Spot the difference 🤔

@kravietz
Even if someone cut down the trees in their yard, PV is still one of the best sources of energy:
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/16/mediocrity-is-the-enemy-of-the-solution/

@cjd @kravietz I'm not convinced that it is bad to invest in nuclear power research. We're getting to the point now where thorium-based liquid salt reactors will be commercially available in 5-10 years. Many new thorium-based MSR designs would obviate concerns about traditional uranium-based nuclear power, in particular the risk of explosion from a meltdown would be nearly nil since they can be operated at 1 atmosphere of pressure, and their fuel would mostly be stuff that is considered a hazardus byproduct of rare-earth mining (which, coincidentally, is necessary to construct high-efficiency rechargable batteries)

@mithrandir @kravietz
Definitely worth investigating to some extent. Scaling properties on solar are hard to beat, but small self-contained nuclear batteries could be competitive.

@cjd @kravietz I think they would be useful in different situations -- solar and wind can provide surge power, nuclear can provide a baseline.

@cjd @kravietz (helps also to reduce the storage problem for renewable energy)

@mithrandir @kravietz
Per the link I dropped, problem with NEW nuclear is it takes like 15 years to bring it to completion. So shutting down nuclear prematurely is probably a bad plan, but spinning it up right now is kind of a case of too-little-too-late. New solar deployment is up within a year.

Also scaling properties. Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper. True too of reactors but not many of them are (ever) made so scale doesn't happen.

@cjd @kravietz
>New solar deployment is up within a year.
Indeed, it is quicker to build the plant, but the plant also takes up more space (with exceptions -- those towers outside Vegas are wonderfully compact, idk how much power they put out though), and you have to build it somewhere where you get sunlight/wind reliably enough that the plant is worth building. For a lot of cities that means the plant has to be far away, which leads to high line loss.

OTOH solar and wind are eminently the best strategy for power in rural and low-density urban areas, where the cost of land is cheaper and also it makes more sense to spread out power production. A small town would probably be better served by nearby solar and wind farms than a faraway nuclear plant.

The article you linked seems to be making an argument that *nothing* besides wind, solar, and waves should be invested in. That just seems shortsighted to me, especially when so many proposed power sources are still in their infancy.
>Every solar panel built makes building the next one cheaper.
Huh? You mean that it's easy to mass produce them, right? There is not an infinite supply of silicon, and the fixed marginal cost of the production process remains the same until you change the production process.

@mithrandir @kravietz
1. "Naive" economies of scale, bigger more efficient factories, better processes.
2. R&D-based economies of scale: more people buy PV, more competition, more R&D investment --> higher efficiency, longer lasting PV made with cheaper materials and processes.

Same story as batteries. It's not govt research that's driving these curves, it's competition.

@cjd @mithrandir @kravietz this looks pretty good and should solve a lot of energy issues simply by being the most cost effective option. do you know how to the energy storage problem will be tackled? I.e. the sun doesn't shine at night?

@lain @mithrandir @kravietz
Batteries. Buy a phone, buy a Tesla, push dat curve.

@cjd @mithrandir @kravietz so nothing new really. But yeah, with more PV there'll be more demand for batteries, and with such a fortune to be made there'll be solutions.

@lain @cjd @mithrandir

Because PV is actually made mostly of mined resources, as this friendly ad from Australian Mining (!) demonstrates

@kravietz @lain @mithrandir
A PV cell is mined and then runs 10 years. A cm3 of gas is mined and then burned within a couple of hours.

Also I prefer the Australians, they don't try to invade Europe every chance they get.

@cjd @lain @mithrandir

I don't think anybody supports fossil fuels in this thread, so this argument is irrelevant.

The problem with PV is specifically what you described - it runs 10 years, and then you need a new one.

Per 1 W of energy mining requirements are much higher for PV than other sources.

Then you need a whole lot of them due to low surface power density.

Then you need even more due to low capacity factor.

And then you need storage.

@kravietz @cjd @lain This graph is not very useful -- mining uranium is much more difficult and has many more nasty byproducts than mining anything in a solar cell, for instance, plus there's just less uranium (and it needs extensive processing, depending on the reactor type)

@mithrandir @lain @kravietz
Love how they have this little black sliver "Geological repository". Cost of storing the waste 100,000 years is way higher than that, but I guess that's close to the cost of giving it to the Mafia to dump off the coast of Somalia.

@cjd That’s the problem most people have with nuclear power, after the elephant in the room, dirty bombs all over your country. It’s hard to convince a people who couldn’t hold their country together for 300 years that there’s a good plan for the next 10,000 years. (Did you write 100,000 on purpose?) @mithrandir @lain @kravietz

@epic @lain @cjd @mithrandir

But it's based on three fundamental misconceptions:

1) that only nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste

2) that it needs storing for 100'000 or 10'000 years

3) that radioactive waste is the *only* one that needs safe storage for a long time

@kravietz I have spoken before with people in the industry whose job was to push nuclear power, which is nothing but a solution of what to do with the existing waste we have now.

1) that only nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste I’ve not heard of anything producing nuclear waste in the massive amounts that nuclear power or weapons do. Do you mean small amounts like for medical purposes?

2) that it needs storing for 100’000 or 10’000 years Those proponents never said that long-term storage wasn’t necessary, never was the thousands of years contested. Their solution was it would be encased in concrete and stored at the reactor sites themselves. I found that silly because those sites won’t last that long either and it would be even harder to get people to accept a reactor near their home. (And check the comma key on your keyboard. I think it’s on upside down)

3) that radioactive waste is the only one that needs safe storage for a long time I’ve heard the big problem with solar power is its disposal too. Not crazy toxic like nuclear waste, but must be disposed of in dumps lined with rubber or similar, like you would batteries or computer parts. What else needs long-term storage in figures like thousands of years (which was not denied by the people selling it).

@lain @cjd @mithrandir

@epic @lain @cjd @mithrandir

> mean small amounts like for medical purposes

This is the funny part: nuclear industry is so regulated, that anything anything used anywhere in a nuclear plant or X-ray machine is "nuclear waste". Most of these drums shown in scary German movies about leaky storages are filled with old gloves, clothes, tools, parts of machinery and all that crap that is "radioactive" only by legal definition. In terms of volume it's a lot, but in terms of emissions, it's nothing.

@kravietz There’s a mountain in Idaho with tunnels full of drums of nuclear waste. After a few decades, the drums were leaking and the tunnels were caving in on top of them. They can’t get anyone to go in there to fix it, and they can’t get anyone to let them dump it anywhere near where they are. It ain’t old gloves. @lain @cjd @mithrandir

@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
I grew up nearby to the Rowe Yankee powerplant which was in decommissioning all through my childhood. I remember when they pulled the reactor and drove it out of there, lots of people protested for some reason but allowed the truck to pass, my parents took me to see the spectacle.
They're still keeping some waste on-site because they judged it safer than transporting it.

@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
That was in decommissioning from 1992 until 2007, and there were a good number of people employed there. It's hard for me to imagine how a nuclear power project posts a bond big enough to pay that kind of bill since they're very likely to be bankrupt when they have to clean up...

@epic @lain @mithrandir @kravietz
If you want to drill oil, you need to post a bond large enough to plug the well if you disappear or go bankrupt. I have a hard time imagining how you would conceivably post a bond big enough to pay for taking a nuclear plant apart.
The other thing is if you've got an old powerplant which *should* be shut down, if you're a business you have a perverse incentive to keep it running as long as possible.
Keep running -> make money
Shut down -> massive cost