
Energy - jordanmessina
http://blog.samaltman.com/energy
======
beat
I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce
fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in
terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are
high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up.

Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up.
Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require giant corporations,
government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to
implement. With those incredible advantages, it doesn't need to be cheaper
than nuclear - it just needs to be adequately cheap.

~~~
icanhackit
_think of finance in terms of latency /bandwidth_ [...] _reactors are high
latency - they 're expensive and take a long time to set up_

I like this metaphor. I think what you might have implied but didn't
explicitly mention was distributed vs centralized when thinking about these
systems as well. Solar can be a distributed system whereas fission & fusion
systems are centralized.

Even though you can make small fission systems and IIRC Skunkworks is working
on a small fusion reactor (small = fits on freight truck...once the damn thing
works) you still have issues with waste, heat, faults etc. so they need to
remain isolated from living space. Thus they are better utilized in a
centralized manner.

Sticking with the computer/internet metaphors, you could consider solar to be
like a Solid State Drive while fission is very much the classic HDD, moving
parts and all. The elimination of moving parts/complexity to generate
electricity makes solar suitable for the home just as NAND is better for
portable devices like phones.

Pros: speed vs capacity, Cons: cost vs complexity - pick one from each pile.

~~~
XorNot
Faults are not a serious issue with a fusion reactor beyond it breaking down.
Neither is waste - an inert reactor is harmless unless you insist on
crowbaring into the core to bathe in all those activated inner wall materials.

~~~
icanhackit
_Faults are not a serious issue with a fusion reactor beyond it breaking down_

That's what I mean in the context of centralized vs distributed - replacing a
faulty solar panel is no biggie. Replacing a micro fusion reactor, while not
as bad as replacing a tokamak reactor, is significant.

 _Neither is waste_ [...] _unless you insist on crowbaring into the core_

Reactors still need to be decommissioned at some point, though you're right -
it's trivial comparatively. I will do a dance when fusion is a thing and the
world will be a better place.

------
kolbe
> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics
> technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion
> is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and
> realizable 10 time faster than other projects.

What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven
decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same
project. What in the world is this tiny startup doing with a $5mm grant that
is so easy and cheap that could possibly lead to that kind of breakthrough in
fusion energy?

~~~
rtfeldman
For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in
retrospect after every major breakthrough.

YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism
is not the best default.

~~~
kolbe
I am literally asking "what?" Because I don't know of any common idea that is
even in the realm of this. I'm hoping someone knew something about the process
they're pursuing that is not commonly known among cargo cult physicists like
myself.

~~~
titanomachy
> The Helion reactor will fire a steady stream of plasmoids from each side
> into a chamber, where the fuel is crushed by magnetic fields until fusion
> begins. Within one second, the fusion products are channelled away just as
> the next pair of plasmoids hurtles in. “The analogy we like to make is to a
> diesel engine,” says the company's chief executive, David Kirtley. “On each
> stroke you inject the fuel, compress it with the piston it until it ignites
> without needing a spark, and the explosion pushes back on the piston.”

[http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-
upstart...](http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-
upstarts-1.15592)

EDIT: This admittedly isn't very much information, but it's more than I could
find on their official site.

------
andy_ppp
Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill
underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive
waste that has such huge half lives...

From Wikipedia:

    
    
        Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission
        products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million
        years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years.
        The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life
        two million years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,000 years).[39] Nuclear waste
        requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it
        from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment,
        followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or
        transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.[40] Governments around the
        world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though
        there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management
        solutions.[41]
    

Here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_of_waste)

~~~
mikeash
The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by
industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly
content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to
safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from
"infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get _more_ worried?

~~~
mikexstudios
Well, the difference between chemical toxic waste is that there are accessible
methods for making it non-toxic. It's just a matter of cost. For example,
toxic organic and inorganic compounds can be thermally decomposed. For
organics, you create elemental carbon. For inorganics (containing metal ions),
you can reform the metal and collect it. Acid/base waste can be neutralized.
You can't really do that for radioactive material except trying to accelerate
the decay. And while chemical waste can often be handled with standard safety
measures, radioactive waste is just too dangerous to work with.

I see your point. I think one needs to consider both the danger of the waste
and the amount of it generated. Then try to find a good balance.

~~~
mikeash
What about elemental toxins like mercury and arsenic?

~~~
mikexstudios
Just collect and store. They can be purified and have commercial use.
Otherwise, since they came from the earth in the first place, storing it back
in the earth doesn't change the amount of toxins we have in the ground.

~~~
mikeash
So why is "collect and store" OK for this stuff, which lasts forever, but not
OK for nuclear waste, which "only" lasts some thousands of years?

~~~
mikexstudios
Because this stuff already existed in the ground (just not as concentrated),
is not as toxic as radioactive waste, and can be recovered and reused. Nuclear
waste generates new highly toxic substances that are extremely dangerous. And
even after the waste has "decayed", the products are still toxic (just not
radioactive) and last forever.

------
falsestprophet
_The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the
22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy (i.e. terrestrial
atomic generation and energy from sun’s fusion)._

It's silly to describe solar as atomic energy from sun’s fusion as a distinct
category from carbon-based energy, because of course carbon-based energy was
formed by capturing solar energy from the sun's fusion.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
How is this anything but useless pedantry?

~~~
drcube
I think the OP is illustrating the pedantry of "well _technically_ solar
energy is atomic energy" by pointing out that, by that standard, so is coal
and oil. In other words, I don't think you disagree with the OP.

------
jonathannorris
It's great to see you invest your time and money in nuclear power Sam. We
already have the nuclear technology to solve our energy emissions problem, we
just lack the political will to make the shift away from coal/oil/gas. Great
leaps in the efficiency and safety of nuclear power systems will hopefully
make the shift politically achievable.

~~~
arenaninja
I thought the biggest hurdle with nuclear energy was waste management? As in,
we've nowhere to put the toxic dump that's produced that will radiate a few
tens of thousands of years? Unless that's been solved, in which case consumer
education would be a next step

~~~
mikeash
Much of the waste problem can be solved by using reactors designed to use the
waste as fuel. This isn't currently done, but there's no big technical reason
it couldn't be.

For what remains after that, well, there's nothing particularly wrong with
sticking it in some extremely sturdy armored containers, sticking the
containers in a shed, surrounding the shed with a razor-wire fence, and
stationing a couple of guards at the gate.

The paranoia over nuclear waste is weird. What if civilization collapses and
people in the far future discover the stuff and don't know it's dangerous? It
lasts tens of thousands of years, after all! OK, but we leave dangerous stuff
all over the place. There are tons of barrels of toxic chemicals, ponds full
of poison, and heaps of awful stuff just sitting around, and more being
produced all the time. Nuclear waste is bad because it lasts tens of thousands
of years? How about arsenic or mercury, which lasts _forever_? And sure,
precautions are taken with those toxins, but not on the "this must be placed
in a geologically stable area, packaged to survive the fall of civilization,
and signposted so that all future intelligence will know to avoid it" level of
precaution.

~~~
jarvist
> using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel

What do you mean? The waste is full of nuclear poisons (a technical term,
isotopes that stop fission by neutron capture). Reusing it means reprocessing
to extract the Plutonium, which is burnable in a reactor (particularly as
MOX). The chemistry required for this is pretty messy, and the radioactive
environment (fuel from a power station is very 'hot' radioactively speaking)
so horrific that you need a fully robotic plant.

This hasn't gone great for the UK,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Oxide_Reprocessing_Pla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_Oxide_Reprocessing_Plant)

But we do now have 112 tonnes of Plutonium as a result of our half a century
of reprocessing. Which no one knows what to do with, and is an enormous
liability.

~~~
mikeash
The main problem with reprocessing is fears of weapons proliferation, which is
an odd fear when it happens in countries that already have large piles of
nuclear weapons, but there we are. The waste is _mostly_ still full of fuel.
Advanced designs like the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor could make
this simpler and cheaper.

What to do with the UK's plutonium seems obvious to me: use it as nuclear
fuel. If this isn't being done it's presumably because of political
opposition, not technical problems.

~~~
redwood
Hardly an odd fear when adding new systematic components to the material
supply chain massively increases the chance of some of that supply leaking.

Not doing that route makes you less exposed to risk.

In an extremely complex world where risk needs to be minimized as much as
possible, it's totally reasonable for society to decide not to extract
plutonium at mass scale in a free market way.

Sure if the military controlled the whole thing (as they do via their own
supply chain) that could perhaps feel more secure... but who controls outflows
of waste between governments, etc?

Oh and the mind-boggling cost. Who pays?

Nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of energy when you cost in the full
price of making it safe, including dealing with waste and ensuring absolutely
no proliferation of weapons.

------
codingdave
I worked on renewable energy projects a few years back, and while the idea of
a large disruptive technology development sounds awesome, the reality is that
there are already a plethora of renewable energy turbines and designs that
would greatly improve the world... But the engineers and inventors running
around with these ideas have no idea how to go from a small scale proof of
concept into a fully built out manufacturing and implementation process.

Even if they do figure out how to get engineering and manufacturing in place,
then there are regulatory barriers to figure out. There will be politics
involved, and legal challenges. And of course, you need to actually operate
the sites on an ongoing basis.

All of these challenges can be overcome... but most people who know how to do
so already work in the energy industry. What is really needed is a group of
people who can bridge those gaps to take an innovate design from an engineers
drawing board, and jump through all the hoops to make it a live production
site. If such a group were to be built, real change could happen very quickly.

~~~
jacquesm
There is also a very large amount of snake oil in the renewable energy field
and a ton of ideas that keep being recycled that have long ago been
invalidated.

~~~
codingdave
There is some of that. There are also very valid projects out there. I am
running under the assumption that people can tell the difference.

Frankly, most of the sketchy folk that I ran into during my projects were the
investors, not the engineers.

~~~
jacquesm
> Frankly, most of the sketchy folk that I ran into during my projects were
> the investors, not the engineers.

I've seen a couple of both, but for the most part the engineers when they are
wrong are deluding themselves as well, the investors that are sketchy seem to
be more cynical and aware of what they are doing.

------
sskates
I always wondered why more energy wasn't generated from nuclear. On paper it
seems like a great energy source.

Kudos to Sam for putting not just his money, but his time where his mouth is.
If only the rest of the internet could do the same!

~~~
chinathrow
> On paper it seems like a great energy source.

On paper the waste issue is still not solved. And the risks are still large
(yes I know, coal, gas and oil has it's drawbacks too).

~~~
sskates
Not sure about waste, can someone else here speak to that? Also deaths per
unit energy are incredibly low relative to other sources.

~~~
jddw
The UPower design is waste negative so it can convert the entire planet's
spent nuclear fuel and depleted uranium stockpiles into enough energy to power
the globe for about 500 years. All while leaving behind a waste stream that
decays to be less radioactive than the ground beneath your feet in a few
hundred years. If we buried it in Paul Revere's basement when it was built,
people could see it and touch it today without any exposure above background.
Not to mention it is also fuel agnostic so it can run on thorium as well.

It's also important to highlight that the UPower design can consume the entire
actinide vector because it uses fast neutrons. A lot of the longer lived
actinides cannot be fissioned or transmuted effectively by thermal neutrons so
they just build up.

We like to say we are the ultimate disposal, and can take anything, including
the waste from other waste consumers.

------
hypertexthero
Recently watched Cosmos Episode 6 where Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks of
photosynthesis and how all our energy problems would be solved if we were able
to learn the 'trade secrets' of how plants do it.

This makes a lot of sense.

Can anyone point out current research on this field? I don't seem to hear much
about it.

Edit: Just found this after searching #photosynthesis in Twitter:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/20/artificial-
photosyn...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/20/artificial-
photosynthesis-environment-energy_n_7088830.html)

~~~
jddw
There are neat ways to make sunlight into fuel, but it's about what form that
energy takes. If it is a fuel that needs to be burned - in the case of sugars
from photosynthesis - we already do this by burning wood.

I think Cosmos missed a really important lesson which is that the fuels at our
disposal are all a function of time and distance. The longer a fuel source has
been building, and the less distance it has to travel to be useful to us, the
more valuable it may be. The sun is a result of billions of years of the
shape-shifting games between mass and energy, all driven by gravity. The
fusion energy produced in the sun then has to travel 93 million miles to us to
be useful. The food chain harnesses this energy and accumulates it over time,
and after hundreds of millions of years much of that energy has been
sequestered into fossil fuels. While there is a tremendous amount of power
emanating from the sun, it has to go a long way or accumulate for a long time
to be useful to us. Nuclear fuel sources on the other hand bring the billions
of years of nucleus building that previous generations of stars did for us to
our door step. The parent stars of our sun produced heavy actinides like
uranium or thorium, as well as the abundant light elements like deuterium,
helium, and boron, and then scattering them across the cosmos along with
leftover hydrogen in brilliant novae and supernovae. In our case, many of
these elements were in the stardust that formed earth, and are here beneath
our feet and above our heads.

Solar, wind, and nuclear will dominate the 22nd century, but we need both, and
they do and can play well together. They just need to be treated and respected
equally.

~~~
lutorm
Why does it matter how far away the Sun is? It's the amount of energy
available to us here that matters. And it doesn't have to accumulate at all,
the instantaneous energy flux is plenty high for our needs.

~~~
DennisP
Except for the darn planet getting in the way half the time.

------
sandGorgon
P.S. I'm not an expert, but this has been in news media in India for a long
time.

The reason that China and India are the only countries going after fission is
because of a singular element - Thorium. Both India and China have huge
reserves of thorium that can be unlocked with molten salt reactors that are
unviable anywhere else in the world (including the US, which gave up on this a
long time ago[1]). Australia does have large reserves of thorium, but its
projected energy needs are dwarfed by India and China's.

China is way ahead than India on this front with more than a billion dollars
managed by Jiang Mianheng to conduct research into these new reactors. And
which is why India is bending over backwards to sign the India-US Civil
Nuclear Energy treaty.

Interestingly, a US company, Thorcon [2], has built a "hackable" MSR - though
I dont know if it is any good.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-
nuclear-...](http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-
reactor/) [2] [http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-
to-g...](http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-to-go-into-
production-by-2020/)

------
erobbins
This is fantastic. Nuclear fission suffers from a hindenberg-type PR problem,
where incidents from early design mistakes and poor choices color the opinions
of people even though modern reactor designs are safe, efficient, and
essentially clean other than small amounts of waste.

I would love to work on a project like this.

~~~
beat
It's not just a PR problem, though. It's a cost structure problem, and a grid
problem. On the cost front, they're tremendously expensive. New tech and
manufacturing processes might get the cost from the billions to the millions,
but it's still very expensive.

On the grid front, nuclear is good for baseline, but not peak load. Most
nuclear reactors can't just be flipped on and off with a switch, or even scale
power quickly... they're more or less constant. So you still need a peak load
system, which currently consists of gas plants - very expensive, since they're
intermittent and offline most of the time.

------
codeshaman
> A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water
> availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to
> the energy problem.

It's worth pointing out that the problems enumerated above are partly the
consequence of energy becoming cheap and available during the last century
(coal, oil, etc) not lack of it. But the main reasons are the dominating
philosophical and ethical standards of humanity during the energy boom. Cheap
energy + wrong philosophy = bad application of energy = problems enumerated
above.

So if you want to tackle any of those problems, you have to work on both
variables in that equation, just increasing the availability of energy without
raising awareness of how to apply it, will lead to unsatisfactory results in
the long term.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Indeed. Technology is a multiplier. If we as humans keep repeating some errors
we'll shoot our foot (with bigger guns)

------
washedup
A huge part of the problem is not investment or technology, but the
legislative structure which still favors fossil fuels. The lobbying interests
and influence are immense. Once this starts to change there will be a rapid
shift towards clean energy.

------
abalone
_> terrestrial-based atomic energy... has major advantages when it comes to
cost_

Are we talking public cost? Because that's all that matters. So far the public
cost of nuclear power has been extraordinary, due to accidents and waste.

I understand that some of these startups aim to process existing waste in
relatively small distributed reactors but what is the public cost of spreading
a bunch of "mini" toxic waste sites around the world that remain hazardous for
100 years, instead of centrally storing it?

Plus I've read that although these mini reactors are not directly producing
material that could be used in a dirty bomb, that they could be converted to
do so if they fell into the wrong hands. I may be oversimplifying here, but
the question again is what is the public risk of distributing atomic fuels and
reactors in a manner that makes them much less secure? Would this make them
more susceptible to "war hacking" and could this be the mini-reactor
equivalent of a nuclear disaster?

Nuclear costs have always been about the long term public costs, not the short
term $/kWh.

This is before we even consider the taxpayer cost that's gone into nuclear
tech development. I wonder if there will be more public money needed to take
this tech to market, even if the test reactors bear fruit.

~~~
jddw
First, the reactors are consuming the fuel while deployed, but no waste is
stored at the sites. It is stored centrally so there are a few centralized
sites that hold the waste for a few hundred years. After which you could make
things out of the material and use them around your home without issue.

The reactors cannot be deviated for nefarious purposes. And the materials are
not less secure. The materials are being consumed by the reactor, and they are
not dangerous as they are. In fact these reactors could destroy weapons grade
material that is slated to be destroyed for fractions of the cost of programs
the US is pursuing. Plus the reactors are secured when deployed. They are also
buried and completely cooled by natural forces so they always stay cool. No
fuel overheating.

The reactors cannot be hacked, and if a bad actor commandeered one, all they
could do is turn it off safely. Even if they tried to make it hotter it would
just turn off and cool down. There just isn't enough fuel in the core to do
anything else.

~~~
chinathrow
All your statements seems to good to be true. Can you back them up with some
facts?

~~~
DennisP
It's a 1MW reactor. That's a thousand times smaller than conventional nuclear
reactors. It doesn't seem unlikely that it could be passively cooled.

For the rest, a great source is the book Plentiful Energy, by the chief
scientists of another small fast-reactor project at Argonne. For that reactor,
the fuel is a mix of plutonium isotopes which can't be used for bombs and are
much more difficult to purify than natural uranium ore. The waste goes back to
the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.

[http://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-
scientific...](http://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientific-
non-specialists/dp/1466384603)

------
api
I'm very happy to see independent fusion efforts raising money, given that
government R&D has decided to put nearly all its eggs in the tokamak basket.

------
sremani
I am convinced LFTRs are the way to go, they fit in with distributed
generation model very well. For what it is worth 21st if it takes Nuclear turn
will be clearly fission, actually fission is good enough. But if we were to
ascend into space and beyond fusion gives us bigger wings.

------
hackuser
Years ago, the story I understood was that renewables couldn't scale up fast
enough to sufficiently mitigate climate change, and nuclear was the only
answer. Recently, I've read that renewables have scaled up much faster than
expected.

Does anyone know the current story? Can renewables scale up fast enough? Also,
does the availability problem (i.e., renewables not being available when the
sun/wind are not) prevent them from having a sufficient impact? I could
imagine that, even if renewables weren't always available, their use still
could reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to mitigate climate change
sufficiently.

~~~
DennisP
Renewables still aren't fast enough by themselves, even with the most
optimistic projections, according to engineers from Google's big renewables
project: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-
rea...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-
to-reverse-climate-change)

Availability is a problem. Right now we're mainly backing up renewables with
fossil plants.

Most people really aren't getting what climate scientists are saying these
days, which is that we have to cut emissions drastically in the very near
future to avoid disaster. If we exceed +2C, or possibly even +1.5C, positive
feedbacks will take the planet several degrees further even with no more
emissions from us. Right now we're at +0.8C. Every ton of CO2 we emit takes 30
years to have its full effect on the temperature, considering direct effects
alone, so we've got another 30 years of warming locked in already.

+4C or so might not sound like much but judging by geological history, the
effects would include an enormous reduction in the amount of food we're able
to produce.

------
TeMPOraL
> _The big government projects, like NIF and ITER, unfortunately have the feel
> of peacetime big government projects._

Not sure what 'sama means by this, but I guess it's what I feel - government
projects tend to go slow unless there's an actual, real security reason for
them to go faster, in which case - like with Manhattan project - you get crazy
amount of productivity and progress.

~~~
gordjw
A focus on excessive procedure at the expense of real progress, unless there's
a pressing need (like war), would be my guess too.

------
soulsurfer
One important thing that nobody thinks about when discussing nuclear
fission/fusion as energy source of the future, is that it is not climate
neutral at all. Popular science tends to forget about that. In fact, nearly
all of the energy budget on earth comes from the sun. There is natural fission
and energy emission on earth, but you can see that as a background constant
and the climate system on earth has adapted to it. Fossil energies are just a
very large chemical sink for the energy of the sun, and we just burnt it away
at once in geological scales. If humanity now starts to deploy nuclear fission
or fusion, it will heat the earth even more. Because that energy was basically
trapped inside the atomic core, where it didn't play a significant role for
the global climate. With more and more atomic energy usage, the energy will
finally end as heat somewhere and increase global temperatures even more (not
in the way that fossil energies do with emitted greenhouse gases, but still).

~~~
DennisP
Yes, there will be waste heat and that will add to the Earth's energy budget.
But that's a tiny fraction of the heat trapped by excess greenhouse gases.

Deploying a bunch of black solar panels will also increase the Earth's energy
budget, by absorbing more sunlight. But that's another insignificant effect.

------
Helius
" It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex
regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement." Oh, Come on! With
similar government subsidies and Mandates, Donkey wheels could deliver a
similar power density. With such subsidies and mandates, donkey wheels would
double, double and redouble again, and one could therefore project donkey
wheels to exceed all power generation.

    
    
       Ironically enough, a donkey is 1/3 horsepower, which is 748 watts of power.  A donkey at about 250 watts is therefore is roughly equivalent to a solar panel the same size.  The donkey has the advantage over solar, in that it's dispatchable, while solar is not. 
    
     I wish we considered donkeys instead of Solar as a replacement for fossil fules, since the shortcomings might be more obvious to the innumerate.

------
natch
I'm sorry I missed this earlier because I wish Sam could see this comment.

Nuclear energy is inherently centralized and difficult to decentralize. This
creates all sorts of political and economic dynamics, some of which you (Sam,
and YC) may benefit from, but some of which may be damaging to societies in
various ways (think corruption, control, monopolies, etc.)

Obviously this isn't necessarily true for all possible as-yet-unimagined
implementations of nuclear technology. But it's something to think about when
comparing energy technologies.

Solar, on the other hand, while not necessarily inherently decentralized, is
extremely decentralizable, leading to very different dynamics.

I'm not saying Nuclear is bad. I'm just saying this stuff should be factored
in.

------
legulere
One problem I see with nuclear power is that it goes the very inefficient way
over heat. The prices in the building industry are rising so much that it
already is unprofitable to build nuclear power in the west today. (When
Hinkley Point C will start producing energy it will have a higher feed in
tariff than photovoltaics:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Economics))

I don't see any future for nuclear if it doesn't fundamentally change the way
it harvests the energy and when it solves the nuclear waste problem
economically

~~~
DennisP
Then you'll like Helion, which produces high-energy charged particles and
doesn't use a thermal cycle.

Neither of the ycombinator companies produces long-term waste.

------
stillsut
The killer app for these modular reactors is to scale with the same footprint:
If you have the infrastructure to house one of these boxcars, for the town's
first factory, why not 10 boxcars on the same site once the town grows in
population.

That's what you can't do with solar - with solar you already have a big
footprint to power that first factory, and your footprint increases
proportional to power use. 21 century calls for scaling roughly 20x = 2x
(population growth) * 10x (rise in developing worlds livining standards). I
don't want 20x solar footprint.

------
FiatLuxDave
Former fusion startup founder here (Fiat Lux Research, funded by DFJ
1995-2000).

I couldn't agree more with Sam about the importance of energy for our
civilization. Kudos to him for putting his efforts towards important stuff.

I have mixed, but mostly positive feelings about venture capital and energy
startups. The fact is, it's a tough space. Large capital requirements,
prototyping cycles often measured in years, and a low success rate. Everyone
is still waiting for the energy unicorn to put Google, Uber, Yahoo, et al. to
shame. And energy startups don't benefit from many of the things in SV that
infotech startups do, such as ecosystem synergies and being co-located with
all the new cool stuff in your industry. This is especially true with regards
to one of SV's great strengths, the freedom to fail.

Where SV shines is in the short times from idea to testing. In most of the
nuclear energy industry, going from idea to tested prototype can take decades.
I think we all know the importance of short debugging and feedback cycles.
Hirsch harped on this a few years back, and it's still a good point. Look at
ITER, which were were talking about back in 1995. ITERative, it is not.

Some observations:

1) The teams and funding are a bit larger than they used to be. This is
probably a good thing. The design turnaround time is a bit better, but not by
much though. It's necessary to tweak a design once you have built it to learn
from it and see what its ultimate performance can be. But it's all-too-easy to
spend a year or two doing that. Do that a few times and then you're out (of
money, time, your mind, what-have-you).

2) Location. There is no advantage to locating an energy company in SV except
for proximity to funding (and Stanford, I suppose). We located by the NHMFL in
Tallahassee. It's cheaper, and the magnet guys would moonlight for us.
However, working with Tim over 3 time-zones had its challenges. I don't think
we got the benefit of having a great VC as much as some of his other portfolio
companies did (no complaints about him, just the distance). Some things are
just hard to explain over the phone. But SV still isn't the right place. I
think that there is a big opportunity for VCs to improve how they provide the
value-added stuff that they do (beyond providing money) remotely, and energy
is the space that needs it most. I don't know the VC job well enough to
provide good suggestions, I just know there is an unmet need here.

3) Because the failure rate for startups is so high, it's important to have a
decent failure path for the people involved. For software devs, SV jobs often
provide a soft landing. Energy guys don't have that easily transferable skill
set. So, fusion largely consists of old hands who are willing to spend 20
years ramming a single design through, and a bunch of young redshirts who are
sure that they can beat the odds. When every design failure becomes a career
failure, people aren't incentived to radically iterate designs quickly.
Luckily for me, I learned radiation measurement and protection on-the-job (hey
we have neutrons! How many neutrons? Woo hoo! Wait, oh shit!) so that skill
transfered over into medical physics quite readily. But imagine what SV would
look like if almost every software startup founder who failed once had left
the software industry.

I wish good luck to Helion, UPower, and all the other teams fighting the good
fight.

~~~
dkirtley
Thanks FiatLuxDave, I think you are exactly right. Prototype/design cycle time
is a huge issue with fusion, fission, and many other energy technologies. No
matter how good your idea may be, you have to be able to build, test, iterate,
prove, and commercialize it quickly (and ideally, cheaply, but I would argue
quickly is even more important). In energy, the physics make everything work
better at large scale so it is easy to fall into the "build it bigger" trap.

------
MrBunny
Why are we so focused on having only one solution for energy? I would
understand the cost would decrease when you put all your eggs in one basket
but can we really find one type of energy source that has no disadvantages?
Wouldn't we be better served with diversity of energy production (more than we
have now)?

------
iamcurious
I find it strange there is no mention about batteries. From what I understand
(and it isn't much, I'm way out of my field) getting energy is easy, saving it
is hard.

~~~
cjensen
Fusion and Fission systems tend to run 24/7, unlike Wind and Solar. There is
far less need to store energy when using the former types of generation.

~~~
jarvist
Fission: Nuclear power stations have relatively low capacity factors (a
measurement of how much of time they're actually connected to the grid and
producing power). This is typically 70% over the last few decades for Western
countries (i.e. a third of the time, a nuclear power station is not producing
anything). As well as unintended maintenance shut down periods, most reactor
designs require a multi-month shut down to refuel. In recent years some
countries have managed closer to 90%.

Fusion: By '24/7' you mean the 0.5 s sustained burn at JET in the 90s.
Humanity has not yet managed to sustain fusion for a full second on the Earth,
let alone get any useful power out of it. ITER (the next generation Tokamak
test reactor) isn't built yet. The intent is for it to achieve 1000 s of
fusion burn time. Its over budget and behind time, and they've just had a
management reshuffle to try and deal with this.

* Edited & extended to try and incorporate nbouscal's feedback from below _

~~~
DennisP
Do you mean to include the entire U.S. as one of those states? Wikipedia lists
nuclear's capacity factor as 90.3% in the U.S. in 2009, and 88.7% averaged
over 2006-2012, according to the DOE:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States)

The Helion design which Ycombinator funds is pulsed, so sustained burn time
isn't applicable. It's also much smaller and cheaper than mainstream tokamaks.

------
hyperpallium
I wonder what environmental impact truly large-scale solar energy will have.
In that it is moving energy away from where it would usually fall on the
ground/plants, thus reducing heat, less rising air, less photosynthesis etc.
Perhaps additionally aid global cooling? Though that energy will mostly end up
as heat anyway.

(Of course it's far better for the environment than present
coal/petrol/gas/wood, and their energy initially came from the sun anyway, but
it will still have some environmental impact.)

~~~
Retric
As a sanity check, the earth gets ~1366 W/m2 * (6,371 km) ^2 * pi = 1.7e17
watts * 24h/day * 365.2425day/year ~= 1.5e21Wh/year ~= 1,500,000,000 terawatt
hours/year. Humans use 155,505 terawatt-hour / year or ~ 1/10,000th of that
much energy.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption))

Further, it's all (99.99%) going to get released so net impact is going to be
very local.

PS: In the end the real change would simply be changing the albino of the
planet slightly. But, buildings and roads already cover far more land than
solar is expected to anytime soon with minimal impact.

~~~
donttrustatoms
Hurricanes also produce Terawatts of energy. The question is the way the
energy is turned into electricity, and how it's stored or backed up because an
economy requires reliable electricity

I'm a supporter of solar, and trying to get it on my house.

But I also did some back of the envelope calculations that showed, just if we
had enough Powerwalls to backup US peak demand for one hour it would require
10x the global annual mining production of lithium. And that's just one hour.
And that doesn't include the electricity production.

It's generally estimated that US power, with good transmission, would require
enough solar panels to cover the entire state of Massachusetts. I think you're
right that it isn't the land cover that would have much effect, after all
buildings and roads already cover a lot of land. I think it's sheer material
production.

Mining is almost entirely powered by fossils, it has to be. And so is most
transport. And so is recycling of metals. So the energy density of an energy
source really is a zero sum game. If it takes a millionth the material for one
source versus the other, that adds up.

Then in maintenance, solar farms are truly "farms"\- they require a lot of
water to wash away dust to operate optimally. A states' worth of water is
significant.

Then in recycling at end of life, and this is why I got so excited about
nuclear as a somewhat hippie child growing up around oil companies in
Oklahoma, solar is going to require a lot of energy to recycle, while nuclear
can produce energy in recycling its fuel.

The main reality check, to me, is: what is the energy density of this energy,
and if emitting, how much pollution? Coal is far more energy dense than wind,
which is why humans evolved from windmills and wood to coal. But it's so
polluting which is why we are all working towards better sources.

~~~
Retric
20,000km2 sounds huge but:

The US currently uses 40% of the 84 million acres or 340,000km2 crop for
ethanol production which is arguably pointless. So, if we swapped just corn
ethanol for solar cells we would have 6 times more land area than the entire
state of Massachusetts covered in solar cells (135,000km2). And if we feel
ethanol is really necessary we only need 8% of the total corn crop leaving 32%
for corn ethanol.

If this still seems like a huge issue the soybean crop is far larger.
[http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/cropmajor.html](http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/cropmajor.html)

PS: As to storage, we don't need 100% solar wind and hydro can make a huge
difference. Pumped storage is also far cheaper at scale; it's just impractical
when scaled down to home use.

------
sunstone
Apparently the crust of the earth is floating on huge nuclear energy
generator. I guess it's a materials problem to tap into that?

------
dharma1
There already is a very well working fusion reactor - the sun - and it's free.
We just need better battery tech.

------
Mz
There is actually a lot we could do in terms of promoting _passive solar_ \--
i.e. a lifestyle and design-based approach that uses less energy to get the
same results. In a finite world, I really wish passive solar got a lot more
attention than it does. There are serious costs involved in burning ever more
energy. Passive solar brilliantly sidesteps that inconvenient physics-based
fact.

~~~
secstate
While I totally agree with you on principal, that's the energy argument
equivalent of saying that if there's a coal power plant being built in your
backyard you should move rather than complain about it.

There is a huge infrastructure cost involved in upgrading, building new or
knocking down and rebuilding non-passive solar structures. Now, giving tax
breaks to new construction that is passive would be great, but it wont put a
dent in the energy consumption issue.

I say I agree with you, because I think that saying "cheap energy is the
future" would have been 100% as valid a statement in 1965 as it is in 2015.
Fifty years and a HUGE series of energy improvements later and we're still
chasing the cheap energy dream. Guess what? Oil is cheap. And relative to
cutting down wood to heat your house with a fireplace (a la most of human
history) current solar is absurdly cheap.

What we need, and Musk knows this better than anyone, is better batteries to
store energy when we're not using it more efficiently. Batteries will
revolutionize the world, and Sam would do well to pay attention to what Musk
is doing.

------
nosuchthing
Least we forget: Tidal energy & Geothermal energy...

~~~
dredmorbius
Tidal offers little potential at tremendous cost and impacts. Outside a very
small number of modest sites, it's not likely to see much application.

Wave power is even worse.

Geothermal from high-flux sites does work and works well, though its limited
to a relatively small number of regions worldwide. Many of those have already
developed much of the available potential. Iceland, Indinesia, Japan, Kenya,
New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States most notably. Kenya's Rift
Valley is probably the biggest greenfield opportunity with significant impact
opportunity (Kenya's existing electrical infrastructure is minuscule). In the
US, resources generally exclude both the Yellowstone Caldera and Cascade
range.

------
jsprogrammer
Hmm, major reversals of conflict-of-interest policy? (ie. now chairman of two
YC companies and personally investing in them)

Large claims with no hard data comparisons? (eg. atomic power has major cost,
density, and predictability advantages)

This(?):

>There will only be one cheapest source of energy

Really? There can't be two sources at or near equilibrium?

These systems are not deployed in isolated, designer environments, but instead
are deployed in complex environments. Transportation and project logistics
will prefer some sources over others.

The lack of any real metric for cost or "cheapness" is a red flag. Is cost
being measured in nominal dollars? Will such a thing even exist in the 22nd
century?

~~~
benaiah
The hard data has been around for years, and is fairly easy to find. Not every
blog post needs to have an accompanying statistical analysis.

~~~
jsprogrammer
So easy to find that it can't even be linked to on the web by two people that
claim it exists?

~~~
mikeyouse
I still think there are huge issues with nuclear that need to be solved but
nothing Sam said was controversial;

Cost:
[http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm](http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm)
\-- on an LCOE basis, Advanced Nuclear is cheaper than everything but natural
gas and that's entirely due to CapEx costs to build new plants -- which are
what the modular nuclear companies that Sam's joining are working on fixing.

Density:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials)

Predictability: Can be assessed by the capacity factor of plants that are
running, the EIA publishes monthly data;
[http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=14611](http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=14611)

~~~
jsprogrammer
So, comparing the report in your link for cost, Solar PV capital cost is a bit
more expensive than "Advanced Nuclear" capital cost. However, the ongoing
maintenance costs for solar PV are less than 50% of the ongoing maintenance
costs for Advanced Nuclear. In fact, the additional (over Solar PV), annual
maintenance costs for Advanced Nuclear are about 17% of the entire capital
costs. After just a few years, Solar PV will be saving massive amounts of cost
over Advanced Nuclear, just in maintenance.

This seems to at least be partially taken into account in the "Total LCOE"
numbers (sorry, but this report doesn't seem to have much as far as exactly
how these numbers are calculated). Without subsidies, Solar PV is about 30%
higher. However, when you look more closely at the actual ranges behind the
averages that are the primarily cited data, you'll find that the Total LCOE
estimate ranges for Advanced Nuclear and Solar PV actually overlap. The
"minimum" Solar PV estimate is 97.8 and the Advanced Nuclear "maximum" is
101.0.

The claim that atomic energy has major advantages over solar is not borne out
in this EIA report. In fact, the report seems to show that solar is highly
competitive with almost every generation source and actually has a huge
advantage in ongoing maintenance costs, being practically at the bottom.

I haven't investigated the other links yet, since the first one didn't seem to
pan out.

~~~
donttrustatoms
That makes sense given those numbers tabulated, but the real question is cost
of solar _plus_ backup or storage. One means nothing without the other in
terms of both cost and carbon.

Above I illustrated my calculations on just one hour of battery backup for US
grid with lithium ion- would require 10x annual global production of lithium.
Generally cost of battery backup looks like 35c/kWh and has limitations on
duration so it must come back to fossils.

Solar makes a lot of sense if backup/storage/smoothing weren't needed since pv
has gone down in cost. It still makes a lot of sense in many off grid
applications, and for instance in my home we have solar concentrator lights
and I would love to have solar water pre-heaters in the summer. But for on
grid the capital requirements are much more complicated than generally
illustrated, and ultimately the environmental impacts are greater than
apparent at first glance.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Lithium ion makes no sense for storage. Something like large-scale flywheels
would probably be much better. Using gravity for storage is even more
sustainable. Flywheels for night use and stored water for long term use
(storms, fog, prolonged winter at poles [would need to keep from freezing])
all powered by solar or other low-ongoing-input sources should provide a
pretty nice environment.

~~~
dredmorbius
Flywheels have proved extremely expensive with massive engineering challenges.
When you have to account for precession due to Earth's rotation, things get
tough.

For short term very high flux power conditioning they've got uses. For long-
term storage not so much.

Seconds to minutes is likely their effective range. Not hours to days.

------
Eleutheria
Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the
individual.

Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors,
etc.

Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and
reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could
switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and
installing it at home.

Individual energy independence, even if it will never be possible, that's
where our dreams should be.

Then water, then food. That's disruption at seismic level. Post-scarcity
world.

~~~
beat
Decentralization solves a lot of other problems as well - it's less vulnerable
to accidental or intentional failure, it requires much less skill and expense
to implement and operate, etc.

Solar has the advantage that it cannot be weaponized even in nonsense theory,
greatly relaxing export regulation. This makes it a viable solution for
developing countries and remote areas, not just the handful of nations with
the wealth and sophistication to manage a reactor.

~~~
someguy488fu348
Solar may have been weaponized as early as 214 BCE.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Photovoltaics can't really be weaponized, and we can't stop bad actors from
getting access to large mirrors.

~~~
TeMPOraL
PVs can't be weaponized because they suck as an energy source compared to
burning fuels. Any power source with enough energy density to be interesting
is a weapon, just like any engine with enough power to give you reasonable
interplanetary travel times is a weapon of mass destruction.

Humanity needs to find a way to deal with high-energy technology if we're to
move forward as a species.

------
sgk284
Slightly off-topic, but going to UPower's site shows nothing but a somewhat
sparse wintery forest. Perhaps I've too much sci-fi on the brain, but it made
me think of a nuclear winter.

~~~
donttrustatoms
Haha, wow. :) Thanks for the comment. It was meant to signify the communities
in the far north or arctic that currently are reliant on very expensive and
dirty diesel... Our webpage is under construction probably to be put up in
about a week. You can definitely feel free to ask any questions and would
appreciate your thoughts on the new one.

~~~
kpennell
cool of you to respond!

------
dmritard96
Obnoxiously self important attitude.

------
transfire
There are other technologies. Nuclear isomers for example have a lot of
potential, but the fossil fuel hegemony really keeps alternatives from
flourishing. We can be very thankful that photovoltaics was invented pre-WII,
otherwise I doubt we'd be seeing it today either.

~~~
jacquesm
That's not really how it works. Technologies are either commercially viable or
they are not. The thing that enabled windpower and solar power to take off is
economic parity with other means of generating power. Photovoltaics and
windpower being 'invented' (as if it isn't blatantly obvious that there is
energy in wind and solar and that this energy can be captured in a myriad of
ways) before a certain date has nothing to do with whether or not we see them
today.

Tons of money and effort has been sunk in attempts to create more sources for
energy and some of those have paid off and others are still under review. The
'fossil fuel hegemony' is actually quite a large investor in more than a few
projects, their product is energy, not a particular kind of energy.

------
jjtheblunt
The article ignores the elephant in the room: the problems he discusses are
all more directly a result of too many humans for the closed system planet.
Period.

------
3pt14159
Probably not. Energy isn't really what is holding the poor back - a lack of
stability and security are. If I had to chose one technological improvement to
help most people on the planet it would probably be benevolent AI, which could
refocus many of our challenges to what is important. Getting people out of
poverty and war.

Energy is a tiny component of modern civilization.

~~~
saryant
Energy is the sole basis of modern civilization.

We are Hydrocarbon Man.

~~~
dredmorbius
Por que no los dos?

Yes, abundant energy is behind virtually all past development. What seems to
be holding back the next 5 billion, however, is _access_ to what that energy
has made available.

Though the question of just how many billions can be provided for ought also
be raised.

