It's interesting how incredibly low France's CO2 output is, mainly thanks to their investment in nuclear power. And while uranium isn't renewable, I think we've got 300,000 years worth of it available. Think we can crack fusion or ultra-high-efficiency solar by then?
> This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world's largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That's cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel.
Solar & Batteries work great in California when peak demand is when its hot. In the frozen North though its different, esp if you want to replace gas/oil heating with heat pumps, peak demand would be cold nights in January.
Certainly in the UK there is talk of trying to wean people off of using gas to heat homes.(1). Options to replace it are electric heat pumps and/or hydrogen-based systems.
Most people I know have abandoned gas hobs and replaced them with induction hobs - they feel a lot like cooking with gas (unlike halogen or ceramic ones), but are a lot more practical (e.g. cleaning, extra space etc) and better for air quality.
> induction hobs - they feel a lot like cooking with gas
This really depends on the hobs. Bad ones are nowhere near gas quality and trend to regulate the heat by going a few seconds full power then few seconds off. Good ones regulate in a much smoother / more consistent way. We can't compare generic "induction hob" - it doesn't exist.
In the North, AC will simply not show up on your energy footprint. Heating will most definitely. So yeah, electric heating is is. I hate electric heating as a user, but nearly every apartment here in France has it. And since France is most nuclear, that's actually not bad in terms of CO2. For cooking there's induction, which easily competes with gas in terms of convenience IMHO, but yeah, for heating I'd like better solutions.
Although in fairness, it would be interesting to make that comparison after accounting for external costs of both. CO2 emissions for gas, and nuclear plant decommission /storage in case ofnjuclear power like here in France
Interesting how there, the trade-off of electricity for nuclear is so advantageous, that you can even do inefficient things with the electricity downstream and still come out ahead.
Gas cooking is probably my #1 primary source of CO2 emissions. I ought to switch to electric. Burning that gas at a weaker plant and sending it to me over the wires is still cleaner at a mg-CO2/joule than burning it at the point of use.
("primary" means I directly cause it; if I drove a car that would probably be my #1).
This is the key that people forget. Not all power source work equally as well in all areas. There is a need for a diversified energy portfolio.
I do want to follow this up saying that I fully support building as much solar and wind as we can. Not doing so is kinda dumb. Just saying it isn't a cure all.
Currently, electricity is generated by "peaker plants", which spin up when the price of electricity goes up, and then spin down when the price of electricity is low. Consumers are often passed the buck: peaker-plant electricity (usually natural gas) costs more than baseload electricity (usually nuclear or coal)
Utility-scale batteries are competing against the Natural Gas peaker plants. The question is if utility scale batteries can make as much money (ie: provide the power at low enough costs) to be worthwhile.
Wholesale prices for electricity certainly vary, but consumer prices are a flat rate, 24/7. Nowhere I've lived has this not been the case, and there is no incentive whatsoever for consumers to time-shift their electricity consumption.
A huge part of what caused the Enron California electricity crisis is the utilities were unable, by law, to adjust consumer prices as wholesale prices changed. The utilities were required, by law, to provide whatever consumers demanded whenever they demanded it, at a fixed price, regardless of what it cost the utilities to provide it.
If this has changed in California, that's for the better. In Seattle, the price of electricity is the same, 24/7.
Consider gas prices at the pump. They vary every day, based on demand and supply of gas. Gas prices go up over Memorial Day. They go up when a refinery burns down. They go down in winter when people drive less. It works very well at matching up supply with demand.
It broke down completely in the late 1970's when the government imposed price controls and allocation controls at the pump. When Reagan repealed all that, things worked fine again.
I don't know when it changed, but California mandates time-of-use pricing for all commercial, industrial, and agricultural electricity customers. Residential customers can opt into ToU plans too. My uncle is on one because he is retired, so can set his own hours, but also likes to run electricity-intensive tools in his shop.
Even better than ToU is having it priced minute-by-minute based on supply/demand, just like gas prices are. After all, a cloudy day may reduce solar output, and prices should rise accordingly.
Here in in Illinois we have ComEd which has a RRTP program with “real-time” pricing for residential customers based on supply and demand. I’m not sure if it’s true real-time but current price in 5-minute resolutions.
That sounds like the right kind of system. The next step is to build this awareness into things like the HVAC system, the refrigerator, the car charger, etc.
Finally, a point to having internet connected appliances!
Not in the US, but I have two meters on my house.
One meter is attached to most of the circuits, and charges the 24/7 rate.
The other meter is attached to the heater system, only works off-peak, and charges a discounted rate.
The heater is basically a slab of steel, wrapped in heating elements, surrounded by insulation. It heats up when the power is on, and temperature controlled vents let air circulate when it's cold in the house. Works ok, but I'll probably change it out for a heat-pump soon.
I looked, California utility rates come in a number of plans, which are recent. Some are "tiered", meaning the more you use the more you pay. This doesn't help with the battery problem.
There seems to be an increasing use of Time of Use plans, which will help with the battery problem. But they're a poor match, still being fixed rates for fixed times.
The bidding costs for peaker plants have been beaten by renewable+storage combos for IIRC 2-3 years now for new builds of capacity. IF you think about it, the gas turbines are a fairly expensive capital cost with high maintenance vs renewables. Add to that intermittent operation and that capital costs performs even worse while adding maintenance wear and tear for startup/shutdown.
There is so much scope here for a hydrogen economy to take off. Run at 32gw all the time, when demand is 16gw, send that energy into generating hydrogen/and or batteries. It's the ideal use case for 'always on' nuclear.
Then start investing in reducing the energy consumption of air conditioners, as that's by far the biggest consumer of energy in a home, and it's rather useless if it doesn't run during the day.
We've got 300k years of fissile material, at current usage rates, which is only a small fraction of our current energy usage. If we magically went to 100% nuclear fission for energy (which is not reasonable for personal transportation, at least), and continued to increase energy consumption per business as usual (developed economies not reducing, and developing economies rapidly catching up to developed usage per capita), then it would not last nearly as long, by 2 orders of magnitude. Also I think that estimate imagines efficient breeder reactors and "complete burning" of the material, and does not take into account our current incredibly wasteful techniques of using 5% of the available energy and burying the rest in an unrecoverable mountain sludge.
I know that a few thousand years still feels like a long time, but with nuclear fission, it is truly the most non-renewable resource, being formed only in stellar explosions. Let's put aside the science fiction of asteroid mining nuclear fuel for now; I think a reasonable argument could be made to not spend nuclear fuel for our primary energy needs. If we have dreams of ever being able to do mass interstellar travel, nuclear material is the only fuel we have so far with reasonable energy density for the speeds and distances involved. (Of course some will say "nuclear fusion" or "light sails", to which I say, we should defer mass consumption of fissile material until we have a reasonable expectation that those methods are viable).
"We" now and "we" ten thousand years from now are very different people. Those in the future will laugh at your concerns for them. It's as if ancient Egyptians would worry about whether we, now, have enough flood plain space to harvest crops.
Nuclear fuel is a non-trivial resource. There is no basis for thinking we will ever find anything better.
Scientific progress is not a law of nature. It needs very specific environment to thrive. Before scientific revolution kicked in the pharaohs would have easily adjusted to europe and elsewhere.
No one can predict whether there is an infinite amount of scientific progress ahead of us or will we hit a wall.
There are plenty of areas to look at for new energy generation just within particle physics alone. Not to mention that we're at the finish line with a net positive fusion reactor (I don't know a single fusion scientist that doesn't think iter will work).
Scientific progress may not be law, but there isn't a thousand year period where humans haven't advanced.
I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long?
Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know when it works, until, well it does. And who knows how long it will to take commercialize once we do get it working.
I mean, Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 were easy and would be solved in 2 years. 4 years later, Tesla'd are killing people by driving into highway barriers or broadsiding a semi trailer. Ambitious? Yes. Are we there yet? No. I think autonomous driving is a worthy goal and we should keep working at it. Same with fusion. But do I believe the projected timelines? No. Doubt that I'll see fusion as a power source in my timeline. Maybe never fully autonomous vehicles (I mean trully fully). And I'm still under 40. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think a lot of people underestimate the true difficulty of some of these projects.
Quoting Musk is probably the worst example you can give. His track record for prediction isn't great.
You're right that it is hard to predict how long R&D takes, but governments are different than companies. Companies have a lifespan in decades, possibly a few centuries (if you're REALLY really lucky and pivot a lot). Profits are focused at the yearly level and long shots are decades out. Governments on the other hand generally have much longer lifespans. Decades are short periods of time for them. Investing in things that will pay off in a century is great business here (lots of science and math falls into this category). This is the problem. People are comparing how companies operate to how governments operate. They have completely different agendas, priorities, and operate at completely different time scales.
Unless you believe markets are completely inefficient I just don’t buy this argument. Think about the reward awaiting the person or company that finally cracks fusion power: trillions of dollars in wealth; the gratitude of an entire planet; instant, everlasting fame, and so on. So, ample incentives already exist. No, the reason we haven’t solved fusion is that it’s a hard problem, and the right genius(es) have yet to come along.
Companies are just too risk averse for expensive moonshots like this.
Construction costs alone for ITER are estimated to be $22 to $65 billion dollars. This doesn't even factor in the cost of actually running it after that or the cost of feeding all the scientists involved in it (which receive government funding through their respective countries).
You can probably count the amount of companies with enough cash lying around to finance this on one hand. And then they'd still need the people for it.
Even once ITER is completed you still don't have a realistic product to sell. ITER is of no use besides getting us one step closer to fusion energy.
And at the end of it we may just realize that fusion is never going to be cost efficient compared to other energy sources.
That's no risk any sane company will take.
As always the free market will wait until all the groundwork has been laid by taxpayer funded scientists, and even then only make a move if there are massive government subsidies - as has happened and is still happening with fission energy.
The free market is much better at low-risk and incremental innovation. Stuff like this? Not so much.
This is exactly right. If we look at history most of the major moonshots have at minimum had a substantial help from the government. Even silicon valley had a lot of help. Places like Bell Labs did as well, and partially forced. We see things now like X, but they're moonshots aren't decades out from being useful. That would be dumb for a company to do, which generally don't last on the other of centuries. But countries do! Even when they don't, the use lives on in the birth of whatever new country. Countries are in the business of succeeding on the time line of centuries, so funding things that takes decades of research and billions of dollars (mind you this is an international effort so that money is spread out over decades AND by many countries) makes a lot of sense. It's a simple fact that countries and companies operate on completely different time frames.
That being said, I have friends in fusion. I know plenty of others that work in various areas of it. No one thinks iter isn't going to work. All the major problems have been solved. The infighting you see is about money, because there isn't much going around for this because the gp is right that this is a difficult problem and we thought it was easier. The argument now is that some think we need iter to prove that it works and that will cause more funding to come in and then we can build the nice fancy power reactors. The other camp is that we don't need iter and that we should put that money into <insert popular method> (most will probably work). This is a very different conversation then what it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago we had neutron problems.
The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half an ITER a year. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
> That's one company spending half an ITER a year.
No it's not even close to the total cost of ITER. It may just pay for the cost of actually physically constructing it.
The R&D that got taxpayer funded scientists to the point where we are able to construct it at all is going to be a multiple of that.
> The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
So you're saying that things like fission reactors, spaceflight and GPS, treatments for some rare and not-so-rare diseases, the Human Genome Project, ARPANET, everything that came out of CERN, etc. were bad ideas just because no private company could be assed to develop and build those first?
No. It's a fact that all of these were vitally important to get our species where it is today, even though they would have looked like a terrible investment of time and money from the perspective of a private company. Today private companies have happily entered some of those spaces that have been pioneered by government funded scientists.
It's true that many moonshots fail. That's why they're called (sometimes literal) moonshots. But it's important to try anyways so we can advance as a species.
And most of the time we learn a lot even if we fail.
Fusion is powered off of hydrogen, the single most abundant element in the universe. Seems to me like the smart bet is that sometime within 3000-300k years humanity will have developed fusion.
Cold, net-positive fusion. Current fusion reactors either require more power than they output or would run far too hot to be sustainable.
While I too am hopeful that humanity will be able to crack cold fusion in the next few hundred millennia, it should be noted that cold fusion is something which has simply not occurred in our universe before. Yes, fusion is the most commonly-occuring process in the universe, but all of it runs hot. It is possible that net-positive cold fusion might never come to pass and we'll have to go back to solar panels so we can exploit the output of already-existing hot fusion from the Sun.
Why would you need cold fusion? Simply net-positive energy output from a (hot) fusion reactor would do the trick.
Of course, there is a risk there that we will hit some fundamental efficiency limitation that simply makes it not worth it. But st least it's not known to be a physical impossibility, like cold fusion is believed to be.
In fact, more than cold fusion, I think there is a reason to hope for warm superconductors at some point in the future.
That depends on how hot we're talking. I'm not up-to-date on the latest hot fusion work (so I might very well be completely wrong here) but I'd have naively assumed that containment would be a significant limitation of having stable hot fusion reactors. Most research fusion reactors I've seen online only run for minutes at most -- and that's with net-negative fusion.
Basically there's lot of research into how to do containment that's far more efficient than Tokamak reactors that suffer from the problem you mention. A 100 years is a really long time to bet against given how the pace of our innovation is constantly increasing, let alone 3000 years. Keep in mind that thorium has 3x the capacity & we don't even have reactors to process that so even "regular" has a very long shelf-life. Uranium scarcity isn't a thing when compared with global warming & meets our energy needs drastically better than solar/wind & even hydro while having a much more compact ecological foot-print.
From what I’ve been told, the runtime limit is mainly because they have a stringent and tiny limit on the lifetime radiation production of their reactors. These limits are not technological, they are because the reactors are research projects.
I believe the main losses are plasma instabilities, rather than the energy cost of the containment. This is somewhat secondhand knowledge though, I merely used to hang out in a pub with someone who worked in this field.
This assumes we don't screw ourselves into another dark age via societal breakdown climate disasters. Both events seem increasingly likely within 100 years, let alone 10,000 years.
Humanity in Y12019 might be exactly where we are now.
If we can't make any improvements or find an alternative energy source (like fusion, who's fuel is essentially limitless) then we probably don't deserve to live anymore.
The assumption that we'll make absolutely no technological progress in a (at a ridiculous lower bound!!) 3000yr time frame (and that we shouldn't use an energy source because of that) is laughable! Let alone calling something the least renewable because of it. Specifically with nuclear we've made tremendous progress in the last decade alone. There is no evidence to support this kind of thinking. Let alone that humanity won't make any progress.
If we took this kind of thinking to any other kind of problem we'd never make any progress. There's reasons to not use nuclear (I'm pro), but this isn't one of them.
> If we magically went to 100% nuclear fission for energy (which is not reasonable for personal transportation, at least)
Not quite so fast. A nuclear power plant under the hood of a car may be unfeasible for a long time to come, but what is becoming feasible is electric cars. Right now, a Tesla is still powered by coal in most places for now, but as more renewable energy sources come online, they magically get switched over to being solar powered, and then they become "nuclear powered", if/when that time comes.
There is effectively an unlimited amount of uranium dissolved in ocean water which can be mined at a much higher cost, but which is an insignificant cost in the operation of a nuclear plant. There's no reasonable reason to delay consuming uranium, and absolutely ridiculous to consider saving thorium (not that we can actually consume thorium yet).
They don't produce plutonium. Department of War (later the Dept of Energy) had a LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor) running at Oak Ridge but the primary goal there was to produce plutonium for the military's nuclear weapons arsenal, not electricity.
In addition to having a far more plentiful fuel source, a LFTR runs at ambient atmospheric pressure so it's not necessary to have a massive containment dome surrounding the reactor in case of a core loop breach. Also, the chemistry of a LFTR tolerates the addition of partially spent uranium fuel (popularly mislabeled as "nuclear waste") which is then consumed in the normal fuel lifecycle of a LFTR. Why this wonder of chemistry isn't more commonly known is beyond me: we could simply solve the Yucca Mountain problem by recycling the partially spent fuel stored there into liquid metal reactors like the LFTRs. The downside is that if you have to scram a LFTR the core chemistry solidifies (it's liquid metal, after all) and restarting is time and energy intensive.
Ultimately, though, because the LFTR didn't produce plutonium for bombs the Department of Defense didn't have interest in running it.
I disagree with this. 233U is part of the Th cycle. You definitely get transuranic elements out, though admittedly less. There is an advantage though, you can produce power and pull out enriched uranium while doing that; an enticement plant that generates power. (Note: we already use reactors that have low plutonium yields)
The real reason that we don't have thorium reactors is that it's difficult. All the kinks aren't worked out. Compound that with that it's hard to implement new reactor designs and the process becomes really slow to work out those kinks.
The answer, unsurprisingly is extremely complicated but certainly isn't just because it doesn't produce Pu, or rather creates low yields. This myth needs to die.
I think it's fair to say our expertise in Uranium cycle fuel came out of the fact it generates substantially more plutonium for nuclear weapons. This was a huge reason it was selected over Thorium initially. Now, it may just be momentum. I argue it's because back in the day, it didn't product Pu.
Also keep in mind that the Uranium cycle is SIGNIFICANTLY easier. I'd argue that that played a major role. But I'm also not denying that weapons didn't play a role.
The fact that as a total percentage of the cost of generating the power Uranium is cheap as heck. All of these complex alternative fuel plans are solving a problem that doesn't currently exist.
If we went all in with fission we still have thousands of years before it's an issue, by which point we'll probably have figured out some even better alternatives.
Oh dear this ancient repeated never ending debate. Nuclear lost - in cost, in failure modes, in lack of private funding, in plant build time, in risk of enrichment systems... dead horse is dead.
Edit. Add the fact the reactors take decades to develop, cool story we have about ten of those decades before really shit has hit irreversible climate destabilization fan.
Tell that to the US Navy which operates dozens of reactors in wartime vessels travelling millions of miles and enduring rough conditions and even combat with one of the best safety records of any industry.
The US has 2 sunk Nuclear submarines (129 and 99 lives lost). With at least USS Thresher being related to a loss of propulsion and thus at least indirectly the reactor. Considering how few where in service and none being sunk in wartime that’s not a great safety record. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subma...
The cause of USS Scorpion’s sinking is unknown so it may be related to the reactor or it may not.
We're discussing safety record for nuclear power specifically, not lost ships for any reason. The USN has about half of all the reactors running by the USA. How is that a "few"?
If you read the page about USS Thresher then it clearly explains it had nothing to do with the reactor and was a "high-pressure water spraying from a broken pipe joint may have shorted out one of the many electrical panels, causing a shutdown ("scram") of the reactor, which in turn caused loss of propulsion" followed by other personnel and procedure issues that led to a sinking.
That quote directly says the loss of reactor power was part of the chain of events leading to a sinking.
Sure it did not blow up, but that does not mean the reactor was safe to use as a critical piece of equipment. Loss of power is a huge deal and the reactor being unable to recover in that situation is a major design flaw.
That's like saying a torpedo hit the sub and the reactor stopped working so it's a reactor problem. You're being disingenuous. The reactor was not the part that malfunctioned.
Again, if you read that page then you'll find several other causes like faulty ballast tanks that didn't eject, isolating the steam system too quickly and eliminating potential energy from the turbines, and inexperienced personnel not restarting the reactor after shutdown. If just the ballast tanks had worked then the sub would be safe for rescue, if the steam was used then it could continue to drive to surface.
According to an official report [1]: "U.S. Nuclear Powered Warships have safely operated for more than 50 years without experiencing any reactor accident or any release of radioactivity that hurt human health or had an adverse effect on marine life. Naval reactors have an outstanding record of over 134 million miles safely steamed on nuclear power, and they have amassed over 5700 reactor-years of safe operation." and this is from several years ago.
Steam turbines are part of a nuclear reactor. If it had used batteries and Diesel engines there would have been no steam system to fuck up.
I absolutely agree it was not the single cause of failure, it was even recoverable in theory. But, if the reactor had continued to supply power, like large result battery systems tend to, then it would have likely made it. That directly means using a reactor was less safe to put on the sub.
If an aircraft lost all engine power over the ocean because of a defective engine design and thus crashed. Well you can bet the navy would blame the engines, but with nuclear power they care about perception. The loss of a crew is acceptable risk, the loss of nuclear reactors from a public backlash is a loss of capability.
PS: They can and do mitigate this risk by having large battery systems for redundancy, it’s only a few hours of power. But, it can run a redundant electric engine to move the sub, and that’s an important lesson learned.
If it was a diesel-electric then the broken water-pipe would've shorted out the batteries and electrics, and the flooded engine room would've stopped the engines, resulting in the exact same loss of power.
The fact is that the reactor didn't fail, it worked normally. The steam system didn't "fuck up" but was used incorrectly. The part that did fail was the ballast tank safety system. Diesel-electrics aren't a magical answer and have major disadvantages (like the need for air intake in a submarine).
It seems you're arguing that nuclear-powered designs aren't good, which is an entirely different topic than the safety record of the reactors themselves. Bad design of a system is not an argument that that core principles are inherently wrong, which is exactly the same thing any nuclear expert will tell you about Chernobyl.
It’s very possible that a broken pipe would have shorted out all batteries on an equivalent non nuclear sub. But, that would also have been a significant design flaw.
Anyway, I think this is more a case of disagreements about what constitutes a system than about what happened. I would say if the design of a critical system lets people mess up then that’s a failure of the design and the system. Chernobyl was very much a case of operators doing a long series of dumb things as people do. Similarly, the operators caused an issue with the steam system, but that just means the system and it’s design was also faulty. (IMO, the steam system should be considered part of the nuclear power plant as civilian nuclear power plants also use a steam loop for similar reasons.)
I would rate the US Navy highly on nuclear safety operations especially over the last 50 years.
That's also 3,000 more years to figure out how to make a useful fusion reactor, or to figure out how to smoosh neutrons and protons and electrons together to turn uranium into a renewable resource, or to figure out how to blow up stars and harvest fissile material that way.
3,000 years is a long time at our current rate of scientific discovery.
Enough time is millions of years for the earth to make oil.
If it makes you happy, i’m willing to ration the uranium so the earth’s supply lasts 10,000 years. If our exponential knowledge curve can’t solve the problem by then we might be in trouble.
The singularity should be within the next 10,000 years.
Once you get to the point where you mined all of the fissile material in the solar system you probably have fusion figured out or how to use solar power at large scales.
I'd say we have a reasonable expectation that fusion will be viable this century in the sense of working. Whether it will be cost effective remains to be seen.
It’s going away on the scale of billions of years. Personally, I think it’s much better to use it for space exploration than unusually expensive electrical power.
Now if was even vaguely cost competitive with battery backed up wind and solar then that’s a reasonable argument, but until then I just don’t see the point.
With seawater extraction and breeders there's enough uranium to power the entire world many times over for hundreds of millions of years. Thus, just like the fusion fuel in the sun, uranium fission fuel is effectively as renewable as it gets.
Good news! That figure probably grossly underestimates how much uranium can be extracted. Indeed, I'd interpret that 200 figure as 1,000-2,000 years worth of supply.
If nothing else, people havn't seriously looked. For example, in Australia, the state of NSW "proclaimed on 14 September 2012 ... [the removal of] the ban on uranium exploration" [0]. Australia has worlds most extensive uranium resources in the world, although not in the state of NSW for obvious reasons. Possibly we can extend our lead.
But practically, the 'resources' definition that that article is relying on (going purely off the Australian legal framework) likely involves investment on the part of companies to be able to advertise. We've a lead-silver mine in Australia that have '20 years of resources' on the books over 80 year periods, because every time they need a mine extension they go out and 'discover' a bit more of the resource that everyone knows is there but havn't officially measured yet. The current 20 years of resource is a polite lie as well, they've got lots more.
And surprisingly, there is a constant "let's end nuclear!" campaign going on in France. A lot of people complain about the risks of accident and the nuclear waste.
Nuclear reactors are delicate machines, and owners all over the world treat them badly to maximize profits, those in France being no exception.
In theory there's lots of controls and oversight and everything, in practice the nuclear industry has waste products that are suitable for military purposes, and so they can get away with rather a lot as their watchdog ultimately also owns a military.
These campaigns to "end nuclear" might have less traction if the owners managed their systems properly.
If we believe climate change is a catastrophic disaster for humans now and near future, we should do everything to protect ourselves.
There is a false dichotomy of renewables vs nuclear. Pursuing these options are not mutually exclusive. Only in so far that we want to devote limited resources to the problem.
The real solution is that we should pursue both. Nuclear so we have a back stop to the problem. Renewables so that we have hope for the best case clean and safe energy future.
It is foolish to believe the projections on renewables will absolutely happen. There are a lot of problems that can happen with technology at scale. Nuclear is a surefire bet, with risks being nuclear meltdowns and improper waste management.
We would have done the same in the UK, except it was foiled by an anti nuclear movement which is still informing the environmental movement today. It's a heart breaking own goal.
Nuclear energy always has and will be a purely political thing. Without state funding no private or public company would have taken on the potential future risks of harnessing the same power that laid waste to two cities and forced the Japanese Empire into decades of submission.
Sadly we live in a world were future risks are ignored and lessons from the past, be it nuclear bombs or warfare in general, are forgotten and ignored.
We have already cracked solar and battery tech. Coal is dying. Nuclear appears to be near dying as well. This has happened in the past three years or so.
This has to be flagged for the quality of the news source.
There are multiple typos in the article itself (the last word is "recieveing"). The homepage headline as of writing this comment is grammatically challenged: "The ‘Black Mirror’ tech billionaires are investing in to try and live forever"
This article provides no sources, no footnotes, no authoritative evidence other than "purportedly..." It editorializes throughout and reads like it was written by a Romanian SEO bot.
Do we have any standards on HN anymore, or do we just post and promote articles with clickbait headlines that make us feel good?
Albania has been run on 100% renewable energy (hydric) for 50+ years now.....
the only thermo-central power plant built, has been uncompleted and in-functional for decades due to the high cost of fuel.
Usually smaller countries that have the resources can pull it off.
(hydric in the case of Albania, as it is 70% mountainous and has a lot of rivers crossing it).
The downside is that is very much rainfall dependent. There are years where it could actually export energy, and there are years that it has to import it to meet demand.
Norway have produced on average more energy than we consume the last 70years, but we can not call ourself green anymore because the CO2/energy certificates are bought by Facebook, Apple and other large energy consumers in Europe that want their green stamp. The problem is that Norwegians still feel they are green because we produce so much green energy, and don’t understand (?) the link with money. Because of that Facebook and Apple (++) get these certificates super cheap.
True, but If it is balanced with the exports, then it is still zero overall. (eg. if your renewable exports are substituting dirty energy somewhere else).
I don't know what the current ratio is, but I do know that Rainfall directly affects the GDP of the country by almost +/- 1%.
With their mountains and rivers they could probably use hydro as backup for solar and wind generation and achieve 100% but with ability to buy electricity because of the connected grid unlikely to happen
And the air still smells like car exhaust in pretty much every city. I've been there many times and was actually there earlier this week. I've been all over the western half of the country. They have an insane tax on cars - I think it's like 20% of the value of the car - which means a bunch of people drive old beaters and cheap dirtbikes. They are noisy and dirty. I had an easier time sleeping last time I went to NYC than I did in Palmares with all the motorcycles riding around. They require you to bring your car in for regular emissions tests, but I don't know how that's working out because a bunch of the cars there are a lot dirtier than what we have in the US. Once you get away from the cities and cars it's beautiful though.
Is 20% really insane? Do they also have a VAT? A VAT is often 20 or 25% so that seems like a normal tax on any product, not only cars. It’s probably high for not-very-rich country though (compare e.g with Norway’s sometimes over 100% tax).
It's high enough that people are driving dirty old beaters instead of something newer that pollutes less. You could probably make an argument that it does more harm than good. I think they also have VAT or it's coming soon. There have been protests about it since late last year. A couple weeks ago they were at it again and truckers clogged all the roads going 1 kmh.
What are you even talking about?
VAT has existed in France for decades. The 20% tax has nothing to do with cars, its just the regular VAT you pay on any transformed good. People driving old cars also paid VAT when they bought it (it might have been closer to 17% back in the time).
And finally the yellow vest movement has nothing to do with VAT.
Pretty sure you are missing something. We are talking about Costa Rica, not France. There have been protests in Costa Rica about a new tax. Truckers have been clogging up the roads.
Costa Rica has high taxes specifically on cars. It’s a car import tax and every new car has to be imported. Someone there told me 20%, but a quick search looks like it’s 45-85%. Whatever it is, the result is most people are driving around in old cars that have higher emissions than newer cars. A lot of the stuff on the road is over 20 years old.
I'm guessing it has more to do with the fact that the average person's yearly salary is around $9,000 [0]. At that salary, it'd take over 2 years of pure saving just to afford a toyota corolla.
The import tax is around 50% and still have to pay sales taxes (like VAT but different). Here the cars are sell with nice seats and radio, instead of must have security features... You know, to die with style.
Oh, yes San Jose smells bad, but most people avoid going there unless really needed.
Totally agree. If you spend any time in San Jose you feel like you have to take a shower afterwards because the exhaust from the cars and buses is so thick and gross and gets all into your clothes. If only they would take emissions a little more seriously.
It's a great achievement to produce 100% of your electricity from renewables but this title is misleading. Cars, planes, trucks, etc, still run on fossil fuels. Costa Rica also heats water with gas, like most countries.
Also, Costa Rica has always been a low emissions country. In 2014 they had 1.6 per capita, well below the 4.3 world average.
> As Costa Rica is a small country, it's much easier for it achieve these lofty goals, than say, countries like China and the USA, which are larger in size.
Does this affirmation actually hold?
Is it really easier just because it's smaller? In this particular case Costa Rica has a lot of natural resources that enable this. But in general I think that these changes depend more on willingness than country size.
It struck me the same way. Presumably, you have a lot fewer people to work at pulling this off, also. That would be like saying, "of course it's hard for Costa Rica to achieve these lofty goals, with only a few million people to support it, whereas China has over a billion people". The particular resources, yeah, maybe, but that particular statement seemed silly.
> In this particular case Costa Rica has a lot of natural resources that enable this
Maybe the clue is here? Presumably the USA and China have areas the size of Costa Rica that are as rich in resources as it but those are averaged out by the rest of the land.
It is very impressive, but when looking at a broader picture you come to see that electricity prices are fairly high, the temperate climate means mostly no heating or air conditioning needs, and there is very little energy-intensive heavy industry like steel mills or such.
But every country has its unique features and must play with the cards they are handed. So this still is really neat.
Another wikipedia article states this, which I based my assumption to.
>Mild climate and trade winds make neither heating nor cooling necessary, particularly in the highland cities and towns where some 90% of the population lives.
In the capital San Jose it has about a mile's altitude and is in a valley ringed by mountains. In the capital every day is pretty much 70 - 80s F / 20s C and a little colder in the mountains, the coastlines are at sea level and quite hot.
At least in the political/socioeconomic sense (though perhaps not in the literal sense of "the point where water meets land"), lots of what we consider to be a "coastline" is actually well above sea level (for example: sea cliffs).
It's sad how every such article is flooded with excuses basically amounting to "it's not identical to the our situation in every single particular, so it couldn't possibly work for us." The world would be a much better place if people were willing to learn from people outside their bubble.
Part of this is the fact that Costa Rica is an energy exporter.
Handling consumption peaks means either using fossil fuels, or vastly over producing electricity during non-peak hours (which in a free market can cause odd incentives such as negative energy prices). CR as an energy exporter, they generally produce way more than the country consumes, so they get to handle the peaks in a way that is unique to places that have energy importing neighbors.
I will add, this electricity is produced by a government run monopoly that keeps prices extremely high, which has chocked out much of the manufacturing done in the area.
Even tradition, old school Costa Rican brands which supply the local market have been moving to Nicaragua and Panama (Jack's snacks for example)
Still, the achievement is great news and commendable.
> Only with renewable energies, this country has been operating for more than 6 months. The heavy rains in the region have allowed the country to completely renounce fossil fuels, and to feed almost entirely on the electricity generated from 4 hydroelectric plants – with a little extra help from geothermal, solar green energy and wind projects. With a little more investment, this trend can be maintained over time.
The grid in Costa Rica is also highly unreliable and many communities will run off oil & gas generators for extended periods of time (in addition to the comments that a majority trucks, busses, cars still run off of non-renewable sources.
It shouldn't - the damage dams do to our fisheries is devastating. We likely wouldn't need fish farms and genetic modified salmon if we didn't have so many dams.
I would consider them renewable as long as the river keeps flowing. The question of whether or not we should use them because of the damage to fish populations is another question entirely.
> The state applied to kill the sea lions “because their analyses showed that the high levels of predation by sea lions meant there was an almost 90% probability that one of the upper Willamette steelhead runs would go extinct,” the wildlife agency said in a statement.
Nuclear has well known downsides. As I mentioned, it's not renewable so isn't a permanent path forward for human civilization. But additionally it currently has unpriced externalities in long term waste storage, looks less attractive when fuel & plant are full amortized over lifecycle, complex relationship with arms proliferation, limited deployment options because of large cooling requirements, requires permanent and expensive security and expertise over the life of a plant, and others.
It's not the harmless cure-all that it's made out to be here at times.
edit: that said, CO2 levels are an immediate planetary crisis and nuclear is a tool we can and should use to mitigate it.
Nuclear isn't renewable precisely, but the amount of fuel available is extremely large and not being decreased by any appreciable amount.
Waste storage can be handled quite easily by reprocessing fuel, the waste is very small in comparison to other types of energy. There's little to no relationship to arms proliferation, that's only a very specific type of reactor and fuel that's not in general use for nuclear power.
And finally there's a lot of water on the planet. Cooling isn't a difficult problem.
The bigger problem is that reactor research has essentially been stopped due to nimby problems, so we don't even know how much better we could make nuclear power.
I think I'm missing some sarcasm here. Nuclear power plants need water for cooling. If a fish gets stuck in the cooling system then it gets ravaged. The hot water gets dumped back into the river. If the water gets too hot then everything that lives inside the river dies.
"The last reactor, N Reactor, continued to operate as a dual-purpose reactor, being both a power reactor used to feed the civilian electrical grid via the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS)"
"Hanford also hosts a commercial nuclear power plant, the Columbia Generating Station, and various centers for scientific research and development, such as the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the LIGO Hanford Observatory. "
However, Intel closed the fab business here years ago, when they decided to reduce expenses even further by moving production to Malaysia. They are still around with some software-related projects.
Our Costa Rican economy is, more than ever before, based on providing services: customer support, technical support, financial services, web and games development, digital arts, ecotourism, etc.
They spend hundreds of millions on the UEI special forces that are somehow not considered military even though they are structured like a military. This is basically their defense from Nicaragua and narcos which is really all they have to worry about. They have the Fuerza Publica which handles broader security and law enforcement. They are also under UN protection and both the US and China have interests there. It's not like they don't spend any money on defense.
> Fuerza Publica which handles broader security and law enforcement
See that's a force that has a daily purpose unlike a standing Army that waits for battle.
The 70-something strong UEI is something most countries have since the 70s to fight terrorism, like Germany's GSG9. Again, not a standing army to fight another army.
A standing army on the other hand is a very large and very powerful tool, either to fight outside armies or to impose internal repression. The whole point about abolishing the military was to take this force out of the larger equation. The UEI will never be a threat to Costa Rica itself, a standing army would be.
In my native Germany you can consider a chunk of the Bundeswehr to have a right-wing/extremist mindset (E.g. Franco A.) and I wouldn't trust it much in a situation like say a Green-party leader becoming Bundeskanzler.
This is pretty awesome. I just came back from a trip to Costa Rica and although I found the country a tad boring and overpriced, I was thoroughly impressed with the knowledge and respect locals have for nature.
