Solar is great. But building massive solar farms is a environmental issue in of itself.
We need to push home and business solr.
Note that CA’s Utility commision recently got down on its knees to PG&E and made solar less economical. That has to stop.
The impact of solar farms is utterly negligible compared to that used for crops. Around 1% of the total US land area would be sufficient for our energy needs if used for solar. Whereas agriculture today uses something like 50% of the land, depending on how you count it.
In fact, >1% of land area is dedicated solely to the utterly stupid experiment of corn ethanol. If all we did was end that idiotic project, we’d regain enough land for all the solar we’d need.
And acre-for-acre, cropland is more of an environmental disaster than solar. Solar can be designed to have a relatively small impact on the ecosystem. Intensive farming can’t, almost by definition (granted, grazing land is not quite as bad, and part of that 50%, but nor is it totally harmless).
Note that’s for four hours of peak discharge, so if looking to add or replace capacity while maintaining some SAIDI target, YMMV. But the trend is impressive and, as you mentioned, there’s work on other storage methods.
Great cite. Thank you.
It would be interesting to see what the subsidized costs are. And what things are labeled as subsidies. Lots of room for accounting chaicanery there. And also political chicanery. As in “A tax rebate for solar is evil woke meddling in the natural order of things. A tax rebate for coal production is a time honored necessity to preserve vital jobs.”
Microsoft thinks next-generation nuclear reactors can power its data centers and AI ambitions, according to a job listing for a principal program manager who’ll lead the company’s nuclear energy strategy.
A job listing doesn’t seem enough to draw big conclusions from.
That’s putting the “death” into BSOD. 
SMRs may be required to save us. While governments dither and stall large nuclear power projects, private industry will protect itself from grid instability.
Expect other large companues with data centers, large industrial facilities and other concentrated energy businesses to follow suit if Microsoft makes this work. And if SMRs are built in enough quantity to put them on assembly lines, the prices will plummet and you’ll start seeing small cities and large towns buyingntheir own SMRs.
Of course, this might not work out and the SMR designs might not be ready for commefcialization We’ll see. But if they can get this going, this will be a big help. Taking huge energy consumers off the grid will help everyone.
In the meantime, Poland has approved construction of an AP1000+ Gen III nuclear power plant. 3750 MWe. It’s to be the first of six, and Poland wants to generate 6-9 GW of power from nuclear by 2040.
It’s humorous in a sad way that one of the contractors is Bechtel, a German industrial company. Germany has shut down its reactors for no reason and is now energy poor, but German companies are helping their neighbor build more.
Germany is nuts. Expect a lot of German industry to move across the border unless the Germans get their heads on straight. But they should thank Poland, because otherwise that industry would move to China, or maybe France. Both of which have abundant, cheap nuclear power.
This company would disagree.
Taken at face value, that improves the carbon situation, but less so for land use. Land occupied by cows is probably not land inhabited by the diverse selection of animal and plant life that would have been there otherwise.
I’d like to see more intensive farming. It might use more energy, but the land use can go way down overall. Indoor farming isn’t quite here yet (with a few exceptions), but I’m hoping it’s just a matter of more development. The area needed to provide the extra energy will be a small fraction of what’s needed by current farming techniques.
It’s not really a matter that’s up for debate. It’s simple question of energy flow in an ecological system. Plants capture energy from the sun and turn it into chemical energy - photosynthesis. When you eat veggies or cows eat grass (or more realistically in the US, when cows eat corn-derived feed) they break the chemical bonds that the plants formed during photosynthesis in order to power their own bodies. Some of the energy goes towards keeping the cow alive and moving around. Some goes into growing the cow’s body. Some is stored for later use.
When you eat the cow, you digest it (just like you do the plants), breaking the chemical bonds that make up its muscles and fat.
Here’s the key point. All of the energy you can find in a flank of steak originally came from food eaten by the cow. The blade of grass or ear of corn is a Producer - the energy comes from the sun. When the cow eats grass, or when you eat an apple, you are Primary Consumers, one trophic level down. When you eat the cow, you are a secondary consumer - you’re on the third trophic level.
Only 10% of the energy consumed by members of each trophic level is available for consumption by the next trophic level. If you eat a 2,000 calorie diet of fruits and veggies, it took the trees and plants that grew these fruits and veggies 20,000 calories to produce that food. If you eat a 2,000 calorie diet of beef, it took the cows 20,000 calories to produce that meat, which means they ate 200,000 calories worth of corn.
Indeed, these areas of development are incredibly promising. Greenhouses use orders of magnitude less land than fields do; experiments with vertical farms are incredibly promising, with yields potentially 40 times higher per acre than field farming.
There are experiments with special greenhouse lights that only output the wavelengths of light that the photosynthesis process uses, which could greatly decrease the energy cost of using artificial lights.
If we could decrease land usage enough it would enable truly incredible rewilding efforts to proceed. Humans have been radically changing their ecosystem for tens of thousands of years, but we put that process into turbo drive all the way back in the Neolithic era. Vertical farming could allow us to put that genie back in the bottle.
With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project’s economics have worsened. Some of the initial backers started pulling out of the project earlier in the decade, although the numbers continued to fluctuate in the ensuing years.
I remember how conservatives in the US cursed things that added the externalities costs to the use of fossil fuels, like cap-n-trade. So now energy companies that could see profits with a system that added the real price to pay for using fossil fuels are not bothering with nuclear.
Good news. Sodium ion battery technology moves forwards. A Swedish firm has claimed they have made a tech breakthrough. Moreover, Chinese EV maker BYD is building a $1.4 billion sodium ion battery plant.
Sodium batteries are lower energy density than lithium, but it’s thought they could be put in some lower end electric vehicles. Moreover, they could provide backup power for the grid.
This is a big relief and part of a pattern: new battery tech has emerged in the past few years reducing reliance on nickel and cobalt, two materials that analysts feared would suffer long run shortages. Now we have an alternative to lithium.
Solar and wind will benefit from this of course, but so will nukes. Nukes are honking expensive to build, so it makes sense to run them at 100% capacity if you can, when you can. Cheap storage would enable them to run closer to 24/7, though there will always be shutdowns for maintenance and refueling. For seasonal storage, we’ll have to develop hydrogen.
Toyota also claims to be close to having a solid state battery for cars and other applications. This one has twice the energy density of current EV batteries:
Still needs lithium, though.
I don’t see batteries becoming a long-term storage for power plants though. I can see them being used for peaking power and to timeshift away the peak after- work hours when demand is high and the sun is low or gone. But storage for days or weeks to make up for ‘dark doldrums’ is not going to happen with batteries. We need nuclear power. Batteries will help reduce the need for natural gas peaking, though.
More than 20 countries, including the U.S. agreed to this–by 2050. Strangely China which is actually building new nuclear generating facilities is not one of them.
I don’t see this happening.
It’s the only way we’ll slow down climate change. It’s about time rhey figured that out. The best time would have been 40 years ago, but better late than never.
So not accurate, but it is a way to help against climate change and needs to be on the table.
We had a dozens things that could have helped 20 years ago that didn’t happen in most of the world, including the US & Canada. There is far to much resistance to doing what needs to be done. #1 remains reduce use of coal and Nuclear power with renewables is a key to reducing coal use.
Cleaner Coal would have helped but was not a great solution.
Increased energy efficiency could have been huge and we’re getting there, but we’re 10 year behind where we should be.
Improved electric transmission was a piece of the puzzle and we’ve hardly touched this one.
Nuclear fission power is a good baseload source of electrical power, and if we’d started developing more advanced Generation IV reactors capable of better utilization of nuclear fuel and complete burnup cycles it might have been a significant contributor to electrical power, but it is both far too late to start development of usable technologies and building out the infrastructure to significantly contributing to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in time to keep from achieving even the RCP 4.5 scenario. Even setting aside the massive cost, energy requirements, and carbon footprint of a more-than-order of magnitude increase in nuclear fission reactor plants or the difficulty in staffing and maintaining those facilities within a suitable non-proliferation regime, the necessary capability to increase uranium ore extraction; mill, refine, and especially the enrichment of uranium to low-enriched (fuel grade) uranium (LEU) condition and produce fuel elements; and create a distribution system to securely transport new fuel elements to this expanded network of reactors and then collect and process or store ‘expended’ fuel elements from the current once-through nuclear cycle of light water and pressurized water reactors does not exist and would be the work of decades to scale up to a point that it would even replace all current fossil fuel electrical generation, notwithstanding liquid fuels used for air, sea, and most bulk land transportation or the greenhouse gases produced by industrial processes.
To provide some more context, total known uranium reserves that can be extracted at less than US$130/kg (FY2021) are 6.078 MT, with an additional ~2 MT extractable up to US$260/kg. (Cite). The current global nuclear fission electricity capacity is about 400 GWe, requiring 67.5 KT/yr of uranium ore, so an order of magnitude increase in nuclear fission power generation would offer 10-13 years of power at a 4TWe production level, assuming you could build out the generation capacity and extract/mill/enrich/process the ore into LEU-suitable material and then distribute.
Enrichment, as noted above, brings in its own challenges; current global enrichment capacity is 60,166 Separative Work Units (SWU, a normalized measurement for enrichment capacity), via a power generation requirement of 50,205 SWU (2020 data, cite). Nearly half of this (27,700 SWU) is done in Russia by Tenex. The United States has the capacity to produce 4,900 SWU, which is actually half of the required fuel to support the current nuclear power infrastructure, so the rest is imported. Capacity is only projected to grow by about 10% by 2030, so supporting additional enrichment infrastructure would require a massive expansion. Uranium enrichment via the centrifuge process required a substantial amount of energy, are designed around specific assay tails (235U/238U concentration) and must be run continuously, so they are typically operated using natural gas-fired plant which of course emits copious amounts of CO2 exhaust. Laser isotope systems using somewhat less energy are in development but have yet to be deployed.
Of course, uranium mining and milling produces a vast amount of environmental contamination that is difficult to contain and remediate. Extraction of relatively poor-grade uranium (the only grade available in the continental United States) in southern Utah and northern Arizona, for instance (and using largely Native American labor who were not informed about the hazards) has produced large areas of land requiring remediation and communities that had to be abandoned, in addition of course to the generations of workers who suffered cancers and various other illnesses. Rapidly expanding existing uranium reserves not already controlled by a national authority like Australia, Russia, or China would largely mean exploiting reserves in developing nations like Namibia (470 MT), Niger (311 MT), and Botswana (87 MT), almost certainly at the expense of those populations who would enjoy little of the benefits.
Some GenIV technologies could utilize natural thorium (232Th) and use uranium fuel in a partial or full burn-up cycle, extracting an order or magnitude or more energy vice the current once-through uranium cycle and extending the viability of nuclear fission power by over a century. However, these technologies are largely nascent and not closed licensed for energy production, and many are potentially exploitable for nuclear weapon proliferation and so cannot readily be exported to countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons programs (although that ship has mostly sailed already).
There is also an issue that bears consideration at this point; an attempt to deploy a hypothetical vast infrastructure to enrich and use nuclear fuels would leave a dangerous residual in a post-industrial world where security and control of nuclear waste is no longer assured. This was already a worry in post-Soviet Russia, and an even more grave concern where the reach and surveillance of any remaining developed nations is limited. Unconfined nuclear waste and nuclear power facilities which are allowed to deteriorate to the point that safety and containment systems are no longer adequate would pose a severe environmental hazard on a millennial timescale. We should really be thinking of how to confine and protect existing wastes and reactors rather than investing in a massive build-out that is unlikely to come online in a useful timeline or would be capable of being maintained in a vastly constricted industrial infrastructure.
In short, nuclear fission power is not going to ‘save’ us from the ravages of global climate change; it can’t even offset fossil fuels in providing a baseload capacity comparable to current levels; and will create contemporary and future environmental hazards that we will not be equipped to contain or remediate. It is not a good solution to anything except for vary narrowly confined applications, and it will essentially do nothing in terms of reducing global transportation or industrial emissions.
I know there is now going to be a bunch of arguments and recrimination for this “anti-nuclear” stance (I’m not) or prognosticating a worst-case scenario (it isn’t), but an objective look at the realities of climate change, global overshoot, and the real costs and issues of the tip-to-tail nuclear fission energy infrastructure don’t render a transition to broadscale nuclear fission to be viable.
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