Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/04/climate-change-is-spreading-ra.html
…
3 Likes
Well, I guess we couldn’t expect 2020 to be all good news, all the time.
12 Likes
Privileging short term gains over long term losses is a cognitive bias that’s especially pervasive when it comes to nuclear power. You want to keep the lights on for right now. But the waste you generate will be dangerous fo 10,000 years.
Do you think, in even a hundred years time, people who are stuck with dealing with this stuff are going to look kindly on the generation that created it? “At least they were able to keep the lights on, this is an okay price to pay so our ancesters could benefit slightly” says no one, ever.
7 Likes
10,000 years from now, I’ll bet we have disposable waste rockets we can just fire into Sol.
Or maybe the cockroaches will have developed them after we’ve off’ed ourselves.
I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with nuclear, but we have to get off fossil fuels RIGHT NOW and nuclear is a rational bridge technology to do that.
The problem is grid storage for renewables. The grid depends on continuous production that scales up and down smoothly. This is why coal is so popular. It’s easy to turn on and off. We currently do not have the technology to go all renewable because of the need to store that power to smooth it out and scale it to demand. We don’t have any viable grid storage that scales. There are lots of promising ideas- pumped hydro, lithium batteries, giant masses on inclined railways, all sorts of things. However we don’t yet have anything that works well enough to replace coal power for the quick demand changes and hydroelectric for the baseline.
Keep in mind that what most people know about nuclear power is based on 60 year old designs. We have designs now that are inherently stable- they can’t melt down because the core reacts less the higher the temperature gets. We have designs that will burn the waste from older reactors. We have designs that don’t require active cooling. All sorts of things.
Nuclear is not perfect, but it’s the only option we have to get off carbon today. And it has to be today. A small pile of waste underground won’t matter if the human race goes extinct because we all starve to death or any of 1000 other ways climate change is going to wipe us out.
7 Likes
Coal country: "LA LA LA. Can’t hear you. We don’t know much about “nuclear” things. That’s more of a liberal elite thing like solar, wind, and tidal.
Let’s just make our coal plants look cleaner during certain administrations to satisfy the EPA, then wait for someone to come along and defund the EPA.
2 Likes
300,000. Give or take. For the nasty stuff.
Incidentally, 300,000 years ago the first humans that would pass as Homo sapiens entered the scene.
4 Likes
When compared to our current trajectory of rendering much of the planet uninhabitable with global warming? It may very well be preferable long term. We’re just not there on solar and other renewables for a grid scale responsive switch out and our new tech development runway is basically gone. The IPCC 1.5 degree report giving us 12 years was two years ago.
2 Likes
The higher number is unlikely to make people pay more attention. I fear that in a paradoxical way, it makes it easier to blow off as unadressable. 30 times the staying power makes people 30 times less likely to give a shit.
Gravity-based energy storage can indeed shift output to meet demand almost instantly. Proponents of existing designs claim they can shift to 100% output within a millisecond (which is one of the main advantages over pumped hydro, along with increased efficiency).
2 Likes
There are designs, sure, but will they actually work in the real world? How long will it take to build them out at scale, and how expensive would it be? Nuclear is colossally expensive, and slow to build, and failures can be devastating. I believe we need to shoulder the staggering cost it would incur, but that money would be better spent on, in this order:
- Reducing energy use in the first place
- Improving storage technology for renewable sources
- Improving renewable output and cost
Even though some fossil fuels would still be needed in this scenario (by the way, not one person serious about renewables is suggesting we go entirely renewable immediately), it would reduce overall carbon output much more quickly than scaling up nuclear plants, in a much safer and more decentralized manner.
3 Likes
I’m far from an expert here, but my understanding is that all of these ideas work well in tests, but none scale particularly well. Pumped hydro scales the best (you can scale it up to power a whole country if needed) but depends on very specific geography that doesn’t exist most places. Gravity-mass just needs a hill, but it takes so many of them to meet demand that it may not be practical. Chemical batteries scale well and work anywhere, but we don’t have near the production capacity for the amount of batteries that would be needed. No easy answers here, which is why none of it has happened yet.
None of it is easy, no question. But what is the alternative? Renewables can not meet the demand at current technology level (see my rant above about grid storage). Many folks say decentralizing generation is the answer (put a windmill on every house) and maybe some day that will be, but that’s a lot bigger undertaking (and politically, probably impossible here) than building some nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great option to replace all the baseline generation currently done by coal and gas. It doesn’t ramp up and down quickly, but a single plant can produce huge power for small land use and can be built in any location.
Grid storage isn’t the only thing holding back renewables. Solar needs specific exposure (and a lot of it) and has a large land use problem (unless you’re talking distributed, but again that’s extremely difficult to deploy). Wind is extremely unreliable, and depends even more on grid storage. All these problems are solvable and will be solved, but not on the timeline that we need to save the planet. Nuclear is the only viable technology I can see that is a drop-in replacement for our current generation that is low carbon and meets all the same needs at existing technology levels.
Most arguments I hear against nuclear are along the lines of people who won’t vote for Biden because they don’t agree with him on health care policy or something. Sure, nuclear is not perfect and nobody is thrilled to have to use it, but renewables can’t solve our immediate crisis.
If we let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”, we all die. Build some nuclear, save the fucking planet, then we can debate the nuances of wind farms and hydrogen infrastructure and whatever.
We. Don’t. Have. Time. For renewables to catch up to the problem we have TODAY.
2 Likes
It actually doesn’t need a hill, the designs I linked to use towers or shafts. The “Gravitricity” startup is building a demonstration model in an existing abandoned mine shaft for something like $1.5 Million, which is chump change for this type of project.
3 Likes
And we’re still dealing with the fallout from that!
1 Like
Also these:
4 Likes
Makes me wonder what other hideous shit we haven’t “remembered” yet.
4 Likes
Aging Cold War Weapons Researcher: [Waking suddenly] “Oh shit, did I ever remember to unplug that Doomsday Machine the last time I left the lab in 1992?”
4 Likes
2 Likes
Again, I don’t think 30 years out can be considered a “drop-in replacement.” How fast are nuke plants being built today? How many have we commissioned in the US in the past 30 years? Can they be built everywhere, like solar and wind (Germany is not known for abundant sunshine, but is producing a LOT of solar power)? Has the increase in nuclear MWh over the past few decades come close to that of solar and wind MWh?
As I mentioned, nobody - nobody serious about this stuff, anyways - thinks we can simply replace our current consumption with renewables. You and I are in complete agreement about this. Where we differ is that this is even more true of nuclear. Baseload power from a nuke plant whose commissioning has been delayed over a decade is considerably less useful than peak load produced by solar that is being scaled up as we speak. We cannot look to a single technology as a way out.
Please see my first point about solving the climate dilemma - reduction of consumption. Reducing emissions will require everything we can throw at it (as you said, RIGHT NOW), and the very most important tool in that bag, which we have the ability to do right now, is to use less energy. The covid crisis shows that we can immediately reduce energy usage globally. Just like every other tool (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear), it will cost money to implement, but the payoff is immediate.
I absolutely agree perfect is the enemy of good, and that we don’t have time. Which is why nuclear can only be a small part of the solution.
1 Like
