A world on 100% renewable energy. Is it feasible using the following method :

In My Humble Opinion
81

I don’t think there is a one size that fits all. In some cases, a huge power plant makes the most sense. In others, several distributed plants (or wind turbines or whatever) makes more sense.

With nuclear, one of the big concerns is physical security, so that’s why they generally build them big (or build several reactors in close proximity), so they can guard them better. Also, especially in the US, we have this issue with waste, so having a large plant with large grounds means we can kick to waste can down the road some more and just store the stuff in situ, at the reactor site. Presumably we’ll keep doing this until we just entomb the stuff on site when we decommission the things, then leave it to later generations to figure out what to do.

82

TA: @Trinopus

The usual approach to “scale up” with nuclear is scaling out. Going from one-offs designed from scratch & built like buildings to production line tech more like manufacturing airliners or naval ships of a class. IOW: design once, build n times for values of n in the low hundreds to low thousands.

What gets scaled up (out really) in that scenario is all the upstream provision of specialized parts & materials.

83

The reason nuclear is dead…and I’m adamant about that…is more a detail you’re not factoring in, XT.

It’s more a mental image and less about numbers. Doesn’t make me less right. See, what I see, which I know for a fact will work, is the use of machine learning to optimize to the last details the assembly and mass production of products like solar panels, inverters, and batteries. It’s being used at all levels - from robotic mining equipment, to the production of the sub-components, to the actual module production, to fully assembled, automated systems that are truly plug and play. (they come prepackaged, ready to go, won’t energize the electrical contactors between modules until they are properly plugged together, have the cleaning robot built in, are self diagnosing…)

And then robotic trucks actually deliver them, robotic arms actually install them, and done. Scaling to 10,000 square miles of panels becomes a simple math exercise and a project mostly supervised by people in front of spreadsheets.

You can’t do this with nuclear. You can’t aggressively cost-optimize because if you shave some metal off a part, you can’t prove it didn’t need that metal without running it in a real plant for thousands of hours. You can’t rely on robots to do all the work without supervision because of the liability. A manufacturer in the non “will irradiate thousands of square miles if it fails” industry can take lots of risks, use the latest beta algorithms to eke out more performance, try running plants without any workers at all to supervise, and so on. Worst case scenario is some extra warranty claims. You can’t install a new automated supervisor to oversee a nuclear plant because the regulators won’t let you…even if is far more reliable than humans in testing.

As a side note, you also can’t explore for oil this easily. One of the reasons why the manufacturing environment is so tractable for using the latest algorithms is because it’s predictable and mostly causal. Oil rigs are vastly more complex, dirty, and chaotic.

So I know where this is going. I know we’re going to go to mass clean power deployment not because we’re good people, but because it actually is cheaper. And the reason it’s cheaper is because this kind of thing is more tractable to megascale automation.

84

440 is too small. Most modern power stations comprise multiple reactors. IIRC there were about 130 domestic power station reactors built in the US for only about 90 stations. Some 30 reactors have been decommissioned. And that doesn’t include military reactors, which I know nothing about. But DOE has operated another hundred. Plus about 50 at universities. And that’s just in the US.

But of course then it’s only fair to include meltdowns at the other reactors.

85

On last sentence I totally agree. It would be easy money if you bet on average people’s (or even expert) simply laid out solutions to complex issues like ending up wrong.

Your solution though (while I agree with it to some extent) only partly sidesteps the issue. It lets the market do what it can do much better than popular or expert opinion about complex economic solutions. However the market (as I guess you agree) can’t tell you what the right level of the carbon tax is. If the threat of climate change is overblown or understated, a too high/low tax is still attaching value to more expensive ways of generating and using energy that are in fact just more expensive, or still undervaluing the externalities of higher carbon solutions. Likewise to the extent the threat is real but adaptation or direct climate engineering are cheaper solutions than emission reduction. Which of course all depends how much reduction, how much threat, how feasible is adaptation and/or direct climate engineering, which are really complicated questions themselves.

A carbon tax is politically self regulating in the sense that if it’s really high (though perhaps still actually not high enough to meet a stated emission goal), the public won’t go along with it. There might be a bit more room in the kinds of approaches many countries have used of more complicated subsidies and mandates which hide the real costs from the public, for a while, but eventually if they are high enough people catch on and resist (see Germany for example).

So market mechanisms are preferable for aspects of the problem. People’s actual willingness to invest in nuclear plants for example is a much better gauge of the method’s feasibility than people with no money directly at stake saying nuclear ‘needs to be part of the mix’. IMO the time is past when there’s any likelihood nuclear will be a much more significant part in places where it already is. Like the US, miracle IMO if nuclear held onto to its existing share of energy production, even that is highly unlikely.

86

Again, you assume incorrectly. I actually agree with you…the reasons we won’t expand nuclear are political, not technical. And the reasons it won’t be much more than the current 11% world wide (20% and dropping in the US) are equally political, though the Chinese are building a large percentage of those 60 new plants and plan to double their current build plans over the next decade…if you believe them, that is, which in this case I do.

I get your concept of mass production and automation. I’m not arguing that you couldn’t do this sort of thing. You could, with a massive effort, build the automation plants to build a shit ton of solar panels. I concede this (though, as I said, I never argued you couldn’t do this). But there is a lot more to this than just building a shit ton of panels, and building the plants and the automation and the logistics and the upstream feeder production and the new distribution grid and…and…and…

Sure, if you were god king of the Earth you could order all of this and if you had enough people with guns backing you then you could force it to happen, regardless of the costs. But you’d destroy your economy and bankrupt the world to do something that you don’t need to do in order to bring the world to 100% solar, which it doesn’t need to be at. And doing so you’d cause a lot more environmental damage and produce a shit ton more CO2 in the short and medium term than we currently are producing.

Well then, revive this thread in 5 or 10 years and make everyone including me eat crow. :wink: Personally, I think we are headed towards both more highly automated manufacturing and cleaner power production…I just don’t think it will be 100% solar or anything remotely like that. Frankly, I’d be tickled if we got to 20% worldwide production of power from solar. I think that would be an awesome achievement. If you could do something similar for wind, well…we’d be in a much better place than today. Heck, if we could get the Chinese (the supposed kings of green and renewable) to stop building really dirty coal plants all over the world, we’d be in a much better place.

And if we could get folks, especially a certain brand of environmentalist who is knee-jerk opposed to nuclear to actually listen and look at the data we could even build a bit more capacity on this front that would also be zero emissions and would help a lot.

87

You noticed that I completely sidestepped what the desired outcome goal should be.

ETA re: Corry

88

I mainly agree with this, but just wanted to point out that the US (or Europe) isn’t’ the whole world, so you need to widen your view of who is or isn’t investing in nuclear beyond those. The Chinese, in particular, are investing heavily in new nuclear plants. Just because this is a dead issue in the US wrt politics (and in a large part of Europe for similar reasons) doesn’t mean it’s the case across the board.

Like I said, I mainly agree with your overall point…I expect the US to continue to slide down wrt nuclear, dropping from around 20% down to a fraction of that as the plant’s age and are decommissioned and no new plants are made to replace them.

ETA: The irrational fear of nuclear still far outweighs the fears, even of dyed in the wool environmentalist types, of global climate change. It’s a shame, but it’s the reality.

89

Your Wiki cite includes Three Mile Island as a meltdown.

Regards,
Shodan

90

Who pays for the 25 trillion PV’s needed to cover this 10,000 mi[sup]2[/sup]? … right now, they’re running about $500 per m[sup]2[/sup] during year-end sales … we’re into the quadrillion of dollars and that just provides for 5% of the population … about 250 years of Federal tax revenues … do these PV’s even last 250 years? …

91

Sure, in China the govt is to a greater extent (not entirely) the ‘god king’ you referred to earlier, able to do what they see fit at whatever cost (again within limits but much broader than US public policy’s reach). ‘Here’s what we should do’ threads on energy/climate tend to assume the US/developed world.

In same vein, some posts (some experts too) are very bullish on the declining cost of renewables. If that really meets its hype, then there’s no need for action by the collective ‘we’ at all. There’s a wiki link above for Lazard cost estimates of various types of energy. It shows wind below nat gas fueled combined cycle gas turbine plants, solar close. Great if really true…including the issue of storing or shunting power around at night, cloudy, calm etc. Then no need for mandates or regs to push fossil plants aside, no need for rending our garments that Trump doesn’t want the US in the Paris Accord. But that’s not really the state of things, which is that adopting renewables on a large scale still means higher costs, including all effects, and actually still dubious you can run grids at all with a very high % of installed capacity being intermittent renewables like sun and wind, without storage and super-grid costs not included in the figures saying wind/solar have reached parity with nat gas plants. Which is where the idea comes from to force rate payers to accept the higher cost of nuclear zero CO2.

The it’s really cheaper argument for renewables if true now would mean ‘we’ wouldn’t actually have to debate what ‘we’ should do. ‘We’ don’t debate for example that merchant ship owners now always choose diesel over steam turbine (except on some LNG tankers): it’s cheaper so they do. In not so distant past it wasn’t always so they didn’t always.

92

Agree completely. And good point about how the Chinese operate.

93

Because it was. When they actually decomissioned the reactor and checked, it turned out to have been nearly a complete meltdown.

94

Yes reactor 2 absolutely melted. #1 is still running IIRC.

95

However, Three Mile Island didn’t breech containment … I would think that’s an important distinction if we’re talking about public hazards … but then again, there’s more than just meltdowns that cause public hazards … c.f. Oakridge and Hanford …

What ever part of the solution nuclear power could have provided it’s long past time we started … who today is even building nuclear reactors now that Westinghouse went bankrupt? …

96

It was a severe hazard and would have breached containment if, at the 11th hour, the actual designers of the plant hadn’t told the control room crew in no uncertain terms to turn the cooling pumps back on. Even though it didn’t harm anyone near the plant (or at least not by much if it did), the cost was enormous, both in direct dollar amounts, and scaring the entire nuclear industry into being even more afraid of risk.

Contrast that to what happens if someone makes some fire prone battery banks or some solar panels that tend to de-laminate. Companies just pay the warranty claims and fix the problems in the next revision.

97

You didn’t answer my question about the cost of building a manufacturing plant that can punch out 800,000,000 “plug-and-play” PV’s every year … next question is what voltage do we run at to keep amperage manageable for our TeraWatt facility? …

98

Well. We obviously automate, with the same generalizing machine learning algorithms, the construction of the robots that go into the plant. I mean, no shit, right. That’s the obvious thing to do if you can develop a solver that can read the blueprints of a product and figure out a way to assemble it*. And read the solidworks model and figure out the cutting steps to construct it using CNC machines. And once it finds a way to do it, optimizes for the best way to do it. And shares strategies it learns with thousands of other robots working in parallel running similar software, all updating files stores in a cloud of servers with their converged policies for a given situation.

What were you thinking we’d do? As a side note, this kind of technology would also let us more easily scrap the capital equipment we have, since there’s ways to develop recycling plants that use moar robots to actually disassemble things instead of just crushing them.

So that would make the actual assembly of the hundreds of square mile, terrawatts per year, solar panel production complex cheaper. What about the raw materials? Well, if your robots can make robots, and you have robotic mining equipment made of the same generic pool of components your robots can make, then…

*you know, a near impossible task a few years ago that is now actually totally straightforward with the latest tools…

99

Agree overall with the thrust of your various posts.

I’ll make a quibble with your punchline. There is a transition period as the conventional wisdom shifts. People and organizations don’t react to the price signals. They react to what they *think *are the price signals.

In something like real time stock trading that distinction is negligible. In something like utility construction there’s a lot more room for organizational inertia, defects in cost accounting and risk estimation, challenges of having enough appropriately skilled workers at scale to make the schedule risk tolerable, etc.

The more compelling the news the faster it diffuses through the whole economic ecosystem, displacing inertia as it does. An order of magnitude change in battery capacity or PV cost will move the rest of the needle much more than the current situation where relative cost conclusions are pretty equivocal depending on how many second and third order effects are costed in and other niggling assumptions.

All these things don’t mean cheaper doesn’t win in the long run. As you say, it surely does. I merely point out that the long run can be longer than it at first appears during the early halting days of what are later seen to have been paradigm shifts.

100

So either you don’t know how much it will cost or you you’re just dancing around the issue … I think your ideas are fine but your time table is ridiculous, 10,000 square miles is a BIG construction site … I think better to have 10,000 one square mile sites, or make PV’s double as roofing material … and let people migrate to where it’s windy …

I’m a big proponent of local action … build a farm in your own neighborhood if the idea is profitable … if you’re waiting for Congress’ permission, then you’re waiting for Big Oil’s permission … and that’s why we’re in this situation to begin with … plus the smaller plots carry less risk, easier to raise the capital, because it doesn’t matter how much cheaper your system is if that’s still prohibitively expensive … meanwhile, Oregon is putting in a full scale farm and check out what Oklahoma does with wind power … just so you know your ideas are a bit dated …