Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history.
In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.
Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:
- Wind and solar grew a lot.
- Nuclear declined.
- Gas grew a little.
- Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.
- Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy.
- fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less.
- Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted.
- Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years.
- We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.
Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance.
Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.
> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline.
In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.
Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)
This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.
and it won't be better if you have a closer look. Take Europe, for example. Nuclear plants over budget and overdue (France, UK), projects which are highly unlikely to be ever build (Poland), a rotting nuclear fleet (France) and a final exit in Germany.
Then there are all those plants in poor countries which depend on Russia.
And then there is China with their magically fast build reactors but also with massive coal and renewable construction.
Nuclear peaked years ago, and it's going to be a decline in the future since it is money in the end deciding the fate and nuclear isn't worth it.
Well according to the two graphgs for 2018 and 2019, nuclear declined a bit in the US. Not surprising because there were some plant closures and not a whole lot of plant openings. And nothing is on track to be added any time soon. Maybe one or two plants.
New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery.
I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.
I suppose we're going to see the nuclear debate play out as an A/B test with the US vs. the countries mentioned. Should be some interesting data eventually.
That chart overemphasizes waste heat. 1 MJ of heat at 50°C is a lot less valuable than 1 MJ of electricity. They are not interchangable. The 1 MJ of electricity could pump much more than 1 MJ of low-grade heat, and it would take a lot of low-grade heat to generate 1 MJ of electrical energy.
The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy.
> The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.
> Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?
"Lost" means spent towards nobody's useful purpose. Nobody used the output in any way. In transportation, you used your car to get from point A to point B. You don't care about the heat or noise or whatever that you generated. That energy was "lost." If somebody harvested that same energy directly from your vehicle for some purpose, like making fried eggs on your engine block, then the portion used to fry your egg would no longer be "lost"
The text line under it tries to explain the concept, but fails due to brevity. I believe (by looking at the numbers there) it counts as "loses" everything that happens due to energy conversion, and "useful work" everything that happens with the final form of the energy. If that's the case, friction inside an internal combustion engine counts as loses, but at the wheels of a car counts as useful work.
> Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat
I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.
Another aspect is the power it costs to make the power. Oil is a huge industry with enormous transport fuel usage. Nowadays about a 6th of the energy goes into collection. The more we electrify the more that will be saved too coming off the total power we need. Solar, Wind, Hydro and Nuclear are all vastly better in this aspect on production costs and little ongoing transport.
Good point. Oil tankers by themselves put out a measurable percentage of CO2. Also oil refining is an energy intensive industry. Ironically, a lot of that has been cleaned up. It's literally cheaper for oil refineries to be using wind and solar than it is for them to burn their own product. That's why Texas has so much renewable power.
> Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven.
This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction.
The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation!
Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs.
My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.
This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.
That's the 2018 one by 2021, it hit 1.5. And you forget this is the entire US energy economy; not just electricity.
Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly.
If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.
> We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output.
This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1
Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement:
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf
Considering that Reagan reversed this policy by unbanning reprocessing in 1981, this isn't the only reason we don't do it today. Other reasons include that reprocessing is expensive and that we found a lot more uranium ore than originally expected.
A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
This is a common nuke bro story, but it's nonsense. The actual reason is that plutonium has negative value. It costs more to incorporate it in new fuel rods than it would cost to make fuel rods with freshly enriched uranium.
That seems to not account for societal and storage costs. I see too many people extrapolate stuff into "it's not the absolute cheapest we can diversify into pushing the cost off to future generations rather than being responsible for our own creations".
If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also.
As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
> Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.
We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.
Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.
Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
> Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
If you apply this logic universally then we basically can't have a modern human civilization, because airplanes, steelmaking, chemical manufacturing, and many other heavy industrial applications will also be considered too dangerous. This is exactly tackled in the post:
> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks
Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.
After having read the IPCC report, no. A mix of energy is a very viable solution. And if states would not cater to the needs of the nuclear industry, we would have zero plants right now because the price of electricity was never high enough to get the plants insured. Which might change if the price for power climbs, but with renewables on the rise, a limit to that rise or even decline is to be expected.
And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has botched at some catastrophic event so far.
>What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available?
What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal.
Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable.
This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that perpetually antagonize me everywhere, vehicles with obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that absolutely induce premature wear (causing much more serious waste than otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn't really fill up with water all the way, so I run FOUR cycles just to make sure everything is properly rinsed. This one isn't even directly about energy (someone was trying to save water), but it consumes more energy as a consequence. Is this what the environmentalists were going for with the fake "deep fill" selector knob on my ultra-high "efficiency" machine?
The people pushing "efficiency at any cost" are either completely blind to the idea of 2nd order+ consequences or are evil/anti-human. I cannot fathom a different set of options. Do you realize that you have to live on this damn planet with all these side-effects too?
I am completely over it. Let's figure out how to make energy carbon free and infinite. Let's stop fucking over the user experience in every possible way just so we can feel like we are doing something to "help".
> What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use
Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.
I fear this sort of argument will fall on deaf ears here. This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle. It works for them, so it should work for everybody else.. Getting people to live in dense urban housing and be dependent on public transit is considered a desirable outcome, not a regrettable but necessary consequence of reducing emissions. Talk of reducing emissions is used as a justification, but isn't the root motivation for these urbanization advocates. Offering up technical solutions that reduce the environmental toll of the present social order isn't met with enthusiasm because it misses the point, which is to change up the social order.
If you find a way to explain how nuclear reactors will get more people riding buses and bicycles in cities, then you'll have their attention.
> This is a forum where tons of people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle.
This is a forum where a few people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle, and say so very vocally. Don't mistake that for a consensus. It's not. You can find a lot of other viewpoints here as well.
> Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ),
Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose
It's explained in the post. It makes the total amount be roughly 100 quads, which makes it easy to estimate all the numbers in the graphic as percentages.
Given an exajoule and a quad are close in value, you’d get roughly the same result with exajoules instead.
Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data
Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."
I would think that nuclear is popular with the money class because you can own & control the means of prodution. It requires things that only the existing big boys can afford.
Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to.
Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.
> Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century
A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.
Readit News
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E...
A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:
- Wind and solar grew a lot.
- Nuclear declined.
- Gas grew a little.
- Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.
- Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy.
- fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less.
- Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted.
- Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years.
- We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.
Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance.
Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.
Yes, in the United States (4% of global population), coal usage declined.
Unfortunately, globally coal usage is at all time highs.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons...
I’d say it’s ok that we overlooked that but we were warned 45 years ago about global coal usage being a large part of the problem.
https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.
Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)
This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.
[1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...
This is not what a boom looks like: https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/18acef23-4f61-4e14-b66e-7...
and it won't be better if you have a closer look. Take Europe, for example. Nuclear plants over budget and overdue (France, UK), projects which are highly unlikely to be ever build (Poland), a rotting nuclear fleet (France) and a final exit in Germany.
Then there are all those plants in poor countries which depend on Russia.
And then there is China with their magically fast build reactors but also with massive coal and renewable construction.
Nuclear peaked years ago, and it's going to be a decline in the future since it is money in the end deciding the fate and nuclear isn't worth it.
New nuclear is a bit like an oil tanker (pun intended, sorry): just very slow to ramp up new capacity. This boom you are talking about is so far not adding up to a lot of capacity being delivered. We're talking a few gw here and there. Solar and wind are being deployed by the tens of gw per year. Same with battery.
I believe we'll see some nuclear plants being approved for the next decade. And maybe these modular reactors start delivering on their promises. I still think they are expensive. But why not? Unless something happens on the cost front, that will remain a minority of useful output.
The parameter of interest is exergy. That is, usable energy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exergy
Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather inefficient, and requires very big turbines.
> Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.
To uninitiated like me the chart was really confusing. In many sectors doesn't almost all energy get ultimately lost in some way? Like in computing all electricity just becomes waste heat, or in transportation unless you move goods up a mountain all the energy is just lost?
I mean, not all of the IT sector is ad-tech you know; for example, many would argue that the systems durably recording how much money you own provide a useful service.
This does not appear to be correct. The 2018 chart shows a total energy generation of 101.2 quads. The 2021 chart shows only 97.3 quads, a reduction.
The nuclear fraction of total energy generation in 2018 was 0.0834; in 2021 this became 0.0836, a slight increase in its proportion of US energy generation!
Moreover, it's astonishing that in 2021 the US while operating only 55 nuclear power plants generated more energy with those plants than all the energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal combined. Given the sheer number of solar and wind farms I see almost everywhere I go these days, it's really not great that they generate such a small portion of our energy needs.
My understanding is that this situation will just get worse as we try to scale up wind and solar, as well, since it's much more difficult to supply base load with unpredictable power sources.
Also, only about a third of that petroleum input is useful (worse in transport, about a quarter). So, that would be about a 12. Add wind, hydro, and nuclear to the mix and it's basically a 50-50 split in terms of useful output of oil vs. renewables. Of course most of that goes into electricity generation. But luckily there's a major transition from ice to evs under way. So, that will eat into petroleum usage quickly.
If you look at the useful energy component, the transition to renewables is a lot further than many people think. Everybody keeps comparing the raw produced energy. The only thing that matters is the useful part of that.
This was Tesla’s main claim at their recent energy presentation. Page 4 of the doc[1] shows our waste heat to useful work is roughly 2 to 1
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf
A bomb with an actively cooled pit probably couldn't be miniaturized enough to be MIRVed but it would be compatible with old school single-warhead ICBMs or air delivery.
It's probably worth it to reprocess if only to shorten half life.
As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.
We will also require wast amounts of power just to undo the damage we have already done. Capturing CO2 is practically a must if we don't want the permafrost to melt and release the up to 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon stored there.
Will we have enough renewables to run our society and extract the required CO2? Maybe, will nuclear help while using 1/1000 land yes.
Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out.
It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact. That is simply the nature of having existential crisis at our hands right now, not in some far future.
Deleted Comment
> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks
> Why won't anyone think of the GRUBS!!
And for some reason, mainstream social media loves nuclear, so I do question if there is a bias for a technology that every spacefaring state, except for india and china (AFAICT?), has botched at some catastrophic event so far.
What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal.
Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consumption.
No. I have seen the effects of this "goal" at scale in my personal life. Semi-non-effective HVAC systems that I now have to run 24/7/365, LED lights with weird flicker that perpetually antagonize me everywhere, vehicles with obnoxious start/stop mechanisms that absolutely induce premature wear (causing much more serious waste than otherwise). Oh yeah - my washing machine doesn't really fill up with water all the way, so I run FOUR cycles just to make sure everything is properly rinsed. This one isn't even directly about energy (someone was trying to save water), but it consumes more energy as a consequence. Is this what the environmentalists were going for with the fake "deep fill" selector knob on my ultra-high "efficiency" machine?
The people pushing "efficiency at any cost" are either completely blind to the idea of 2nd order+ consequences or are evil/anti-human. I cannot fathom a different set of options. Do you realize that you have to live on this damn planet with all these side-effects too?
I am completely over it. Let's figure out how to make energy carbon free and infinite. Let's stop fucking over the user experience in every possible way just so we can feel like we are doing something to "help".
Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.
We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to:
- Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are recyclable you just need the energy.
- Grow food vertically so more land can be nature.
- Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
- Desalinate Water
If you find a way to explain how nuclear reactors will get more people riding buses and bicycles in cities, then you'll have their attention.
This is a forum where a few people believe rural/suburban people should be coerced into a car-less urban lifestyle, and say so very vocally. Don't mistake that for a consensus. It's not. You can find a lot of other viewpoints here as well.
Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose
Also, the fact that total US energy consumption is currently roughly 100 quads is only a passing coincidence - it would not have been true in the past and will not be true in the future. It is weird to justify choice of unit on the basis of a temporary coincidence in the data
Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."
Same goes for various battery & solar techs. If they can't prevent solar panels from becoming common, at least they can make sure that solar panels and batteties rely on at least some key ingredients or processes they can own & control access to.
Somehow, one way or another, through safety regulation if not through artificial scarcity or patents, there will be no cooking up good batteries or solar panels in garages, and I bet it will never be down to actual physical impracticality.
A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.