Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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> Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life.

This is the most insidious and false lie that is spread. Right now we are going through a technological revolution in humanity, maybe on the level of the development of agriculture, in how we generate energy. Renewables and storage are often cheaper than fossil fuels at the moment, and they are getting cheaper just like Moore's law describes the densification of transistors on chips.

HN is full of technologists. We, of all people, should recognize the capacity for technology change. And that technology change is actual work, that needs actual funding and labor, in order to happen.

We do not need fossil fuels for modern life, if we develop the technology. Dedicated technologists and entrepreneurs over the past 50 years have made solar power the cheapest energy out there, despite massive political power and the all the money of fossil fuel companies fighting against them.

If we had prioritized solar and storage, could we have accelerated the tech's development by 10 years? 20 years?

We don't have every single aspect of technology for decarbonization solved yet. Aviation fuel, for example. But that doesn't mean we can't, it just means that we haven't tried hard enough.

When I say petroleum products are a requirement for modern life, what I mean is that more than 80% of the energy driving modern society comes from fossil fuels. It probably doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. You definitely can’t say that for cigarettes.

I think that you raise a valid point, but also that you’re far too optimistic about renewables.

The people of HN are indeed very tech focused, and I believe that such optimism about energy transformation with renewables may be more difficult to foster if this forum were called “Engineering and physics news” simply because technologists tend to suffer from the “Law of the hammer” problem.

There are very real engineering challenges with renewables that may very well preclude the kind of dramatic progress you’re referring to. Solar and Wind for example require huge amounts of land, and have a fairly high materials throughput as their lifespan is typically only 15-20 years. All of that effort is spent gathering a diffuse source of energy. There are very real physical limits to how much energy you can gather per square foot, per kg of silica, concrete, or steel.

I think your sentiment is correct about nuclear though, which makes me wonder how much big oil has been funding groups like the Sierra Club et al. who have spent nearly half a decade campaigning against nuclear energy.

I didn't say anything about nuclear here... but since you brought up the subject, I think it's a perfect illustration of how misaligned perception and reality are on the subject.

The "physical limits" of renewables are not limits to our current energy use or even an order of magnitude more. Similarly, the amount of materials is still far far far less than what is required with fossil fuels. And the amount of material needed to build a 1GW nuclear reactor is within a factor of 5-10 of what it takes to build an equivalent amount of solar power, last time I checked. Both of these are far far far less material than what's needed to generate equivalent energy from fossil fuels, it doesn't even really compare.

The complaints against renewables are pretty much insignificant, and definitet not applicable to reality, but these are the complaints that get perpetuated and listened to again and again in utility decision makers. Meanwhile, these same decision makers are not avoiding nuclear because of what environmental groups are saying, they are avoiding it only because of financial reasons. What it took to restart nuclear construction wasn't protection against environmenta lawsuits, it took the South Carolina and Georgia legislatures passing bills that would allow the utilities to bill for construction even if it weren't overbudget, and even if construction failed and the project never generated electricity. Cost is the primary barrier to new nuclear, not environmental opposition.

Nuclear has spent 50 years over-promising and under-delivering, solar and wind have spent 50 years under-promising and over-delivering. They are a study in contrasts between a hype driven field (nuclear) and a results driven field (renewables).

Solar has more than 15x the materials throughput per energy generated:

https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-technology-review-0

Solar produces 4x more carbon than Nuclear:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/

The value of variable renewables declines with increased deployment:

https://neon.energy/Hirth-2013-Market-Value-Renewables-Solar...

Wind and solar combines receive 94x the US Federal subsidies and Fossiel fuels receives 2x (per TWh of generation):

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/

There is also the fact that most wind farms use about 400x more land per TWh generation, and solar is about 150x. You can compare solar plants to nuclear on Wikipedia.

Then you’ve got the countless real world examples of where nuclear plants get shut down and the per capita emissions of that area shoot up, despite a bunch of politicians talking about renewables and clean energy (Vermont, California, etc.)

Nuclear isn’t hype. Look at France vs Germany for a great real world example of why nuclear is the better technology.

You talk about 50 years under delivering, but there have hardly been any nuclear plants even built in the last 50 years in the West, mostly due to public opposition to a technology that kills less people than wind farms.

If it’s so expensive why are places like Bangladesh, India, and China making massive investments in new reactors?

Aside: What I find remarkable is that any talk of renewables ends up in a debate about nuclear. Talking about oil and fossil fuel never makes people say "yeah but what about nuclear?" No, it's only discussion of renewables that makes nuclear supporters come out of the woodwork... very odd behavior for people that claim to be concerned about emissions.

Back your main comment: These are all statistics without any significance for deployment of the technology.

For example, 15x material means.... what exactly? Is 15x more material bad somehow? Sure doesn't seem like it. The amount of material that goes into solar panels is not a fundamental constraint on their use.

When wind power "uses" land it does not require exclusive use of the land. That same land will be used for other purposes without impact. Similarly, the amount of land we need to use solar is vanishingly small.

> Look at France and Germany for a great real world example...

For France, I have looked, never found the cost numbers. I do know the Mesmer plan never reached fruition, and that only about a third of the planned reactors were built. I used to cite CANDU as a potential success too, but then somebody who knew better pointed me to the financial numbers...

Bangladesh and India are building new reactors because of corruption, the same reason that they build completely uneconomical new coal plants. China is building a few nuclear reactors, as part of a "try everything" approach, but they are building only a minuscule amount of nuclear compared to renewables, because nuclear is mostly hype, and renewables mostly deliver. Remember that even a construction power house like China, when building France's EPR design, ended up with a build that took twice as long as expected.

I brought up nuclear because I felt that your original comment above was overly optimistic about what is possible with renewables.

People bring up nuclear because it’s the only high density low carbon energy source we have. Splitting atoms produces orders of magnitude more energy than gathering sunlight. Our current reactor designs are incredibly inefficient. The ceiling of what is possible with nuclear is much higher.

If you want to preserve the environment higher power density typically means less impact.

We’ve gone from burning wood, to coal, to petroleum, to nuclear, and then took a huge step backwards on nuclear because of Cold War fears and Chernobyl. Renewables are great but nuclear is the only high power density option that can keep up with our insatiable demand for more energy in a way that doesn’t require converting vast swaths of land into wind and solar farms.

If you think that wind turbines and solar farms don’t have a negative impact on the environment you haven’t been paying attention.

Wind farms impact on insect populations for example is another new area of research and it doesn’t look very good.

15x material throughput means you have to mine/produce/transport/refine/smelt/forge 15x more materials, which means more environmental impacts for the lifecycle of those materials.

A single ACR-1000 reactor can produce more output than the 14000 acre Bhadla Solar Park in India for example, and it will last 4-5x longer.

The problem you're possibly missing here is that oil is used for a lot more than just fuel and energy production. It's used for everything else: road surfacing, plastic production, synthetic fibres, chemical and pharmacutical production, lubrication, fertiliser production (although you could switch to green hydrogen for that), and much more. None of that demand disappears if you stop burning oil and gas, although maybe you could use bio-oils as a starting point for some use cases.

What's the problem there though? If it's not burned, for energy, then it's not causing emissions.

The one emitting use case you talk about is fertilizer, and the switch from the Haber process to using electrolyzed hydrogen is already starting. It will require a decade or more of tech development to make it cheaper than existing processes, most likely, but it's almost certain to happen as we scale industrial electrolysis.

An example hydrogen fertilizer project:

https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/spain-could-become...

Because you said that:

>> Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life.

> This is the most insidious and false lie that is spread.

Even if all energies become renewables, maybe some oil based products are still requirement (but not a big problem).

There are alternatives for plastics too, from plant sources.

Modern life does not require that we get these end services from petroleum, it's just how we currently achieve the end goal.

Blurring this distinction between the way things are currently and what is possible is a very effective FUD technique. I want to be very clear that I'm not claiming the original poster meant to spread FUD, consciously or unconsciously, I don't know their mind. But it is definitely a persistent tactic among the fossil fuel propaganda that we are immersed in.

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