Comment by _aleph2c_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _aleph2c_ | Hacker News Reader

The nice thing about methane is that it's not too energy dense, so you can sell it to your population like gasoline. You may not want to give the population mini-nukes or vacuum energy generation from EVOs.

We don't need to use solar panels though, we already have exceedingly cheap energy generation in the form of nuclear power. We also have inexpensive ways of transmuting the nuclear waste.

We don't really have a environmental problem, we have a regulatory problem; it is impossible to develop any of this new technology because we have made it infinitely expensive by law. We have also made non-technical environmentalism the height of fashion, and now its used as the spiritual engine for the political-left. For those of you who are concerned that this process is net neutral, there is nothing stopping us from using a similar process to pull the carbon out of the C02 and use it for construction, or to just bury it.

The key to a better future is to reconsider our attitudes toward energy innovation and to remove the activists from our regulatory boards and to re-write our laws to make it possible to innovate and build. We teach our kids that they are doomed, maybe we should encourage them to study nuclear and plasma engineering instead.

You have to transport the energy you're generating from nuclear, and the US is a massive country with tons of sprawl. Solar doesn't need a grid. Sure it's not 24/7—besides making better batteries we can use less energy. That's political suicide to mention in this country though so we keep kicking the can down to the next generation. At some point humans will be forced to make do with less, but for now it's all a gravy train.

The key to a better future is to stop letting the boards of ExxonChevronShell completely own energy policy. Their own research surfaced the problem over half a century ago and their immediate reaction was to bury it and fund studies that downplayed it. In other countries it would be called corruption, but we call it lobbying.

I don't know what this "non-technical" environmentalism means, but have you ever stopped to consider that people are capable of opposing nuclear for reasons that aren't technologic? Almost all currently existing nuclear power generation in the US is privatized. Private companies only have a responsibility to the shareholders. Maybe such short-term optimization with something capable of long-term consequences doesn't sit right with people?

Sure enough we have spent 40 years following the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and have yet to build a proper, isolated location in which to store spent nuclear fuel. We store 88,000 metric tons of the stuff on-site at various reactors and the amount is increasing. France, Canada, and the Nordic countries are all further along that process than us despite our head-start. Two US generations have already kicked the can down the road for nuclear waste management, so I'm not sure "removing activists" will let "boards innovate and build".

Unsubsidized nuclear power is unfortunately really expensive everywhere independent from regulation and runs into the same problem from the opposite direction. You don’t save much money when you turn it off but energy demand isn’t constant so nuclear gets even more expensive per kWh the longer it sits idle. Worse you need to take them offline for long periods as in weeks for maintenance, refueling, etc.

Locally you can have a lot of nuclear like France, but only when you can import and export power to low nuclear countries/regions. Batteries can also smooth demand, but if you’re just filling batteries then solar is a lot cheaper. People talk about unreliable Solar, but you can build 4x as generation per year solar power for less than building nuclear. At 4x overcapacity or even 1.5x solar is suddenly vastly more reliable.

Nuclear reactors are cheap. What is expensive is regulatory compliance, and regulatory boards changing the rules while the reactor is being constructed in place. A way around this is to buy a pre-fab reactor that has already made it through regulatory and was fabricated in a factory.

Building the reactor is a small fraction of the total cost. People love to talk about small modular reactors as if that’s the only cost but they still need actual turbines to generate power, electrical equipment, cooling, pumps, complex high pressure plumbing, giant buildings, spent fuel ponds, etc so the reactor’s themselves are not even the full construction cost to get power let alone the actual lifetime cost.

Equipment breaks down so you need to maintain, repair, and eventually replace it. Which is a large reason why you need roughly 500 people per GWh to run the things even without any regulations. You need not raw ore but concentrated u235 in complex and expensive to build fuel rods etc. You need lot’s of land near an abundant water source to cool them which is exactly the kind of places people want to live. Even when it breaks you still need to decommission them.

And that’s ignoring the need for someone to take on the risk of failure. Even when the public isn’t harmed nuclear accidents destroy expensive equipment and are expected to clean up. Accidents on average cost several Billion per GW, you might find cheaper insurance but don’t bet on it without subsidies.

The problem with nuclear is that there is no cheap form factor of nuclear reactors available right here and now, it's all "in the future...". Current NPP designs have painfully high CAPEX, way more so than solar.

And just slashing regulatory requirements to make it cheaper strikes me as unwise.

Especially when the increases in regulatory requirements have been driven by experience, with actual accidents and with near misses that could have been serious accidents.

Well the solar stuff is in the future too :)

The solar stuff that's "in the future" can be estimated by extending the historical experience curve for PV. Doing that, solar delivers at below $0.01/kWh by the time it's fully rolled out.

Do you think people with money want to invest in nuclear power plants with that economic Sword of Damocles hanging over the technology?

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