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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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I really hope Tony Seba is right on his forecasts. It's the only thing that brings more hope. Electric cars, solar, batteries and precision fermentation. He's been right a lot so I have faith.
Having said that we need a huge carbon tax (including on trade) like today.
Sorry to burst the Tony Seba bubble, but he was wrong about self-driving electric cars and he is also wrong about batteries.
(Solar he is probably right on).
We only have two really big, proven guns in the fight against climate change: carbon tax (or, the power of the market) and atomic energy (or, the power of E=MC^2).
Carbon credits system is 100% shell game.
Carbon credits are a great idea in theory, their implementation is just horrible
Everyone was wrong about self driving cars.
Any analysis out there about batteries?
Fission is just too expensive. Will never be the answer.
Fission is by far the cheapest energy source we have ever discovered. There is no cheaper energy today than an existing nuclear plant.
We just over regulated it and lost the skills and knowledge, but it's nothing we can't regain. And we will. The plus side of having many different nations is that not all nations are scientifically braindead.
Battery tech improves very slowly and prices are either stable or have even risen die to scarcity. The industry will boom and be very important, but it won't scale to the level needed to combat climate change.
The only form of energy storage that is more dense than hydrocarbons is atomic energy.
You made that up. That's not true.
I don't know what other points you are making. Plenty of "other" countries have nuclear and none of them can do it cheaply.
Fission is only expensive because we're depending on the free market to develop and deploy it.
Basically, we cannot depend on capitalism to fix a problem that capitalism created.
I've seen fairly credible estimates that say when we finally max out the usable land for solar and wind, we'd be producing 30-40% of the world's electricity via those two methods.
Which is a lot of power, but it falls short of the final goal. As a note, we just barely crossed 10% in 2022.
We need fission. It can power the world for the next 1000 years at current demand, and that's including the power generated by solar and wind.
The problem is, regulatory sabotage has created a system where it's more cost-effective to build the biggest nuclear plant possible. Except by building bigger, you drive up the costs more. Every part must be custom-built, which is expensive, most parts need special machinery to install, which is expensive, and then the constant frivolous lawsuits from people who don't understand a damn thing about nuclear power, but have strong opinions are expensive.
Add in the fact that these lawsuits delay construction, which means that the regulations can then change mid-construction, which means you need to back-port everything to be compliant with the new regs, and now you have a massive project that's been delayed a dozen times and had the final cost skyrocket, all because the current regulatory structure is such that every plant costs the same to license. And the licensing fees are pretty hefty.
So people taking the risk, build bigger, because the biggest plants can produce more power, which can then be sold to a wider market, and that means more profit in the long run. But again, big plants are fucking expensive.
The answer of course is a factory built small modular reactor. They can be slotted in place, run for 10 years, then shipped back to the manufacturer for refueling and refitting. And because they're small, they literally cannot melt down. There's not enough fuel to do so. Being modular, they can stack next to each other until you have the power needed, and they need the land equivalent of a corner gas station. All to produce more power than most solar farms.
But to really get the economies of scale, and drive that price down, you need a bunch of them to be ordered. Which puts up back in the realm of capitalism not being able to fix a problem that capitalism created. See, those first few units are going to be super expensive as the factory is built and tooled up, and no one wants to pay for that when they can just buy 1000 acres of land and throw a solar farm down.
Also, that licensing issue is still there. You have to pay a lot of money to open a nuclear plant, and that's not even the insurance premiums.
Oh yeah, then there's the waste issue, which is only an issue because we're not actually allowed to burn the waste in a reactor. Because of regulatory sabotage again.
If we were allowed to reprocess and burn the waste, the remaining dangerous isotopes would last a couple hundred years, not the hundreds of thousands of unprocessed waste. We'd also shit ton more fuel power the world for a very long time.
Well that's just wrong. Capitalism makes things cheaper. Also fission has been built under communist countries so the point doesn't make sense.
That's just bull crap. Even some back of the envelope calculations can prove that. Go look up some solar farms and wind farms. Calculate the power to area ratio then extrapolate.
You have a very wrong opinion of how capitalism work. Even way before Henry Ford economies of scale have been a thing. The fact is nuclear power large or small doesn't make much money. Also profit maximisation is also cost minimisation, it's two sides of the same coin. Again a country like China could mass produce small reactors even just for themselves, but do they? No they are mass producing solar and wind because it's more economical. None of the arguments you have made in anyway stop China (who know how to build small reactors) wouldn't do this.
The French also built a bunch of cheap reactors by building the same design. But that paradigm is not as common as it should be. Every Reactor in the US is a custom design.
Capitalism, goes with the cheapest option, even if it's not the best. Except that's not actually how it works, It actually goes with the option that makes the most money, regardless of who it hurts. That's the capitalism I know and hate.
Capitalism is why oil companies still exist.
China is building wind and solar farms, but they also rank third in the world for number of nuclear power capacity, and are building more plants. They have 22 plants under construction right now, and a further 70 are in development.
So yeah, a state controlled economy can do it quite easily, capitalism cannot.
The issue with the capitalist approach is called a bootstrapping paradox. You need to sell the thing to develop the thing, and you can't sell it without first developing it. Literally needing to reach down, grab your own boot straps, and lift yourself up.
Well of course you can build them when price is no concern.
But when price matters nuclear is too expensive.
Again, capitalism cannot fix the problems created by capitalism.
And you better believe that the factories that pump out solar cells and wind turbines were initially built with government money.
The federal government has been throwing money at solar and wind projects. And these days it pays off, but in the early days, it did not. Wind was particularly expensive for the power generated for about 5-10 years. And then more factories came online and the price rapidly fell.
The same crowd that told us to wait for wind to become viable, screams that nuclear is too expensive and should get no government money at all.
That same crowd often sues new nuclear power projects, driving up the cost further. All because they are fucking idiots who want fossil fuels to win.
See, that's the dirty little secret. Every wind and solar farm needs a backup power source for when they're offline. And that backup is always natural gas.
Those natural gas peaker plants are being built at a breakneck pace. All because solar and wind get priority on the grid. And then when they fall off, you need a near instant ramp up of power, which only natural gas can provide.
Batteries that can handle the load don't actually exist yet, and likely require more investment than it would take to get a small modular reactor factory going full steam.
Nuclear has huge investment since 1940's and tonnes of money is still going into it. More money is not going to help anytime soon. It's just throwing good money at bad. I'm not saying it won't be cracked eventually. But with the limited time and money in the system wind and solar are obviously the answers.
Capitalism can easily solve the problem with externalities. Very few people that support capitalism wouldn't also support government investment so the fact that capitalist governments have funded capital gains is not at all a failure of capitalism. That would be like saying governments funding schools to increase human capital to raise more taxes is a failure of capitalism. In fact it is the optimal solution for all even in a capitalist society.
There is always wind or solar. If you build enough of it they the low points aren't that low anymore. There is still huge amounts of hydro on most continents. We are not even 10% of the way to where we need to be with renewables. The fact that they only offset gas some of the time doesn't mean they won't ever work, it just means we haven't built enough yet.
It had a huge investment in the 40s, 50s and 60s. At least in the US.
Really, we should acknowledge again that the extreme price of nuclear is a US problem, and not as applicable to the rest of the world, although some of the regulatory sabotage was exported to other countries via treaty.
And again, capitalism cannot solve a problem that capitalism created, because oil is still too fucking profitable to solve it.
As to your example of governments running schools to make better workers for capitalism... Need I say more? Schools are not often run for profit, and the ones that are almost always perform worse than the ones that are run by the government at cost.
As to Hydo, most rivers that can support hydro are already tapped, and creating artificial lakes is worse for the environment than almost anything else you can do. The rotting plant matter at the bottom emits more methane than people realize. And that's not even mentioning the ecological damage to the river itself.
As to wind and solar, sure, there's somewhere on the planet you could probably build more, but getting the power from those places to where it's needed is going to cost more than just building an on site nuclear plant, even at the artificially elevated US prices.
This goes into why prices in the US are elevated. It's a fascinating read. It doesn't talk about some of the issues of scale, i.e. the fact that new nuclear plants are often so huge that they need special everything to even be built. Which is actually an outgrowth of the regulatory licensing structure, but it does cover some of the stupidity around the regulations.
Except when it doesn’t lol
Research has been yielding some pretty promising results lately in the battery department, so there is hope there.
Fission requires an enormous upfront costs, but the yield ratio is better than anything we're doing right now. The biggest problems with fission are the waste and public perception (the nookular crowd), the last being why no major projects have been brought forth recently. Hopefully we are able to figure out fusion soon; there's been some great strides made in that too, but we are still quite a ways off from it being commercially viable.
The problem is economical.
There is nothing wrong with the science of fusion it just costs far to much. Either for corporations or for governments to build.