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abraxas

@ abraxas @lemmy.ml

Posts
2
Comments
382
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • Of course. That happens. Luckily, we have countries like China with less red tape to use to measure. They've been building a lot of nuclear and solar. Their end-to-end solar looks like around $750M per GW (possibly including storage? Not sure. About $2.2B for a 3.3GW plant). Looks like they're spending about $5B per GW of nuclear.

    Sorry I don't have the solar reference anymore. I was building a math equation for another comment and realized they weren't talking price, so scrapped it without thinking.

    Since those numbers seem to match US figures, I think people in the Western World forget that a lot of bid cost increases or "escalations" are due to the fact that companies try to low-bid to win the contract, knowing every little inconvenience will require a cost increase. It evens out more than people want to admit.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • Just did a bunch of my own math before realizing those numbers were already out there. We would need to add 3960 nuclear plants to match current energy demand for the world (440 power 10% of the world).

    That would require at least 5 years of construction per plant. It takes about 7000 workers to produce a nuclear plant. To produce them concurrently would require about 27.7 million construction workers dedicated to this project for at least 5 years. So on one hand, perhaps you're right, since there are 100M construction workers in the world. I can't, however, find numbers about how much heavy equipment exists to facilitate a product requiring 1/4 the world's construction workers concurrently. You might be right that if all other construction were ground to a halt, we might be able to manage a 5-year plan of nuclear at the cost of about $20T (I had done the math before realizing this reply were about workers, not cost stupidity). I concede it seems "10x increase world construction capacity" was wrong, and the real number is somewhere around 1.5-2x, so long as we stay conservative with nuclear figures and ignore extra costs of building or transporting nuclear energy to countries incapable of building their own plants.

    Interestingly, at those construction numbers, you could provide small-project rooftop solar to the world. I can't find construction numbers for power farm solar, except that it's dramatically more efficient than rooftop solar. Unlike nuclear, it appears we could easily squeeze full-world solar with our current world construction capacity.

    I won't bore you with the cost math, but since I calculated them I'm still going to summarize them. Going full nuclear would cost us about a $20T down payment. Going full solar (with storage) down payment is about $4T (only about $1T without storage costs factored). And while nuclear would be cheaper than solar per year after that $20T down, solar power and storage would STILL be cheaper in a 100 year outlook, but would also benefit from rolling efficiency increases as we add new solar plants/capacitors and tear down older ones..

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • Care to substantiate that the red tape amounts to more than 100 years worth of the same MWH of solar? Or is that just your gut feeling?

    Also note, even if the construction cost were 30% inflated, nuclear is still losing handily to solar by the figures I cited.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • You do understand that solving the world's carbon energy crisis is not an individual person's job, right? We're not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We're talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it's pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.

    Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • As others pointed out, to build that many nuclear power plants that quickly would require 10x-ing the world's construction capacity.

    My counterpoint is that if we had "just got on with it" for solar, wind, and battery, we would have the capacity by now and the cost per kwh of that capacity would be approximately half as much as the same in nuclear. And we would have amortized the costs.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • Except that nuclear isn't the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety

    Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they "artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we'll use solar". I'm not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.

    If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it's a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • And yet you made simple mistakes like assuming that nuclear reactors only last 40 years?

    No. No I didn't. I was using the lowest life expectancy for nuclear because it steelmanned nuclear for my other critiques. You want to use longer ages, that means you're prepaying 60% of that longer age at cost. I find it interesting that you called me out on trying to give nuclear more benefit. That said, IAEA holds with 30-40 year life expectancy on a nuclear plant so I think the steel-man I chose is acceptable.

    What magic technology have we invented? You realize that lithium ion batteries are 1980’s technology right?

    Lithium Ion batteries are being used at large scale now, sure. It's dishonest to say the ones being built today for utility-scale power are 1980's technology, just as it's dishonest to pretend that nuclear power is what it was in the 1950's. But there are also advancements in molten sand batteries, and even utility scale water energy storage is going down in price (though I believe it's still slightly more expensive than nuclear).

    Yes, that’s what I said. Remember we’re in it for long term solutions. Not bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.

    So how is $140/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear plant "the long haul" over $77/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear farm? Do we need to discuss how that kind of math works? Building solar+battery plants, running them till EOL, rebuilding them from scratch and repeating several times is still **half ** as expensive as producing the same amount of energy with a nuclear plant until it reaches EOL.

    And considering that cost is effectively more like $1,000/MWH or more for the first few years, how exactly are we going to get carbon neutral any time soon by literally adding an order of magnitude to our costs?

    Yes 100,000 little projects vs 1…

    Sure. Being able to plop it down at a massively high price does have its uses. Note I said there CAN be appropriate uses for nuclear. Just not many of them. The price is just unreasonable. And very often, space isn't really an issue. Those 100,000 little projects are still cheaper than that 1 project nuclear for the amount of energy created.

    And I’m not even Anti-solar… after all it’s literally just second-hand nuclear production… But it’s just that. Second-hand, and why settle for “Second” when we can harness first hand?

    For several reasons. First, the sun is in a state of nuclear fusion which is at least 4x more efficient than can be achieved with fission. Second, the sun is gonna burn whether we harvest that energy or not. Third, the most expensive part of a any nuclear power prospect is causing and containing it. We get to skip that step with solar.

    I’m just not dumb enough to assume it’s the answer to all our problems

    I guess I am "dumb enough". Between the power created from the sunlight itself, and wind and hydroelectric power created indirectly by it. The numbers all work out.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • No way. Batteries are expensive as hell

    Batteries+solar runs $77/MWH with current technology. Nuclear runs $175/MWH with current technology (both of these numbers are TCO, not just running costs) 1 and 2. Months back I did a fairly exhaustive analysis on reddit. Wish I'd kept a link of that, but I cut and ran. More importantly, a nuclear plant is usually "locked in" to current efficiency for 50 years or more, where solar farms and battery farms can be traded up. By end-of-life, that nuclear plant will still be a $175/MWH-TCO plant, but could be competing against solar+battery in the order of $50/MWH TCO as large scale battery tech is skyrocketing of late.

    I ended up anti-nuclear from a position of knowledge and research, not a position of "omg it's nuclear". I started pro-nuclear until I did the math a LOT.

    You’re in the green after about 10-15 years with nuclear. So I’m not sure why you bring this point up repeatedly

    Per Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring, the capital cost accounts as 60% of the total cost of ownership. Yes it's in the green (capital-wise), by year 10-15. But 60% of Every penny that needs to be spent on a nuclear plant is spent before you hit the "on" button. Solar plants go green in 5 years, but more importantly, you amortize the cost (and continue to do so) over the life of the plant. The latter is always more feasible for a large scale project.

    There’s plenty of decommissioned coal/gas/oil plants that are perfect sites for nuclear. Ironically it costs more to clean up the radioactivity left behind by these plants than the nuclear plant will release in it’s whole lifetime.

    Compare that to solar roofs, solar parking shades, windmills that can often be installed in "spare lots", etc.

    EDIT: And to be clear, I'm not even saying there may never be an appropriate use for a nuclear plant in going green. There's just very few of them. Going solar in a big city is a custom gig, but dropping a nuclear plant in its outskirts, not so much. Luckily for me in the US, there's a whole hell of a lot of unused or unusable land just begging for solar plants.

  • S.F. bakery won't serve cops, police union claims. Store says it's about the guns, not the cops

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  • Watch some Police Audit videos. About one out of 10, a cop does something spectacularly good. Once, they even arrested another cop on the scene because the other cop crossed from "merely bullying" to outright criminal behavior.

    The other 9 out of 10 are disgusting and disappointing. So your view of them sure isn't far off reality.

  • Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

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  • The problem with Nuclear's "good enough" is that Nuclear is currently worse than other technology we have in almost every way.

    1. Higher total lifetime cost per kwh than solar or land-based wind (and hydro, but that's niche), even after factoring in capacitors for weather and time of day/year
    2. Awkwardly front-loaded TCO. You basically pay a huge percent of that ugly TCO up front, making Nuclear more prohibitively expensive than its modest total lifetime cost would imply.
    3. Long life. This is a terrible thing. TCO's of solar and wind plants are predicated upon a 20 year obsolescence. That means, the TCO includes the cost to build, tear down, and make way for the inevitable better tech in 20 years. Nuclear plants are priced at 50+ year lifetimes. You can't easily retrofit a nuclear plant with better technology if/when it starts to catch up.

    It is absolutely true that solar and wind are better because more money has gone into their research. But because of that, they are better options in almost all real world power situations.

    The problem with focusing on nuclear is... why waste all that political capital just to spend 100x the money or more that you could spend to be 100% renewbles in the short term? The front-loaded TCO is the real issue with that one. If you wanna hit 0 emissions tomorrow with Solar/Wind, you're just paying the up-front costs, knowing there are per-year costs (still cheaper than fossil fuels) to keep it going. If you want to do the same with nuclear, you're paying for almost all of it out of the gate for 50 years worth. Suffice to say, that's a budgeting nightmare.

    And what's left is space. Nuclear creates a lot of power in a small area. But wind and solar are both far more easily/efficiently integrated into the space we are already using.

  • What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

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  • I agree re: coop. They seem to be the way of the future. Some people I game with get really frustrated being less competitive than the rest in games like Dominion, where taking your time and planning out your turns has huge return but makes everyone have to sit and wait (and don't talk to me, I'm figuring out whether I'm going to play my Laboratory or my Sentry first!)

    For some reason, though, Pandemic goes over like a dead weight to most people. So much so, I've never bought Pandemic Legacy as good as it looks. Arkham horror is too crunchy for some, but just right for others. Spirit Island, surprisingly, has been a sweet spot for some recently. It's a little hard to get good at, but the sliding difficulty scale is really granular.

  • What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

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  • Eldrich Horror is on my to-buy list. My wife got really burned out on board games so I've leaned into my ultra-crunchy solo-friendly stuff, but she enjoyed Arkham horror for quite a while.

    But yeah. Last time I played Catan I wanted it to stop by round 2. I have horrible dice-luck, so a game's gotta be fun when I roll worst-case 5-10 rounds in a row. In Catan, it means I get all nerdy placing my towns on strategically sound intersections, and then watch everyone else play and I pass as numbers like 6 and 8 never roll for an entire game. My record is like the first half of the game getting no resources. Then getting one or two. Something about seeing the 3rd or 4th 2 roll give someone resources before you've gotten anything just makes you want to flip the table.

  • What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

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  • It's incredible, and a blast. A full campaign (assuming you don't lose halfway through) runs about 60 hours. So I get it :)

    The digital version might be more accessible. I really wish they'd sell it without the minis. I just don't have the time to paint minis, which means I don't get the value worth in minis.

  • What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

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  • A lot of board game geeks hate Catan. I also hate Catan, but my reasons probably aren't their reasons. So there's that.

    But I don't entirely disagree. It's complicated. I bought multiple games to find ones I'd love more. I find most people with board game obsession still have a favorite.

    Like me, I've spent more time playing KD:M and Spirit Island than the next 5 combined.

  • What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

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  • For me, it's board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I'm sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.

    No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.

  • Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop ‘very dangerous’ Trump

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  • I know this is the wrong server to say it, but there were some things I liked about Hillary. I am still convinced that her gender played far more of a role in people's hatred of her than they will ever be able to accept.

    Yes, she's still a neo-liberal, but she's further left than most of the Democrats, and we consistently see that the supermajority of non-Republican voters are simply not as progressive as most of us are. Hillary had a well-conceived labor plan and respected unions. She liked the idea of single-payer, if not enough to spend too much political capital on it. She was left of Obama and of Biden, if still to the right of her "progressive" so-called roots.

    Here's my non-opinionated counterpoint. Trump bested Hillary on Labor when his plan was "kick out immigrants and deregulate coal so you get your dangerous job back", and she had a 100 page labor plan that involved things like subsidized retraining of coal workers. The Democrats have learned that you will not win Labor by favoring them. A bad lesson.

  • Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop ‘very dangerous’ Trump

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  • Unfortunately, there's a reason cult deprogrammers are heavily trained. If you're not an expert, the above behavior can have the opposite effect, helping reiterate to them that their crazy positions are actually reasonable and acceptable. The worst thing you can do to a cult member is acknowledge their beliefs respectfully. The second worst thing you can do is insult them. See the problem?

    You have to use the gray rock method, and prove to them that you both disagree with them, and you are not their enemy.

    This is the problem. When someone holds a belief that is not ok, telling them that is "ok" doesn't work. You'll be "one of the good ones", but it'll end there.

  • It's pronounced AYE...

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  • Where some underrepresented domains have made massive strides, this GPT thing has done relatively little for data science.

    The important thing is that "what AI/ML can and cannot do" is not changing that much. It's successful application is what's changed. The idea of making AI libraries more accessible is huge, and leads to stuff like this. But under the hood, OpenAI doesn't do much different than other AI tools. It's just easier to use yourself. You can do more faster as computers get faster, but that seems to be limited with the endgame of Moore's Law anyway.

    OpenAI runs on supercomputers now. It'll continue to run on supercomputers in the future. Instead of getting better, it has started to get worse at many things. Experts have always had a fairly good grasp of where it'll end. There are things AI was always expected to do better than humans at. And things it never will.

    I mean, I expected AI image generation and better text quality. But I also expected the limits it currently has. And I've only done a little directly in the field.