I do know that folks who don’t travel extensively have no concept of how much of the US is now strewn with wind power turbines.
It’s easy for a city or suburban type to (wrongly) believe there are a few experiments at universities and that’s about it. Not so, and the growth rate is phenomenal.
One has but to travel to California (or southern New Mexico) to see vast fields of the things. A lot of the really prime first tier wind sites are in use already. Those that aren’t are generally because the locals are all NIMBY and have the political clout to make their snits over having the things felt.
I’m not dancing around anything. I know the marginal cost now is already cheaper, and I know that our existing infrastructure wears out, and I know that we can develop machine autonomy over the next 30 years to make all this transitioning much easier to accomplish. So your question is meaningless, except to say “cheaper than what we have now”.
It’s not a shame, it’s complete disaster. Hysterical fear of nuclear power is directly responsible for the current situation regarding climate change.
We have the technology to reduce drastically carbon emissions right now, but it doesn’t get done thanks to a consistent campaign of fear mongering against nuclear power. Big Fossil Fuel laughs all the way to the bank when environmentalist rally against it, look at what’s going on in Germany for example.
Nuclear power is proven to reduce carbon emissions, it’s not a hypothetical or a nebulous pie-in-the-sky plan, it actually works:
“While sectoral economic transitions are largely outside the domain and impact of energy policy, and deindustrialization is hardly a global strategy for rapid decarbonization, it appears that history presents at least one replicable strategy to accelerate the pace of decarbonization: the directed decarbonization of global energy supplies via the state-led development and deployment of scalable zero-carbon energy technologies.”
It absolutely drives me up the wall to see people rending their garments over saving the planet from climate change and at the same time dismissing nuclear power due to irrational fears. It’s like watching someone dying of cancer because they refuse chemotherapy in favor of, I don’t know, blipping herbal remedies.
There’s nothing irrational about the liability involved in nuclear power. I don’t mean actual deaths from the radiation leaks, just the liability if you spew a radioactive cloud over the area near the plant. And that liability in turn has driven the cost to the point that it is unaffordable. Ain’t got nothing to do with the hippie protesters.
It turns out that if you put hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel into a pressure vessel that only isn’t melting down because of megawatts driving active pumps to the cooling towers, there’s a lot that can go wrong. And when things go wrong, the radiation fields can be so extreme that you can’t get any human technicians in there to fix it before it gets even worse.
I see, we shouldn’t use nuclear power because outdated technology is not as safe as it should be; it’s like arguing against air travel because zeppelins weren’t safe.
it also turns out that 60 year old designs which aren’t passively safe need babysitting after shutdown. the whole point of newer designs like the AP1000 and ESBWR are that they’re supposed to be “walk-away” safe even in case of station blackout. But we won’t even consider building any because of Fukushima (40-year-old reactors of a 60-year-old design.)
Yes to the first question. Taller windmills access faster wind. And longer blades spin faster and generate more power. But taller and longer are more expensive to make and install. So the optimum is just wherever the cost benefit analysis leaves you with today’s prices. The trend is for taller and longer.
Wind generating power doubled 2010-2016, so we’ll see if that levels off. It isn’t yet. But I recall EIA projections that have it leveling off some time in the 2020s. Maybe because low-hanging fruit (high-hanging hills?) get filled by then. Of course materials advances are allowing taller towers and longer blades, so we’ll see.
Yeah, there is. If we look at the history, even considering most of the plants are of older, less safe and less redundant designs, we see only a few instances where things spun out of control…and in several of them, including the worst, it was not just human error but stupidity of biblical proportions that caused the issues. And even in the most extreme the actual number of deaths is less than the number of deaths from coal-fired plants EVERY YEAR. On the environmental damage side, again, nuclear power is pretty good compared to the alternatives that actually scale as well. Not sure what you think, but 100’s of square miles of solar panels, even out in the desert is going to have a pretty big impact, and all those batteries you want to build is going to cause a hell of a lot of environmental damage.
Basically, people have allowed the anti-nuclear environmentalists to drive the narrative, and the narrative they have driven is one of irrational fear which isn’t born out by the data. Sadly, we could build much better, safer, more efficient and more redundant and fault tolerant reactors today. We just can’t because of the widespread fears of the public, fanned by the anti-nuclear crowd. Not saying that nuclear is or should be the only, 100% solution (unlike you with your solar). Oh sure, we COULD (actually) put nuclear everywhere…no new automation technology needed, just heaps of money and a willingness of the public to allow them to be built…but other energy alternatives make better sense in some locations than nuclear. But if people were really serious about global climate change we’d collectively be building the next generation of plants to, at a minimum, maintain the current mix. In the US, 20% of our power is generated by non-CO2 emitting nuclear. It used to be higher, but it’s slowly dying. Just like hydro (no new dams). To be sure, to an extent we have picked up some of that with wind and solar, and I’m sure we shall pick up more. Some coal fired plants have been replaced by cleaner natural gas. But if we REALLY wanted to make a difference we’d be looking to build another 10% nuclear, which we could easily do…if we could build any at all. Which we can’t.
Good grief. And this from the OP who wants to build 100s of square miles of solar panels, increase mines across the world for rare earths and replace all of the freaking cars with new, electric ones. 
You have an interesting lack of imagination when it comes to a technology we’ve literally been using for over 60 years.
The irrationality is people’s perceptions of the liabilities of nuclear power … if Jane Fonda says it’s unsafe, then it’s unsafe goddammit, that was one hip chick if you’ll pardon the hippy slang …
Ale has the right of it, today we can build nuclear power plants that are much safer than before … I’ll not expose my ignorance in this matter by trying to explain how we did this*, only that the eastern Idaho research facility shut down because it was pointless continuing to build safer reactors since no one was building any commercially twenty years ago …
However, I will call Ale on his claim that nuclear is zero-carbon … I agree that the electricity produced is clean, but the building of the facility is very carbon-intense … even amortizing this carbon load over fifty years still brings us electricity that has a carbon footprint; smaller than fossil fuels, about the same as hydro, but more than solar/wind …
The problems with radiation leaks is only an issue for frail species, like humans who are already at the end of their evolutionary run … within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone we find the more highly evolved species are thriving and quickly saturating their ecological niches; like wolves, beavers and birds of prey … all because humans are too pussified to live there … spew that cesium, suckers, I dare ya …
Anywho, back to Swan Lake … yes, you are dancing around the issue, SamuelA, you seem to be implying that we can triple the tax load in the United States and no one will notice … you won’t put a price tag on your idea because you know my next question: Who’s going to buy your 50-year bonds if you only offer 0.1% interest, noting that 30-year T-bonds are currently paying 2.8% …
More than solar? I don’t know if installing a million solar panels is going to be less carbon-generating than one nuclear power plant. Likewise for turbines.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll try one last time to explain the problem with Nuclear.
So you come up with a new reactor design. In simulations and static analysis it’s safer. It probably is safer. But how do you prove it’s better? You have to build at least a prototype, but even that really isn’t enough. You’d have to build a whole full scale plant and run it for a couple decades to really show it’s a better design.
That lowers the velocity of innovation to next to nothing. Those “Gen4” reactors you guys read about? Your only source that it’s hugely better is basically the marketing department at GE. I’m not a conspiracy nut, I’m just saying that since nobody has actually built and racked up some runtime hours, we don’t actually know how much better the designs are. There might in fact be flaws. Walking away because it’s “safe” is probably a bad idea. And it took decades to get those designs from the drawing board into construction.
Also, nuclear reactors are really freaking complicated. The reason this is bad is that it means it is very difficult - almost impossible - to devise a fully automated process to actually make most of the parts that go in one. Even with these handy dandy machine intelligence tricks that are now available, the government regulators wouldn’t allow it.
So if you’ve been paying attention, solar has been growing with a power law function and blowing past any predictions, even by optimists, of deployment scales. This is because it’s subject to a drastically faster rate of innovation. You can come up with a possible design, expose it to simulated sun to check efficiency, then do some accelerated wear testing at high temperature and high light intensity to make sure it’s durable enough for the 30 year warranty. You can be ready to ship the next generation in just a couple years, no government approval needed. Also, fundamentally, you’re making a product that is either just a similar circuit board to what goes in all other consumer products, so there’s heavy automation (inverter), some metal pieces that are standard stuff (the frame), or a flat sheet with a few processes applied (the panel itself). All things that current automation can deal with easily.
I’ll try and explain to you as well. Even if we only build the older designs, they are safer forms of energy production on a death per kilowatt basis than any other form of energy currently. Certainly better than the old coal plants, which are what they actually compete with. So, building the old plants with modern materials is still better and safer. Sadly, this fact is ignored because of the fear factor driven into the public for decades now.
And, of course, other countries are building nuclear plants, so your idea that it’s only the marketing department at GE telling us of innovation and probably lying about it is pretty laughable. China is building one and is part of the (non-GE) consortium who generated the gen 4 parameters (this includes Australia, Canada, China, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), France, Japan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States. The non-active members are Argentina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland). South Africa is also been developing their own and so has France.
We don’t need a fully automated process to build one. That’s your schtick for building a world around solar because you have to go from 1% to 100% with an energy system that isn’t suited to doing that task. You are trying to force a niche energy production system into becoming the only energy production system, so you have to not only build huge numbers of panels, you have to build out large areas to put them in, build new infrastructure to support it, and build batteries or some sort of storage system to leverage it when the sun isn’t shining. Nuclear doesn’t need most of that, especially if we aren’t crazy and trying to make everything nuclear. You can, of course, pound a round peg into a square hole, but it’s kind of a waste to do this on a global scale.
uhuh. Well, as has been noted, we shall see. If it REALLY is happening as you say, ‘we’ don’t need to do anything…it will just happen because it will be obviously the best form of energy. I’m sure China will be discontinuing those nuclear (and butt loads of coal) plants soon, and switching to all solar, since that’s where you cherry picked your lowball price from. Feel free to revive this thread in a few years to count crow.
No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that the anti-nuclear nuts will fight to the death and beyond to stop it no matter what the evidence. Look at the casks to hold nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. They were made of stainless steel six inches thick. They dropped them onto spikes. They rammed them with a locomotive. They put them into a fire at thousands of degrees. Was that good enough for the Luddites? Of course not.
The problem with nuclear energy is that people are stupid, and have been lied to.
Regards,
Shodan
That sounds really freaking expensive, Shodan. I’ve heard numbers for decommissioning nuclear plants that add up to 3-4 cents per kWh the plant ever produced. So even if all the Luddites go home, you still have to pay for those casks, and due to poor burnup rates with present reactor designs, you actually have quite a lot of expended fuel rods, each one needing a separate cask. Just isn’t very affordable.
What do you suppose the costs of what you are proposing would be? Seriously, you’ve ducked a poster asking you think several times. And with good reason, since it would cost, literally, trillions to do what you are suggesting. Hell, it would be trillions JUST to go all solar in the US alone. Leaving aside the cars and such.
BTW, the cost of decommissioning and long-term storage are all built into the price of nuclear (as well as the real cost of all the lawsuits and delays in construction). Part of what they paid into the system was SUPPOSED to be for a longterm storage facility, in the US, at Yucca Mountain. How’d that work out wrt what they paid for?
Yeah, even if we do go with bad designs, nuclear is still safer than coal. Even if you go with the absolute worst design imaginable, operated in the absolute worst way possible, you still get more deaths per year from coal than were caused in total by Chernobyl. If we were to replace every single coal power plant with a nuclear plant like the one at Three Mile Island or Fukushima, then deaths would go down. Heck, even if we just looked at deaths due to radiation, they’d still go down. Everyone knows that Chernobyl was the worst radiological disaster due to power generation, but do you know what the second-worst was? It wasn’t Fukushima. It was a coal ash spill in Tennessee.
We don’t need to know what design is the best humanly possible, before switching from coal to nuclear. All we need to know is that nuclear is better than coal. And we do know that.
I think you’re right here … back of the hundred dollar bill calculations give about twice the footprint for nuclear, but four times the output … thanks for the fact-check …
I know the actual production is cheaper now. That is, dozens of credible sources say that solar is the cheapest form of energy in the world. This is unstored solar, of course - basically injected into the power grid when it’s available, it’s cheaper than burning any kind of fuel. The state of California has deployed so much that there are now surpluses during the day.
I know the prices for the other stuff - the storage, the ability to make the equipment - is still dropping, and can potentially drop an unpredictably huge amount further if this machine automation stuff pans out.
It’s unpredictable how huge. In the most extreme scenario, we develop a machine intelligence based system so capable that it can self replicate and then economic models basically fall apart. Only limiting factor becomes raw materials, and countless new mines get opened up, deep under the earth or in the oceans, places where humans couldn’t work before.
In this extreme scenario, machine made solar panels cover all non-arable land on earth like a kind of plant that doesn’t need water.
On the other side of the coin, we could do the projection doing today’s prices. Or today’s prices plus a linear projection of decline from the current rate of decline. Or a nonlinear model that assumes we are near a leveling off point.
So that’s what it is. I don’t have an answer because I don’t know how much of the industrial chain can actually be automated. The newest results from Google’s various AI efforts seem to indicate the answer is “all of it” but nobody has actually put together practical robotic systems that use all these techniques to drive robots. At the moment, they just ID things in images and play board games at superhuman levels - but the same techniques should be able to let a robot in a factory cell work out how to achieve an assembly step optimally, or how to replicate what it saw a human worker demo just once, etc. Or a robot in a mine work out how to optimally pick up the debris in the tunnel and where to cut the rock for the next phase.
I don’t know what will actually be done about the economic problems. If you can automate half of every job on earth, and 90% of all jobs in making most consumer and industrial goods, who can afford to buy these goods? How do you fix demand plummeting because you now can make everything automatically but nobody can afford anything?
Overall I agree with your POV. Most nuclear opposition is not rational. And as you say, on a KW basis nuclear is safer than coal. But …
“Safety” is not the same as “Liability”. A coal plant whose emissions incrementally reduce crop yields and increase asthma deaths by 0.00X% will never be called specifically to pay for those harms. A nuclear plant which has a rad leak and damages local property (economically destroys it actually) will certainly be called to pay for that damage.
As in so much else of society, when we’re doing something that’s collectively irrational it’s because we’ve societized some hefty fraction of the costs and they’ve disappeared from view. Society decides based on what it can see.
As long as nuclear has the real, collectible financial liability tail attached to it that other power forms do not, it will underperform versus its competitors. For that reason if not for any others.