditioning unit consumes 2% but for comparison purposes, it was assumed 0%."

That's right. You're losing almost 90% of your available energy to heat. In all practicalities, you use less than 1% of energy available in a barrel of oil to move a car forward.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pu4i-aok/cooldata2/hybridcar/hyb...

"That’s right, an electric car is over four times as efficient at turning energy into motion."

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-whee...

Please see /u/Brackenshire's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676675) regarding land required.

The NREL have done this calculation, it comes out with a total figure of about 0.6% of the US landmass, 50 times less than the land allocated to growing crops. Although that figure includes Alaska, it gives a pretty good idea, and the state by state percentage areas to generate their share of US national electricity demand are also given:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy08osti/42463.pdf

Our failure with nuclear is more of a policy problem than anything inherent to the technology.

There are at least four startups attempting molten salt reactors. In the U.S. they all struggle with the NRC, which has inflexible regulations mandating things that only apply to solid-fueled reactors. We'll need new regulations before those companies can even operate test reactors.

Bill Gates' company Terrapower, which is attempting a fast reactor, has given up on the NRC and is seeking other countries that will let them work.

The U.S. spent thirty years on the Integral Fast Reactor, and according to the lead scientists on the project, they were a year or two from completion and commercial readiness when the Clinton administration shut them down.

Most of these projects, and others with more conventional technology, want to build small modular reactors that could be licensed once and churned out in factories. The NRC isn't set up for this either.

China is indeed rolling out a lot of renewables, but they're also building a fair number of new nuclear plants and have major research programs on several GenIV designs, including fast reactors and molten salt. This is what we should be doing: pulling out the stops and working on every non-carbon energy source we can, because time is short and technology isn't completely predictable.

Solar and wind certainly do well when backed up by natural gas, but running civilization on them is another matter. To overcome their variability you have to add overproduction, storage, long-distance transmission, and smart grid, all of which gets expensive.

Yep, the reason we do not have more nuclear is because environmentalists (perhaps the 100% kind?) have vehemently opposed it.

As far as the story about solar and wind being ready? This is a very easy thing to test: if it's ready, it's ready. You'll be selling them like hotcakes. If it's not ready, it's not -- folks can certainly continue investing, and I wish them the best of luck. But let's go do something right now that we know that works. We could have started with a lot of this next generation nuclear technology a decade or more ago -- and had the support of a big chunk of the people and the commercial energy sector. How far along would we have been now?

We have consistently been more enamored with keeping the troops riled up and having a good political fight than we have with accepting already existing solutions to the problem which aren't as contentious.

I wish solar the best. Wind also. But if we do not understand how we got here, we have little hope of making good strategic decisions and sticking with them.

Some environmentalists, sure, but also the fossil industry, which has provided a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda. Also, the chair of the DOE when it canceled the IFR had deep ties to fossil fuels.

We should certainly deploy as much wind and solar as we can right now. Using fossil as backup is better than using it as primary. But so far it doesn't look like renewables alone are the fastest way to get off fossil fuels entirely. Adding nuclear baseload would make things a lot easier.

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