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Discussion (51 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Great to see engineering deliver on time. I wonder if Rolls Royce will also have a smooth ride. It's a PWR.
That distinction matters because nuclear.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The French reprocess and recycle fissile material but that’s kind of a gnarly industrial process. Still they do it and it works.
The long term solution is to create a second kind of reactor that has a higher burn fraction which means a more fuel efficient fast reactor. Those would be, ideally, the big base load plants if we did this rationally.
What concerns me is that 250 years of fossil fuel energy continues to store its waste products in my lungs and the water I drink. That's the issue we need to solve with urgency.
The "eh, just bury it" approach is really not a bad one. Its not even that much stuff to bury
[1] https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16651
[3] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-la...
Should we double down on renewable energy and solve its issues with lots of batteries or should we invest in next generation nuclear energy?
Both at the same time?
Does anyone know?
Renewables and batteries to keep your AC, workplace EV charger, stove, pool heater and (since recently) green ammonia producer going, nuclear to prevent e.g. aluminium smelters from seizing up.
Also the cheapest way to make renewables work 24/7 is to build HVDC lines - they cost as much as a highway per unit length and even undersea cables would deploy for less and faster than equivalent nuclear.
The total length of HVDC lines just in China is currently more than 40k km, so they've literally deployed enough of them to wrap around the globe.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Not saying they’re not also building renewables and nuclear, but it seems like the policy is more “build anything and everything to satisfy demand” than a focused effort.
BTW: if you look at US emissions, the data center bubble hasn’t had much if any effect. They are still trending down. There’s reasons to dislike that industry but I’m sick of the mindless echo chamber doom on that issue. They’re not that significant in the grand scheme of things.
An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3].
[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
[3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/
If you don't: stick to renewables.
And it also depends on what you mean by "we". As a Dane, I don't think us Danish taxpayers should invest in nuclear energy, but I'm perfectly happy that private Danish investors invest in Seaborg/Saltfoss and Copenhagen Atomics.
Do it all.
Nuclear really has to go big (supply most of the world's energy) or go home. But supplying most of the world's energy means burner reactors are inadequate -- there isn't enough cheap uranium. Burner microreactors have even worse neutron economy, so this argument applies even more so to them.
https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
I think a low carbon mix will result in the cheapest, most reliable and cleanest energy grid.
The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs.
You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav Smil. But Smil used this argument to massively mispredict how solar would be go in the market. We don't hear him much anymore.
Nuclear advocates increasingly resort to conspiracy theoretic reasoning to explain away the failure of their technology to compete. This should be a red flag.
France nuclearized 75% of its grid in the 1980s while the solar folks were faffing around. It's not a cost issue, it's that anti-nuclear folks have choked out the industry.
We need to take the boot off the neck of nuclear. Wind and solar aren't an avenue to moving up the tech tree of civilization, which will involve using vastly more power.
What we do know is their attempt to build more NPPs now has gone spectacularly tits up, with costs completely out of control. This should make one view their earlier efforts with great suspicion. Have they become much worse, or were earlier problems concealed?
I have a solution, take the subsidies spent on "renewables" and put them into nuclear! Easy peasy!
We should be investing in all non carbon emitting sources and we should have been doing it since the 1970s when we figured out pretty conclusively that this would be a problem.
Instead we had right wing fossil fuel shills on one shoulder and unscientific woo woo greens on the other, the net effect being that we kept burning more carbon. We still have them, Trump with “beautiful coal” and greens now opposing even solar power and batteries, but climate change is no longer possible to ignore. Some still manage it but those people are nuts.
If we hadn’t stopped improving nuclear we’d probably have emitted half the CO2 we have. It would have become cheaper and safer and more scalable and then when China industrialized they would have copied that instead of burning so much coal.
France with its nearly zero carbon grid is the existence proof.
It wasn’t until the 2010s that solar and wind became grid scale in a big enough way to matter. That was too slow.
Whether someone is at least open to nuclear power is my litmus test for whether they take climate change seriously.
I do. If we hit 600, 800, 1000 ppm CO2, which is possible if the world keeps developing on the back of fossil fuels, we are entering existential risk territory. Earth has had those CO2 levels before, and higher, but our species was not alive then.
We already passed the FAFO threshold for ppm CO2 and now we will FO. But that’s not X-risk yet. I’m talking about the next threshold, which may start around 600 but really kicks in near 1000. This is where you actually start asphyxiating. You get lowered IQ and impaired judgement to a small degree, but across the globe at a time when we really don’t need it.
> "The demonstration and the licensing pathway it establishes represent a key step toward deploying electricity-producing microreactors for U.S. military installations by September 30, 2028."
So which is it? Power to the people or power to the military? This microreactor concept doesn't seem very well suited for commercial use.
Crippling diseconomies of scale.
Rooftop solar is an example of small scale decentralized energy production, maximum efficiency is not the only relevant metric.
> And you probably don't want dozens of "microreactors" scattered across cities
Why not? If they're considered safe and pass all inspections, what's the problem?
Secondly although generating large amounts of power is more efficient in terms of generation, generating power close to the point of use is significantly more efficient in terms of power loss on the grid as I understand it.