Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report
newatlas.com
[T]he report's executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
"The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs," says the report. "But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb."
Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can't use the same technology on land?
I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:
There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head
Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.
Military expenses, the only socialism acceptable to Americans.
Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/most-ridiculous-things-united-states-military-spent-money-on
Boner pills, anti-rape lip balm (which they destroyed) and other such brilliant things.
And the margins for DoD contracts can be through the roof.
I don't think the military should show a profit. That would just bring back colonialism. Although, they do make a hefty profit for defense contractors.
The fact that this was your take away is concerning.
No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.
Yup, the military's purpose is to not be needed. It should be strong enough to deter attack and assist diplomacy (carrot and stick), and no larger. Our (US) military is bigger than that, so it gets used in place of diplomacy.
Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don't think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn't able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.
Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.
Military budgets. You can use the tech, but no civilian can afford it.
I'm pretty sure they essentially are "one time use" only.
Extremely simplified:
They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.
All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter "worse". By making the system "one time use" you set the "refuelability" and "repairability" parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.
Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.
It's expensive in subs too
I’m pretty sure most military reactors use weapons grade uranium that’s enriched to mid 90%. Countries get sensitive when you start enriching uranium to the mid 90s.
Because if the electricity produced on these vessels was ten times the normal price, it would still be peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
This was pretty much obvious for everyone from the beginning, except if you're a fanboy of this tech.
Or a someone getting a bribe from them.
They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.
I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.
I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.
You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.
You want people to have their own private nuclear reactor in their basement?
Nukeheads are insane
That's some real 1950s futurism.
Ford proposed a car with a nuclear reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
I sympathized with your statement immediately, but then after thinking about it for a bit, most people basically have controlled pressure bombs (gas-water boilers) and buildings filled with gas pipes that can (and have) wiped out whole city blocks.
It's still not a good idea, obviously, but localized fossil fuels are also ridiculous when you think about it.
Nuclear waste and fuel is dangerous for years and is an invisible hazard. Propane and gas at least only explode once
Thoughts on CO from malfunctioning boilers?
The two aren’t even part of the same conversation.
Boilers were, in fact, mentioned earlier. And have a failure mode where CO builds up for and is undetectable without an alarm. Just like the oh so dangerous nuclear. Where's your condemnation of boilers?
Fun fact: coal plants emit more radioactive waste per unit energy than nuclear plants, and its just vented into the atmosphere!
I swear people run on emotion only when nuclear is brought up.
It builds up for days even months and is an invisible hazard?
I’m not engaging on this.
I wouldn't mind one in my basement... If I had a basement. But I do have a nice shed, where a 30MW reactor would fit nicely.
That's your opinion. My opinion is that we need distributed power generation that can handle baseload. And neither solar nor wind can do that. My personal experience is, that our wind turbine usually doesn't spin for several periods of up to 10 days in December through March. And energy storage with the required capacity still doesn't exist either. Thus the power plants will be burning LNG, biomass, garbage or oil and coal, for the foreseeable future.
A centrally controlled, well regulated, network of small reactors will solve the problem.
Look, friend: as much as I like nuclear energy and decentralization of the powder grid, per home reactors could never, ever work. For the simple reason that the majority of us filthy apes are complete idiots. Furthermore, nuclear works currently because it has oversight by educated, trained professionals in a setting where oversight can be effective. Even if you had some sort of travelling nuclear engineer that would check up on your garage reactor, if anything ever went wrong with it then the response time would be too long to adequately deal with the situation.
The only way a distributed network of reactors could work is if it either had massive overhead or if literally everyone had training on the maintenance of a nuclear reactor. And this isn't even mentioning the possibility of adverse weather events potentially damaging the reactor or how the waste would be dealt with.
Nuclear reactors are ill-suited for baseloads, because they can't scale their output in an economical way.
You always want the cheapest power available to fulfill demand, which is solar and wind. Those regularly provide more than 100% of the demand. At this point, any other power sources would shut off due to economical reasons. Same with nuclear, nobody wants to buy expensive nuclear energy at peak solar/wind hours, so the reactor needs to turn off. And while some designs can fairly quickly power down, powering up is a different matter and doing either in an economically feasible way is a fantasy right now.
If solar and wind don't provide enough power to satisfy demand, some other power source needs to turn on. Studies have already shown that current-gen battery storage is capable of doing so. Alternatives could be hydrogen or gas power stations. Nuclear isn't an option economically speaking.
I think the ones small enough for a truck are called micro reactors and they top out at 30 MW
Nice source for tech stuff, apparently.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-atlas/
Why can't we switch to thorium and molten salt instead? Much cleaner, much safer, same idea.
Because it is actually not that simple, especially on the "cleaner" and "safer" parts.
Theoretically the main advantage of the thorium is precisely because its safer and cleaner. When removed from its neutron source thorium quickly ceases fission and decay.
"Theoretically" is worth very little. It is pretty much the same for every concept NPP, that once construction starts on an actual practical plant, ugly problems start coming up all over the place that were not considered or thought of in the concept stage. Corrosion is one of the biggest ones.
See also the Rickover memo.
The technology doesn't exist in a commercially viable form. That's why.
Containing it for a while seems to be super hard. It's really corrosive to most anything that can withstand the heat and pressure. Basically, they haven't managed to make plumbing that works for it. Liquid salt gets mad at shit all the time.
And even more expensive, no?
I didn’t think that was ready for commercialize yet. You have all the disadvantages of nuclear, but need additional development costs, need to implement a supply chain, then build out a new technology that is less efficient than existing nuclear, has unclear service life, may be supplanted by fusion or renewables, and you can still use it to make bomb material. Seems like a poor idea and a waste of money.
From India’s perspective, they’d get to lead in a new technology, where they have huge reserves of fuel, and cheap labor to scale up to a billion energy-starved citizens …. And if it helped increase their nuclear weapons stock in the face of tight controls on plutonium, so much the better
What makes you think it's less efficient. Normally high temperature reactor technology is more efficient not less.
I’m not claiming to be any more knowledgeable than what I read here, but Wikipedia says
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
I didn't say anything about thorium. Not all molten salt reactors are thorium though. In fact not all high temperature reactors are molten salt either. People keep mixing these technologies up.
So an interesting thing I've noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the "real evil", right. "Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!" or "Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!". You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.
The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it's not so much that they're funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they've successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn't the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when "we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted" right, as part of this "emergency mode" is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.
Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That's dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be "correct" in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn't matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can't as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can't exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they're not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.
These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we're just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what's possible, probable, or what's the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.
If you wanna have a top-down take on what's the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.
Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear. I'm seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily...
I've seen opinions very strongly in both directions on here. I'm very pro-nuclear, but the largest issues they face is always bureaucracy. It sucks that an artificial thing is what's stopping then usually, but it is true. We need some protections to keep things safe, but it seems too harsh for nuclear compared to the dangers it presents opposed to the dangers of other power sources.
Absolutely, and it's by design by candid admission of environmentalist organizations and green parties. Their objective was over regulating the industry beyond any rationality and they succeeded.
For this particular design, they could have powered the earth by connecting turbines to the eyes of every engineer and project manager from us all rolling them in the back of our heads upon hearing “no cost overruns or delays”.
Maybe you should spend more time outside. Every flavor of nuclear has worse approval ratings than most dirtbag politicians.
Why do you think you need to PAY people to oppose nuclear? After seven decades of cockamamie “this time it’s different” schemes most people just moved on.
Woa bro I was saying hard on but this is a full on raging erection maybe you should deal with your frustrations
And yet, I remain bullish.
Nuclear fanboys are strange! The won't let it go.
Because it’s really cool tech and unlike burning coal, oil and gas it’s CO2 neutral. And alternatives like fusion reactors are still decades away, at least, and we can’t build renewables fast enough either.
In my opinion shutting down all nuclear powerplants was the stupidest thing the government here in Germany has ever done, especially since coal is still being subsidized and our planet isn’t getting any cooler.
None of what you say is false.
None of what you say is enough to make it the right path for the future.
It‘s a better path than fossil fuels and a worse one than renewables.
I wouldn't call it worse than renewables. It's a sidegrade from coal burning. Where I'm from, solar is non-viable 6 months of the year. Wind is theoretically viable year-round but in reality it's less than that due to cold snaps and the intermittent nature of wind. And there's no way that wind power alone could provide enough power even when running at 100%. There are no viable rivers here for hydro either. Geothermal is nigh impossible here as well. So without a reliable back-up power source, everyone here would be experiencing brown outs on a fully renewable system. Many wouldn't receive power at all due to a significant rural population and the challenges inherent to it (and forcing people into cities is not a viable option). So the only options are fossil fuels and nuclear. Given that we're killing everything with the former, I would much prefer we give the latter a go.
Well, they are worse in the sense that, if renewables were a viable option, you would choose those instead of nuclear. And nuclear does produce more waste than renewables. However nuclear is still miles better than fossil fuels and in cases like yours definitely the best choice to fill the gaps.
I don't know where you're from, but I doubt it's as bleak as you make it sound for renewables. They key to renewables is threefold IMHO:
You have to overbuild. You need to be able to sustain things on 50-60% of maximum output.
You must have multiple grades of storage to cover different time scales. Hours, days, weeks, months. Different capacities of storage that can respond on different timescales.
You need to exploit the diversity of different geographic areas. Take the US for example. Wind in the northern coastal regions. Solar across the south. Hydro in the mountains. These different areas can't do it alone. They need to supply each other in times of plenty, and depend on each each other in times of "famine".
So there's lots of investment needed; In capacity, storage and transmission, and the choice is always where you spend your money. I would rather spend it on renewables and the infrastructure to support it. It'll be quicker to bring online, cheaper, and a better long term solution.
Agreed! So let's stop wasting time and energy (get it?) by fantasizing about a nuclear future and push renewables. There is no alternative anymore, let it go.
Exactly, so you invest the money in renewables.
If that’s possible. There are places where neither solar, wind, nor water are viable options to cover all the electricity needs. What do you do then?
What is so cool about making some water boil?
Because you’re not just making a fire to make water boil, you’re literally splitting atoms in a controlled environment. That’s kinda cool. You can’t do that at home.
Yea but splitting atoms just to boil water. The atom splitting part is the cool part. Using it just to boil water is not so cool.
Aside from flattening a city, what exactly would you do with nuclear technology? How do you think we could capture the energy from fission without boiling water?
Well it seems like a stupid idea to use nuclear technology to boil some water. So just don't. Just because it's possible doesn't mean you should do it.
And yet for a plethora of regions it's the only viable alternative to fossil fuels for reliable electricity.
Well if its the only choice you have then do it. Luckily for most part of the world it's not necessary.
It's not because of smr, it's just that all large projects have this level of corruption and grift.
Skill issue. I can't even blame capitalism, since the french manage to get almost 90% of their power from nuclear.
China has 53 GW installed, 25 GW under construction, and another 47 GW planned. Generally they're pretty clear-eyed when it comes to major projects like this, so I think we can infer the availability of cheap hydro and solar doesn't favor doing more than ~15% nuclear since they're only planning to increase it by 150% over the next couple decades.
Maybe that will change when they set up long term storage/reprocessing.
IIRC the French reactors are all nearing their end of service life and'll be decommissioned soon.
Surely you made a typo? 50 MW is a tenth of the electrical yield of the smallest PWR you can profitably operate.
Off by a factor of 1000. That's why I'm not a nuclear engineer.
So, there's this thing called Java...
Edit: Changed introductory wording to be less belligerent. I am sorry if I have caused a significant level of offense.
Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation.Some people claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. It is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don't provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There's simply no need to go nuclear.I hate that the conversation is happening on these terms. I hate that we have a bunch of opinionated online "teams" on this issue.
Hey, you know what we need? All of it. Any sort of energy generation that lowers atmospheric emissions in any way we do need. The concept of "nuclear shills" shouldn't exist, the concept of "solar shills" or "hydrogen shills" or "fossil fuel shills" shouldn't exist. The entire conversation is a PR battle by energy corps to get people to buy into marketing so they can get governments to back popular choices so they can get expensive contracts for large infrastructure work.
I hate that we have online keyboard warriors overrepresenting the challenges of one of the contributors to lowering emissions while underrepresenting the challenges of others. Hey, do you think nighttime generation and storage is an issue? Maybe installation costs for domestic solar generation, the state of the grid or the uneven distribution of solar power yields on different territories? Because I do.
And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem (which makes it confusing that some countries are dismantling plants that seem to be working safely and are within their expected lifespan, but I digress).
And I do think the impact of hydroelectric power in nearby areas is a problem.
And I do think the open questions for geothermal are a problem.
And I do think the issues with cost, storage and dirty generation of hydrogen are a problem.
And I do think we should be working on all of that. At once. This isn't kids arguing about which game console is better on the backyard, this is a massive existential issue, and would be even if we weren't dealing with a climate change ticking bomb. This report? It's bad news. Any report that tells us any of the ideas we have for weaning off fossil fuels is not working as well as we expected is bad news. Can we all get with that program?
The problem is that "both" isn't a valid option unless a country has unlimited finances.
Otherwise you have to decide on what's the most feasible option and then renewables win big time
I sometimes feel as if the current push for atomic is from the fossil-lobby as they are aware that it either works and they get 10-20 more years to sell oil until the reactors are built - and even if it doesn't work out it still will slow down rollout of renewables
If you have 100 billion to spend on energy producing you have to choose if you want to go all-in with one source or split it up which would move the end of fossil fuels Back further
Not to mention having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships and having problems to cool down the reactors with rising temperatures and rivers running dry
I just don't see how atomic isn't a huge gamble that can backfire hard (and I'm not even talking about catastrophic events like Fukushima)
You keep doing the thing. The thing sucks. Please stop.
For one, no, that's not how that works. Money is already being spent in energy generation, mostly towards oil and gas. This isn't your weekly takeout budget.
It's also not a race towards infinite energy where you dump money to make the infinite energy bar go up. Energy generation will continue to be costly and have problems, regardless of the mix of options chosen. There is simply no single silver bullet. Which is, presumably why we already don't go "all-in" on one energy source, which is just about the dumbest possible plan. Energy diversification is absolutely part of this, regardless of where the majority of the output is coming from.
So please stop it. Genuinely stop it. This isn't a zero sum game, it's about finding the mix of energy sources that gets you less killed in the next century or so. Not finding a single source, not backing a single winning horse, not having your stupid team you support for either dumb Internet reasons or disingenuous trolling reasons win.
If we are thinking of the next century then these discussions are very relevant. A century is a long time. We don't actually have that long for some of these problems though.
Most countries have unlimited finances. They only have limited real resources like labor, concrete, copper, glass, etc. The fact that we still don't understand this and behave as if the metadata of the economy accurately describes reality puts artificial brakes on the solutions of many problems, climate being one of them.
The problem is that if a country treats money as unlimited and without a cost then inflation will mirror that and people in that country will lose their savings, their job will not pay for their bills anymore and so on
It's not as simple as "just spend more"...
Inflation is a symptom of the lack of some real resource. There are many parts of the economies of many countries where there's unused production capacity which simply "turns more natural resources into more stuff" if more money enters that part of the economy, without producing inflation. It's not "just spend more", it's "spend as much as you can on things that you want done, which aren't limited by real resources."
I found Randall Wray's lectures on the topic to be eye-opening. If what I wrote sounds strange, and it might, I highly recommend watching some of them. There are a few recordings on YouTube.
Not really, but also kinda. The biggest exporters of ore are Kazakhstan, Namibia, Canada, and Australia.
The only major producers that aren't American puppets stripping themselves of resources to maintain western hegemony are Russia, Niger, China, and India, who total less than 15%.
I wouldn't call Russia or India not-dictatorships, but I don't see them using US weapons and training to put down a restive population and keep the resources and money flowing out like Kazakstan.
All good points, and I’m all for pretty much any technological research, but
Thorium is another form of fission generation that has not been commercialized yet. In the real world, maybe it will be better, or maybe it won’t. But fission generation already takes too long to build out, so why switch lanes to a different form of fission generation that also needs more time and money to be commercialized? Nuclear uranium fission generation had its growing pains over the years, as the technology found challenges to address and areas to improve, but thorium has not yet gotten far enough to run into those so there will be additional challenges requiring time, money, further development
If those were decades ago when the future was bright for fission technology, I’d be all over this. However the future is dark and cloudy for fission generation, nightfall may be approaching. The advantages of thorium are not enough to shine a new light, there’s not enough room for improvement to save fission generation, this is just an expensive detour.
This is nonsense. Like someone else said we will need some kind of nuclear power for future space exploration. There are parts of the world that are dark for six months of the year, and plenty of places that don't get enough light for solar to be practical.
Most renewable sources are not consistent enough to be used by themselves, and battery storage isn't practical with current technology. Then there are the concerns with hydro power and biomass and how that affects the environment. I have even been told by leftists that biomass shouldn't be installed as it destroys too many native forests.
Of course the actual best solution is one we don't have the technology for yet: things like nuclear fusion or neutrino capture.
For the record, I disagree with you both and this narrative is also part of the problem in my book. Screw the futurism and longermism of "we need nuclear power for space exploration". We're not talking about that. We're talking about mitigating runaway climate effects and filling the blanks of an alternate energy mix by using complementary tech.
Absolutely let's keep working on nuclear power. Absolutely let's keep working on battery storage, and potential energy storage and thermal storage and wind and geothermal and whatever else we can come up with. And absolutely let's abandon whatever doesn't work or is made obsolete, starting with no longer burning hydrocarbons as soon as we can stop.
There's this air of erudite dilettantism about this chatter that just pisses me off. People sitting by and idly projecting their sci-fi fantasies about colonizing planets or about a fully solar powered planet and feeling smart about it. Given the short-term, impending human cost of this issue, both for climate reasons and for energy scarcity reasons, that just feels gross at this point.
What do you disagree with me? I was trying to back you up up here saying that yes we need nuclear in addition to all the other technologies. I am not saying that you shouldn't use solar, just that it isn't applicable everywhere on earth.
You should be talking about that. After all climate change is also a future problem. Staying on a single planet isn't safe even if you eradicate climate change, war, disease, and just about everything else. There is pretty much nothing stopping a gamma ray burst or stray blackhole, or any number of other things from killing everyone on this planet. Like yeah climate change is a high priority, but it doesn't make all other issues go away.
Look, I'm just trying to impress something very specific here and I can tell I'm not getting through.
I'm not here to call out people arguing for or against one or another type of energy generation. I'm complaining about the discourse about this being about long term hypotheticals and optimal solutions when we should be in emergency mode.
It's like we're in a burning building and people are having arguments about the cost per year of different types of fire extinguishers. But if I make this point about someone criticising nuclear power it comes across as me "siding" or "shilling" for nuclear power, same if I do it when someone argues against solar power.
But I'm neither. I'm arguing for practicality and immediate action. Because we need it now, not because I just finished reading the Dune books and have some really neat ideas about generation ships.
Remind me what type of thinking leads to climate change, and pretty much every pollution issue we have now? Short term thinking that didn't take into account long term consequences. If we aren't careful we could actually make things worse by chasing things like lithium battery technology.
Trying to come up with short term solutions to climate changes is fine, but you have to thinking about the long term as well.
I also don't think you give enough credit to the people who are criticising nuclear, they are talking about the short term. "Renewables" are cheaper in the short term. The thing is solar panels, wind turbines, and so on is that they don't last forever, recycling the equipment is problematic, and manufacturing them is an environmental crisis in its own right.
Nuclear in its current form is a medium term solution with its own shortcomings around waste storage, and the materials needed to construct and fuel a reactor.
This is all still probably better than fossil fuels but we are talking about the difference between getting shot (fossil fuels) or getting stabbed (nuclear/"renewables").
Immediate action? We needed yesterday's action, but rushing things today isn't going to make up for it. In fact probably the best thing you can do right now is stop having kids. Bring the population down. Ideally this needed doing decades ago too. If we don't do it then nature will do it for us, which is probably inevitable at this point anyway.
And I was one of those someone else’s, but in the context of calling out that there’s likely little in common.
That’s a choice: too many less developed countries still clear native forest for agriculture, so expanding agriculture has a downside . ITs something those countries need to take care of regardless, just to feed their people.
This is a failure of policy and governance, not technology
I have as much of a handle on the challenges of small thorium generators as I do on the costs and challenges of generation and containment of green hydrogen or the solutions for storage of solar power. That is to say, I know there are challenges, I roughly understand what they are and I know we don't know how to fix them yet. At least not beyond a number of companies that have invested a lot on doing that saying they're on track to do that and a bunch of people saying that no they aren't.
I don't know why I need to be "all over" any of this in any way. I know that we need to solve the challenges on multiple of those technologies, and we need it for ten years ago. The reasonable approach seems to use all of these as they become available based on their total emissions and cost. Anything else seems like either irresponsible idle tribalism or disinformation. Hell, in any case where the least amount of emissions is fossil fuels... well, you do fossil fuels. This is not about ideology at this point.
You are still doing the thing, just like the other guys. I keep wishing people would stop doing the thing.
Brought to you by fossil fuel propaganda filtered through renewable resource advocates who would also lose out to nuclear energy.