A confident assertion that would be a lot more convincing had you put on your big boy pants and actually showed your own calculations with sources, rather than just telling me I'm wrong.
Of course I'm not ignoring the downsides of renewables. But they're not as bad as the downsides of nuclear, including of course the risks of catastrophic failure. If a wind turbine goes kaput, we have a brownout. If a reactor goes kaput, we've got a wildly expensive mess to clean up if we are very very lucky.
As to your rhetorical question: we have to compare 40+ year old tech with today's latest in renewables because nuclear infrastructure is built to operate for decades. We are stuck with its legacy for decades (and for many types of waste, centuries).
Of *course* we think of tall buildings as being more dangerous and having higher severity outcomes than other buildings, if the risks aren't adequately mitigated! Go look at the history of the 1906 SF earthquake, for example. Or the Rana Plaza disaster. That's why we have building codes.
You are rather missing the point: the outcomes from a failure in a nuclear power plant can be orders of magnitude more severe than the outcomes from the worst conceivable building or aviation failure. They therefore require much more stringent mitigation. The question at hand is, can such mitigation ever be adequate?
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money, assuming no economies of scale (!!) Fukushima was about 5TW, I think.
Just curious to know what magnitude of solar capacity could be created if governments put the scale of investment into it that goes into nuclear.
I'm very excited that you've demonstrated that Fukushima Daiichi produced more value in electricity than its cleanup cost (even if that uses some quite heroic assumptions, such as continuous operation at 100% of capacity, etc etc). But why would we only care about cleanup cost? There is also the costs of commissioning, and operating the plant to account for. Both of those will be really quite a big number as well. There are no precise numbers available for Fukushima in the public domain, but it would be pretty amazing if constructing and operating these six reactors for 35+ years was done for less than $60bn.
You're rather spectacularly missing the point. Everyone understands that nuclear bonds release orders of magnitude more energy than chemical bonds. I mean, duh. That's the whole point: it's a high-beta technology. When things go well, you get loads of controlled energy. When things fuck up, you get loads of uncontrolled energy... and humans aren't that marvellous at operating complex systems without ever fucking up for decades on end. So we try all types of risk mitigations, and plan for bad actors etc etc. But while we can reduce the likelihood of a severe incident, we can't eliminate it. And then we have to fork out $200bn as a consequence.
Yeah, those evil media and green types, who paid so much attention to a frigging tsunami overwhelming a nuclear power plant causing three meltdowns, the release of radioactive material and a series of hydrogen-air chemical explosions. Why would they do that? It was no biggie, obvs.
You must know you're arguing with the strawman, not the reality. Nuclear may have killed fewer people to date, but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the probability of a catastrophic failure leading to many deaths must be assessed over the lifetime of operation+decommissioning of a plant, which is decades or more. Maybe that risk can all be mitigated, but it's pointless to deny that the potential severity of a nuclear plant failure is much higher than for other forms of power generation.
Was interesting to read your position. I've never been hugely convinced by arguments about American exceptionalism, nor by the assertion that the US has really focused on limited government -- I don't think that's been true for at least the last 70 years, which is the period when the most growth has happened in the economy, and the greatest rate of advances. From penicillin to the internet to nuclear power, the government has been heavily involved, if not the driving force.
What's more important, Trump saying there may be some connection, or Trump appointing Myron Ebell to head the EPA -- a man who is 100% certain there is no connection? If you define "denying reality" as "not accepting that climate change is really happening", then it has not only survived the election, its adherents are in place to reify the belief in public policy.
I'm curious: when you look at a country like Germany or Sweden today, which has government running (i.e. regulating and to some extent providing) healthcare, employment, banking, housing, etc, do you genuinely think you're seeing a country that is essentially the same as Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany? Or are you simply making some kind of rhetorical exaggeration for effect? Or do you think there is a meaningful distinction between what these modern European countries are doing and what US-style progressivism is trying to achieve? Or something else?
I'm asking because I genuinely can't understand your viewpoint: I can't follow the logic. So I'd be grateful if you could lay it out.
More than 60m people voted for Trump. It's vanishingly unlikely they all shared the same single motivation. Some may well have been voting him in as a fuck-you against neo-liberalism because their hometown industrial base has disappeared and no-one has done anything about it; it's clear that others liked the various hatreds he put on display: towards women, gay people, Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans etc etc; others because he was the R candidate and they vote R no matter what; others because they hated Clinton; and many for some complex mix of these and other motivations.
Tempting as it is to boil the world down to single motivations and unity of purpose, you're just misleading yourself.
It is poor analysis to look at one metric in isolation.
Here's just a few samples of the types of factors you'd need to take into consideration: The damage to human health from exhaust fumes is orders of magnitude higher than the damage from car accidents, and that will be true whether the cars are silent or noisy. Electric cars are only silent when they're going slowly...and when they're going slowly, they don't cause much harm if they hit you A different drivetrain may lead to different driving habits, and those second order effects may be much more important in determining accident rates.
What the fuck are you talking about?? The Earth absorbs 3.85 million exajoules of energy from the sun annually. All human energy consumption combined is well under 1,000 exajoules.
So why did you say that "There is not enough insolation (sunlight striking the Earth) to power the current energy needs."? Seriously -- it is completely beyond me what you could have meant by that statement.
That first article is really spectacularly bad. It assumes that (1) the only conceivable benefit for an EV is that they could be powered by renewables (hint: there's quite a lot of other benefits, too, not least the removal of exhaust fumes spewing out at child's face height on streets); and (2), that it's very difficult to find lower-carbon intensity electricity sources (hint: load of horseshit. Our electricity comes from a supplier who buys REGO-backed renewable power, which means that as people sign up, there's net additional supply infrastructure added -- obviously on a macro basis, not household by household).
The fact that there are cognitive biases associated with group decision-making does not mean that group decisions are wrong 50%+ of the time, nor that group decisions are worse than individual decisions, which are also plagued by cognitive biases.
The notion that "Today's consensus is usually tomorrow's laughingstock" is a very relativist position, so it's surprising to hear you assert it, given your politics. It's also far too sweeping a statement, even if we accept a very Popperian view of science relying on falsifiability.
It doesn't follow logically at all. The sum total of all that we can be right and wrong about is not the same as the sum total of all our scientific knowledge. The latter is a subset of the former. And as you've just demonstrated, a single person's ideas can be completely wrong without other people to help them course-correct.
It's an extraordinary comment on the state of the US polity that it is not possible for me to be sure I share your views as to which would be the obviously wrong choice next Tuesday. It's obvious to me which is the wrong choice, it's no doubt obvious to you, but there's no guarantee we'd both agree.
All of our empirical data was gathered *in* a fairly limited location (on or near the Earth), but it was gathered *from* a much larger set of locations. That's kind of the point of a telescope.
Slashdot Mirror
A confident assertion that would be a lot more convincing had you put on your big boy pants and actually showed your own calculations with sources, rather than just telling me I'm wrong.
Of course I'm not ignoring the downsides of renewables. But they're not as bad as the downsides of nuclear, including of course the risks of catastrophic failure. If a wind turbine goes kaput, we have a brownout. If a reactor goes kaput, we've got a wildly expensive mess to clean up if we are very very lucky.
As to your rhetorical question: we have to compare 40+ year old tech with today's latest in renewables because nuclear infrastructure is built to operate for decades. We are stuck with its legacy for decades (and for many types of waste, centuries).
In the round, nuclear is better than coal, but worse than renewables, bearing in mind factors such as human health effects and carbon intensity.
Of *course* we think of tall buildings as being more dangerous and having higher severity outcomes than other buildings, if the risks aren't adequately mitigated! Go look at the history of the 1906 SF earthquake, for example. Or the Rana Plaza disaster. That's why we have building codes.
You are rather missing the point: the outcomes from a failure in a nuclear power plant can be orders of magnitude more severe than the outcomes from the worst conceivable building or aviation failure. They therefore require much more stringent mitigation. The question at hand is, can such mitigation ever be adequate?
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money, assuming no economies of scale (!!) Fukushima was about 5TW, I think.
Just curious to know what magnitude of solar capacity could be created if governments put the scale of investment into it that goes into nuclear.
I'm very excited that you've demonstrated that Fukushima Daiichi produced more value in electricity than its cleanup cost (even if that uses some quite heroic assumptions, such as continuous operation at 100% of capacity, etc etc). But why would we only care about cleanup cost? There is also the costs of commissioning, and operating the plant to account for. Both of those will be really quite a big number as well. There are no precise numbers available for Fukushima in the public domain, but it would be pretty amazing if constructing and operating these six reactors for 35+ years was done for less than $60bn.
You're rather spectacularly missing the point. Everyone understands that nuclear bonds release orders of magnitude more energy than chemical bonds. I mean, duh. That's the whole point: it's a high-beta technology. When things go well, you get loads of controlled energy. When things fuck up, you get loads of uncontrolled energy... and humans aren't that marvellous at operating complex systems without ever fucking up for decades on end. So we try all types of risk mitigations, and plan for bad actors etc etc. But while we can reduce the likelihood of a severe incident, we can't eliminate it. And then we have to fork out $200bn as a consequence.
Perfectly put!
Yeah, those evil media and green types, who paid so much attention to a frigging tsunami overwhelming a nuclear power plant causing three meltdowns, the release of radioactive material and a series of hydrogen-air chemical explosions. Why would they do that? It was no biggie, obvs.
You must know you're arguing with the strawman, not the reality. Nuclear may have killed fewer people to date, but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the probability of a catastrophic failure leading to many deaths must be assessed over the lifetime of operation+decommissioning of a plant, which is decades or more. Maybe that risk can all be mitigated, but it's pointless to deny that the potential severity of a nuclear plant failure is much higher than for other forms of power generation.
Risk = frequency * severity
Um, look again at who posted. Wasn't me.
Was interesting to read your position. I've never been hugely convinced by arguments about American exceptionalism, nor by the assertion that the US has really focused on limited government -- I don't think that's been true for at least the last 70 years, which is the period when the most growth has happened in the economy, and the greatest rate of advances. From penicillin to the internet to nuclear power, the government has been heavily involved, if not the driving force.
Agreed
What's more important, Trump saying there may be some connection, or Trump appointing Myron Ebell to head the EPA -- a man who is 100% certain there is no connection? If you define "denying reality" as "not accepting that climate change is really happening", then it has not only survived the election, its adherents are in place to reify the belief in public policy.
I'm curious: when you look at a country like Germany or Sweden today, which has government running (i.e. regulating and to some extent providing) healthcare, employment, banking, housing, etc, do you genuinely think you're seeing a country that is essentially the same as Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany? Or are you simply making some kind of rhetorical exaggeration for effect? Or do you think there is a meaningful distinction between what these modern European countries are doing and what US-style progressivism is trying to achieve? Or something else?
I'm asking because I genuinely can't understand your viewpoint: I can't follow the logic. So I'd be grateful if you could lay it out.
More than 60m people voted for Trump. It's vanishingly unlikely they all shared the same single motivation. Some may well have been voting him in as a fuck-you against neo-liberalism because their hometown industrial base has disappeared and no-one has done anything about it; it's clear that others liked the various hatreds he put on display: towards women, gay people, Muslims, immigrants, Mexicans etc etc; others because he was the R candidate and they vote R no matter what; others because they hated Clinton; and many for some complex mix of these and other motivations.
Tempting as it is to boil the world down to single motivations and unity of purpose, you're just misleading yourself.
It is poor analysis to look at one metric in isolation.
Here's just a few samples of the types of factors you'd need to take into consideration:
The damage to human health from exhaust fumes is orders of magnitude higher than the damage from car accidents, and that will be true whether the cars are silent or noisy.
Electric cars are only silent when they're going slowly...and when they're going slowly, they don't cause much harm if they hit you
A different drivetrain may lead to different driving habits, and those second order effects may be much more important in determining accident rates.
What the fuck are you talking about??
The Earth absorbs 3.85 million exajoules of energy from the sun annually.
All human energy consumption combined is well under 1,000 exajoules.
So why did you say that "There is not enough insolation (sunlight striking the Earth) to power the current energy needs."? Seriously -- it is completely beyond me what you could have meant by that statement.
Why do people in Texas put on a new roof twice a year?? People in London, UK, replace a roof maybe once every thirty years, or longer.
There's an opportunity cost: we miss the chance for greater quiet. Noise also harms human health.
That first article is really spectacularly bad. It assumes that (1) the only conceivable benefit for an EV is that they could be powered by renewables (hint: there's quite a lot of other benefits, too, not least the removal of exhaust fumes spewing out at child's face height on streets); and (2), that it's very difficult to find lower-carbon intensity electricity sources (hint: load of horseshit. Our electricity comes from a supplier who buys REGO-backed renewable power, which means that as people sign up, there's net additional supply infrastructure added -- obviously on a macro basis, not household by household).
Yay for one party rule!!
The fact that there are cognitive biases associated with group decision-making does not mean that group decisions are wrong 50%+ of the time, nor that group decisions are worse than individual decisions, which are also plagued by cognitive biases.
The notion that "Today's consensus is usually tomorrow's laughingstock" is a very relativist position, so it's surprising to hear you assert it, given your politics. It's also far too sweeping a statement, even if we accept a very Popperian view of science relying on falsifiability.
It doesn't follow logically at all. The sum total of all that we can be right and wrong about is not the same as the sum total of all our scientific knowledge. The latter is a subset of the former. And as you've just demonstrated, a single person's ideas can be completely wrong without other people to help them course-correct.
It's an extraordinary comment on the state of the US polity that it is not possible for me to be sure I share your views as to which would be the obviously wrong choice next Tuesday. It's obvious to me which is the wrong choice, it's no doubt obvious to you, but there's no guarantee we'd both agree.
All of our empirical data was gathered *in* a fairly limited location (on or near the Earth), but it was gathered *from* a much larger set of locations. That's kind of the point of a telescope.