Compare the generating capacity (GWe) to the energy produced (TWh). The 21 GWe in nuclear power produced 124 TWh of energy, which if I'm doing my math right means a capacity factor of over 60%. Solar capacity of 28 GWe produced 9 TWh, a capacity factor of 3%.
Let's assume solar capacity doubles every 5 years, and nuclear capacity doubles every 15 years. In the year 2030 we should see nuclear generating capacity of about 40 GWe producing 240 TWh per year. At that same time we'll see 240 GWe in solar producing 80 TWh per year. Can we extrapolate that out another 15 years? I'm not so sure, exponential growth like that can only go on for so long.
If we add electric storage systems to make up for the poor capacity factor of solar then that adds to the cost. Even with an optimistic capacity factor of 25% the amount of storage needed would be massive. Nuclear, with even a poor capacity factor of 60%, could use that storage much more efficiently since the nuclear reactors can produce power all night for the daily peaks.
If nuclear power improves modestly in capacity factor to 75%, and solar reaches an unlikely capacity factor of 25%, then we'd need three times the solar capacity to match what nuclear could do. You'd also need three times the energy storage for solar. Excepting pumped hydro these energy storage systems are theoretical, and pumped hydro needs favorable geography to work. Nuclear may be expensive now but how much is this storage going to cost? We can avoid storage with nuclear by over building, which places a cap on the cost of energy to that of a new nuclear power plant. It is simply impossible to build enough solar to last through the night, which places the cost cap at some unknown value since this technology does not yet exist.
Perhaps you see now the desire for China to invest in nuclear even though they are going bonkers for solar? Nuclear can stand alone on the electric grid, solar cannot.
While China is building all this solar they are also building nuclear. China currently has 30 operating nuclear reactors, and 24 more under construction. They plan to have 150GWe capacity in nuclear power by 2030.
China figured out how to build nuclear power economically, I suspect that we can as well.
I have nothing against Nuclear but it's cost make it a dead technology.
I have nothing against solar but it's costs make it a dead technology.
Oh, wait, you say that solar power can get cheaper with more research and development? But then so can nuclear, no?
What happens when the cost of solar halves and the cost of nuclear halves? Over time what happens is that the ability for nuclear to operate during the night makes solar very expensive by comparison. Any technology that can store energy from solar panels can also store energy from nuclear power so any leap in energy storage technology won't save solar. What grid level storage might do is actually the opposite, make solar quite worthless. Solar power takes more land area, more labor, and more materials for a comparable power output than just about anything else we have. Advancements in automation, 3D printing, materials, or whatever that can be applied to solar power can almost always be applied to nuclear power. So for every step forward that solar makes we will see nuclear power take two.
I change my mind, I do have a few things against solar. With the exception of pocket calculators, communication satellites, and a few other niche uses, solar is next to worthless. It's a distraction. We could be doing so much better if we left solar alone and started building nuclear power.
Like I said in the GPP, just don't even try to tell me that solar is "better". We've dumped all kinds of money into it, my tax money, and I'm tired of seeing good money flushed away like that. We have something better than solar already but the US Department of Energy seems to have forgotten that their mandate is to encourage energy development, not hold it back. Get rid of them and we could be building nuclear power at a pace faster than China.
China now has about 30GWe in nuclear power capacity, plans to have 60GWe by 2020, and 150GWe by 2030.
I point this out because the articles linked above might lead people to think that China is abandoning it's nuclear power for solar power, it is not. They are investing in a number of energy sources and I believe that they are wise to do so. It would be nice to see the same investment in nuclear power in the USA.
To all of those that will inevitably reply with doomsday scenarios of piles of radioactive waste, meltdowns irradiating schoolyards and hospitals, and on and on, just don't. We don't build power plants like Chernobyl or Fukushima any more so the scaremongering based on those failures do not apply, we can build them better now. We can build them better because we learned from those mistakes. We can choose to join China in this new nuclear powered age or we can watch them surpass us in technology, in wealth, and in military capability.
One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
Molten salt reactors can reach temperatures of 800C making air cooling viable. That means even in a desert the plant can produce power. A typical coal plant can get to 300C, making water cooling necessary for efficient operation. Steam cycle nuclear is similarly constrained.
Not only can molten salt reactors operate without water cooling it can load follow like natural gas turbines. The turbines used for both natural gas and molten salt nuclear are very similar, the difference is how the heat is produced. Coal, solid fuel nuclear, and some natural gas plants use steam which is very slow to react to changes in demand, if load changes too quickly the turbines can be damaged.
As the amount of energy from sun and wind increases the load seen on the grid can change much more dramatically. Not only do you have people turning electrical items on and off but the energy sources can come and go with changes in weather. This need for peak power is usually met with natural gas. If we get molten salt reactors then we can replace the natural gas power plants.
What I expect to happen over time is that people will realize that with a nuclear power plant that is capable of load following, and the cost to run it varies little based on the load, that wind and solar will become unprofitable.
Right now wind and solar are basically proxies for natural gas, since with every watt of capacity from wind or sun there must be a watt of reserve in natural gas. We are seeing coal power plants getting replaced but not with wind and sun but with natural gas, the windmills and solar panels are there for government subsidized greenwashing. When the US federal government gets their thumbs out of their asses and starts to do something meaningful about our reliance on fossil fuels we can expect a nuclear renaissance of sorts. At which point I expect to see wind and solar to fade as grid power.
If what I predict does not come true then so be it, so long as the USA is providing its own energy instead of importing it from Mexico or China.
No, but any mention of requiring a number to do business seems to bring up that warning in the Bible. The Christian Holy Bible, in it's many variations, is the most read book in all of human history. Google tells me that roughly 1/3rd of the world population, and 8/10 of Americans, identify as Christian. Even those that do not believe in any god would still see it as a valuable historical document with many hints on how civilizations have thrived or perished. It would seem wise to consider the warnings the Bible has given us. Those that do see the Bible as more than just a historical document will feel compelled to consider its societal norms and warnings for reasons beyond being just good ideas. Any law that opposes Biblical guidelines will find resistance from the public.
"You're the one claiming radiation isn't a problem. Prove it's safe."
What is there to prove? Just think it through. The waste from current reactors is a mix of many things, much of which is not radioactive. If we separate the radioactive stuff from the not radioactive stuff then we've likely reduced the mass by 90%, it's at least half of what we started with. The radioactive stuff can be separated further into long lived, short lived, medical isotopes, industrial isotopes, fission fuel, fission poisons, and so on. The fuel is put back in the reactor, the useful isotopes sold off, and so on. When we are done there is very little that we need to dispose of and while it is radioactive it does not pose a threat for thousands of years, merely a few decades. We can build containers that last decades easily.
We know how to do this but a lack of economies of scale (basically we don't have enough reactors to make this processing profitable) and stupid federal laws restricting such reprocessing prevent this from happening. While we don't currently have the infrastructure to do this processing we can do the research and engineering to make it possible.
"Nice straw man. Radiation is all about concentration."
Again, think it through. Mining anything means taking what we are looking for and throwing the rest back in the hole we dug. If we are mining uranium and thorium then we take the bulk of the radioactive stuff and use that as fuel. If we are mining anything else then we leave the radioactive stuff in the leftovers, dump it back in the hole, and just pretend we didn't just concentrate the radioactive stuff. Nuclear reactors destroys this radioactive material, making solar panels concentrates it in the environment.
"Actually we know the amount of solar energy that hits the earth."
Yes we do, and it is very expensive to harvest. Nuclear is cheaper now, today, not in some future after we've done more research. While we're waiting for solar to get cheaper we could be building more nuclear power plants. If that future of cheap solar power, cheaper than nuclear, does actually come then we can shift to a solar powered economy. Imposing solar power onto society before it is ready is imposing poverty onto society.
Think about that for a but. While we are waiting for solar panels to get cheap enough to replace coal we will continue to burn coal. Nuclear is already cheaper than coal. We could reduce our carbon output right now, see no increase in the price of energy, and we could still do research on solar power.
"hence the need to massively refine it to use in fission. "
We refine it because we don't use breeder reactors. If we had breeders then we'd be using this stuff as fuel rather than trying to find a big enough hole to dump it into.
"The dangers and costs of storing voluminous waste for 10s of thousands of years "
Go read a book on radioactive half life. Something that is radioactive for thousands of years is not a radiation hazard. Most of the things radioactive for that long is actually fuel.
The rest of your comment is just speculation on future gains in solar energy collection that may never come. Fission works now. The problems with nuclear power are minute compared to solar.
If radioactive waste concerns you then answer me this, where do you think all the materials for the solar panels come from? Mining, no? When you dig up this stuff don't you think that some radioactive stuff won't come out of the ground with it? What are we going to do with all that radioactive stuff? How is disposing of that any different than disposing of the radioactive stuff from a nuclear reactor?
So many comments and so few mentions of the mark of the beast?
What people value in money is the ability to spend it as they wish. A cashless economy removes this freedom. This will drive people to seek other means of trade. Expect barter, silver, gold, bit-coin, soup cans, laundry detergent bottles, whatever.
I heard some people discuss alternative currencies on late night talk radio not too long ago and the expert they had brought up several means to bypass reserve notes and coins. The topic was not on a cashless society exactly but more generally about the value we place in government issued money.
One thing mentioned in this talk show was the potential use of currency from another country. There are laws already existing in the USA protecting the right of people to keep foreign bank notes. For a cashless society to work then laws like this would have to be repealed to prevent people from just using Euros or whatever, not that it'd prevent it completely but it would drive it underground.
As mentioned in the article there's just too many transactions where electronic transfers just aren't suitable. There's a lot of charities and such that live on small cash transactions, we even have a name for them, "a penny drive".
Oh, and the biblical reference to a mark of the beast will cause a problem with a lot of people.
"You're the one arguing you don't want to pay your fair share for the costs of doing this... "
There are many paths to a carbon neutral economy. I choose a path powered by nuclear power. In which case my "fair share" does not change. All it takes is a change in government policy and the nuclear power plants will effectively build themselves. My part in this is small, I'll leave the building of the nuclear power plants to the mechanical, civil, and nuclear engineers. I'm a computer engineer, if they need me to write some software or design a circuit then I'll help but they will do the heavy lifting on this.
Any other path means higher costs, less freedom, and a reduction in everyone's standard of living. I don't want that. We can grow our economy and reduce our carbon footprint but barring some leap in technology the only way to do that is with nuclear power.
With nuclear power a lot of things that did not make sense with coal now becomes feasible. Things like making diesel fuel from seawater. Do that and we close the carbon loop on hydrocarbon based fuels. That and my next truck will be running on "green" diesel fuel.
That stupid "cash for clunkers" didn't reduce our carbon footprint. All it did was break some windows so the glazier could buy some new shoes. We can't legislate ourselves out of this, we must innovate ourselves out of this. Just like how breaking windows doesn't improve the economy.
"You're so much more qualified to decide whether they are right or not?"
Perhaps not. What I have seen is over the decades these people have failed time and time again to both make accurate predictions on how climate would change and fail to find ways to move away from fossil fuels.
"Do you understand that reality is not up for debate?"
Do they? They claim that by stopping the building of a pipeline we will some how use less oil. I can show them the truth but that does not seem to stop them from promoting backward policies.
If we assume that burning coal and oil is bad then people will have to be lead in a different direction with a carrot of a better alternative. Using a stick from government mandates, taxes, subsidies, and so forth only make people resent government, hate those that imposed their beliefs upon them, and that makes people angry and they push back. What they see is a bigger government, more taxes, less spending money, less freedom, and just generally a reduced standard of life.
This is not a problem that can be solved with taxes and subsidies. We cannot simply legislate wind and solar power to be cheaper than coal, the world does not work that way. This is something that must be solved with engineering and technology, not legislation and regulation.
What we have is a world where policy and legislation is easier than engineering and technology. So these idiots take a path of changing policy. That might create an economic incentive to innovate but it also creates an environment where people have less freedom to do so and less money to fund it. That's assuming that there is no incentive to find something better already, given the amount of money that could be made with a carbon free energy source that is cheaper than coal I believe that there is plenty of incentive for green technology without the tax and subsidy nonsense.
These people protesting oil pipelines, nuclear power plants, and so forth are only making the problem worse. They might be happy living in a cabin off the grid, located in a commune, with non-hybrid vegetables grown in the community garden. But if they break their leg on a hike they will be happy to get on a helicopter to carry them to a hospital where they'll get the best medical care in the world so they don't lose their leg to gangrene. That helicopter does not run on non-GMO tomatoes. Those hospitals aren't lit with beeswax candles. If we are going to have life-flight helicopters and 24/7 emergency rooms then we are going to need coal and oil or something better. Wind and solar will not make a helicopter fly.
We are going to burn oil. How do I know that? Because I have a Ford truck and it runs on gasoline, and I don't plan on replacing it any time soon. I am also one of 100 million people in the USA in a similar situation. To get that oil we can build a pipeline or we can keep moving it by train. Trains compared to pipes use much more fuel to move that oil. Trains compared to pipes are much more likely to leak that oil.
By protesting the pipeline these people are making the problem WORSE, not better.
The more you inhibit supply the more the price goes up, because demand is relatively unchanged. When the price goes up then more means of supply become viable. This is like fighting alcohol prohibition by arresting the bootleggers. For every one you arrest two more pop up. What needs to be done to stop these addicts is find a better alternative.
Furthering this addict analogy there was a study of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam. These soldiers were consuming massive amounts of drugs to deal with the hell that is war. When removed from that hell almost all of them stopped with the drugs. They found living a life among family and friends more valuable than the drugs. The few that kept taking drugs when removed from the war likely had issues prior to the war or lacked a safe environment to go to.
If you want people to stop burning oil then give them an alternative. Give them an offer they cannot refuse. If you don't then expect the people that are "addicted" to oil to fight like any addict would for their next hit.
What is a better alternative to oil? I don't know. I also don't care. I'm happy with burning oil. I say this because I do not believe oil is as destructive as people claim.
A scene from Olympus Space... Tartarus: "You killed off the humans?" Gaia: "No, no, of course not. I fixed the glitch." Tartarus: "But the humans are gone. You sure you didn't kill them?" Gaia: "I fixed the glitch, what happened after that just came naturally."
I believe this is called a Monte Carlo Analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This is a very valuable means to analyze a complex system. I got to play with some circuit simulators in college that did this for analog circuitry. It can tell you how stable your system is or if it is sensitive to small changes to certain values.
I'm not a big believer in the global warming theory but I do see why people would run a simulation knowing that each and every run, even with the same input parameters, will give them a different result. If run enough times with a good random number generator and you can get some valuable statistical data.
So your trading pollution in the "short" term (less than 10k years), for pollution in the extreme long term (less than 100k years) and you consider that good?
I believe that you do not understand the concept of a half life. Perhaps you have heard this phrase, "a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long"? Same goes for radioactive material, if it has a half life in the thousands of years then it is effectively inert. The cut off between something that is dangerously radioactive and something that is not is somewhere between 100 and 1000 years, as I understand it. Something with a half life less than 100 years will glow red from the radioactive decay. Something with a half life of 1000 years or more will outlast anyone exposed to it, the person will die of natural causes before it can release enough radiation to even make them sick.
Something with a half life of 10k years is no more radioactive than the dirt it came from, that might be a bit hyperbolic but generally true. It might need to be handled with gloves and goggles because of the minute radiation, any chemical properties this stuff might have is certainly something to be concerned about, but generally this stuff poses little hazard to life.
The really radioactive stuff has half lives that are in the decades or shorter. These kinds of fission products will fade quickly, in a short enough time that we can build structures to contain them with little cost. Some of them are quite valuable because of this radioactivity. They can be used as a power source for radio-thermal generators or off grid lighting, used as a gamma source for detecting flaws in metal welds or irradiating food to kill bacteria, there's also a number of medical uses.
Assuming we can process the fission products effectively, and there are numerous proposed means to do so, we can harvest a number of useful isotopes. The long lived isotopes are almost always useable as more fuel. The short lived stuff will become inert on it's own typically even before it leaves the power plant site. Some of the really nasty medium lived products can be put back in the reactor, disposal by neutron bombardment. What is left would be medium lived isotopes that are considered "poisons" to the reactor because they eat too many neutrons, have no uses in medicine or industry, and would be in such a small quantity that disposal by dropping it in a hole for a century is feasible.
The future is obviously solar, wind, tidal, geothermal.
No, those are the energy sources of the past. Sun, wind, and tide is how we traveled in the days of sail. Now we have ships that can travel 50+ kph over the sea and do so without stopping for 50+ years. I keep hearing about how abundant power from the sun is but it is so diffused that it is nearly worthless. A plane cannot fly on wind and sun power. Trains won't move under such power either.
We've been researching solar power for over 50 years! We've dumped all kinds of money into it. As of now it provides less than 1% of the power in the USA. How long must we keep banging our head on that wall before we decide we've had enough headaches from it?
Nuclear power is functionally dead for future power plants because of fanatic NIMBYism from a population that has had a demonized view of 'nuke-u-lar' radiation pounded into it year after year, making new nuclear generation facilities hideously expensive both in money and pre-construction approval requirements.
Then we are doomed. Barring that there is some eureka moment in carbon free technology or that the global warming theory is wrong then we are simply doomed to live with the effects of our carbon output.
I disagree, we can easily replace a large part of our carbon output by switching from coal power to nuclear power. We can make a further dent in this by using electric and natural gas for transportation. Only then does the problem become hard and returns diminish.
The hard part would be the relatively minor carbon output from aircraft and watercraft. Large ships could be powered from nuclear power plants on board like military ships are now. Smaller ships and aircraft could be powered by synthesized fuel (ammonia, liquid hydrogen, synthetic hydrocarbons, etc.) or we merely agree that the carbon output from these is worth the cost to the environment.
If natural gas is problematic in the long run then at least we can used natural gas as a transition and compromise since the carbon output compared to oil and coal is preferable to the status quo. The US Navy has shown that we can close the carbon loop with nuclear power and synthesizing aviation fuel (also suitable for turbine engines and diesel cycle engines) from sea water. When the fuel is burned it enters the atmosphere as CO2 and H2O, the same molecules from which the fuel was derived. No net carbon added.
Just like the transition away from CFCs and acid rain producing power plants this will take a long time. I suggest we start this transition with a speed and determination like we've never seen before. This nonsense of subsidies for ethanol, wind power, and solar panels is just feel good greenwashing, they don't hit the heart of the matter with any real results.
We need nuclear power. We, as Americans need to be building a new nuclear power plant (with about 1GW capacity) every week. We, as humans, need to be building a nuclear power plant every day. We need to do this from now until we replace all coal and natural gas power plants, and then keep going to replace the nuclear power plants that we'd retire in 40 years. At some point we'd likely have to build them at an even faster pace to account for an increasing population and/or an improved standard of living.
To those of you that think we could never build such complex machines at such a pace I say look at the numbers of commercial jet aircraft or oil tankers built in a year, they are comparable to a nuclear power plant in size, cost, and complexity and we mass produce them. To those that think we'd create some sort of radiation hazard, well we can address the comparatively small problem of disposing of radioactive waste or we can deal with the problem of oceans rising, super storms, and so on. I'd also maintain that the problem of nuclear waste has been solved already, we'd just need to build reactors that can both produce power and consume the waste we have now.
To those that believe we can solve this problem with wind and solar I say these technologies produce less than 5% of grid power now after decades of government subsidized research and development. Nuclear power now produces 20% of our grid power and we've not built a new nuclear power plant in 40 years. Even if we built those same 50 year old designs today then we'd still be a century ahead of what wind and solar can do. If we build truly modern nuclear power plants, and mass assemble them, then we'd be able to bring costs down below that of any other power source based on economies of scale alone.
To those that think nuclear power is the path to nuclear annihilation I say there is no better way to make nuclear weapons worthless than to make them more valuable as fuel than as a weapon of war. A large problem of dismantling these nuclear warheads is that we'd have to find a way to make the nuclear fuel inert. We can make it inert by neutron bombardment in a reactor, and we'd get effectively free energy from it. The cost of mining and refining this uranium and plutonium is a sunk cost, we can power the world for a very long time on these warheads alone and in the mean time go out and dig up some more fuel in the form of uranium and thorium. With breeder reactors we'd have an effectively limitless supply of fuel.
Don't build the reactors on fault lines, or places known to have tsunamis, but put them on solid bedrock in the middle of a desert and use high temperature air cooled reactors so the lack of water is not only not a problem but makes containment in the case of a spill or leak much easier. In a dry place the radioactive material is much less likely to wash away, contaminate drinking water, or irradiate crops.
If this doomsday scenario is true, and I DO NOT believe that it is, then we need to do something about it now and quickly. We can hope these scientists are wrong and keep burning coal and oil, we can continue to maintain our standard of living free of global warming with nuclear power, or we can revert to a life of subsistence farming and beasts of burden where life is poor, brutal, and short.
"I've worked in the private sector! They expect results!"
I thought the point of all of this research was to better mankind. How is this research going to help mankind if all they produce are some papers that they file in the university library where the likelihood of someone reading it again is small? We would hope that at some point this research evolves into products and services that make our lives better. I mean that's why we spend our tax dollars on this, right? Even private schools get a lot of money from the government even if it is only the fact that they get taxed at a lower rate than any other corporate entity.
So what if a university has had a mass exodus of researchers. It's a university, they can make more. If they cannot create more researchers from their students and staff then perhaps the school is lacking in some way and needs to disappear, or at least get out of the research business.
But we don't have to think of a big picture of improving society, what of the individual? That person was doing this research for some reason. I'd expect, if asked, these people would state they were doing this research out of some personal desire to improve themselves. If they find a means to increase their happiness by leaving the university then there is nothing wrong with that.
I recall my time studying computer engineering and there were a lot of graduate students and faculty that left the university to find more profitable work during the dot-com bubble. The quality of the instructors took a dive. In one class we had a professor take over a lecture for one of the graduate student instructors to announce to the class that they realized the guy was not teaching well. They offered all students in that section to change to another section with no questions asked. It took a couple years but they got more and better instructors.
Now that I think about it this is just a different way to say, "Those who can, do, and those that can't, teach."
This might suck for CMU and the students that attend there but in the long run more people came out ahead on this.
"They included the technologies you speak of and found that nuclear power has a *negative* EROEI."
What you linked to did not show a negative EROEI for nuclear power for current technologies, it showed rather pathetic returns but not negative. These numbers are based on old technologies and the assumption that nuclear fuel will be harder to obtain in the future.
With breeder reactors fuel will become easier to find, because instead of the exceedingly rare U-235 we can use the much more plentiful U-238 and thorium.
The negative EROEI is speculation, based on no advancements in nuclear reactor design or in technologies to mine and refine U-235. If we made those same assumptions about any energy technology then we'd have a very gloomy outlook on its future viability.
This also assumes that the 20% of the electricity that the USA gets from nuclear power are from reactors that are operating at a loss. Same goes for France, Japan, and other nations that use nuclear power. If these power plants did not produce more power than what was put in then we'd have abandoned the technology decades ago. I suppose one could claim we are merely operating them as long as we can to make up for the energy sunk into them. If that is the case then it is quite possible we can keep them running until they do produce a net gain. Many of these reactors have been operating without incident for 40 years, maybe we can keep them running for 40 more.
Japan is returning to nuclear power even after a very devastating reactor accident. Could that be because they do in fact get net energy from them? Perhaps because they are profitable? Perhaps because they found out that without nuclear power they must either resort to very expensive energy, like solar and wind, or very dirty energy, like coal? Perhaps all the above?
"No it isn't. There are extremely complex geological problems that have to be solved so that the radioactive isotopes don't end up in groundwater."
I'm speaking of waste annihilating molten salt reactors. It is just wrong on so many levels to bury valuable nuclear fuel when we can get energy from it.
"The reactor you speak of, IFR..."
I speak of waste annihilating molten salt reactors, liquid fluoride thorium reactors, and other liquid fuel technologies. Anything that uses liquid sodium as a coolant seems like a very bad idea to me.
"So it is extremely unlikely that these reactors will ever be built commercially."
I believe that they will be built just not in the USA, at least not at first. The US DoE is exceedingly risk adverse and therefore I suspect that they will simply not allow a truly new reactor design to the built in its jurisdiction. We will see Canada, China, UAE, or some other nation do something new first. After a few years the DoE will be dragged kicking and screaming to allow something new in the USA. It doesn't help that the existing nuclear power industry lives on the razor blade model, they will practically give away a nuclear power plant just so that they can sell solid fuel assemblies to the new owners of the power plant at, no doubt, a very high profit margin.
The only exception that I can see to this is the Department of Defense, it has it's own nuclear power program and it does not need the permission of the DoE to operate. It does have to play nice to the extent that the current rules require all fission fuel to be bought from the DoE. There's probably ways around that too.
I can see that as a solution. I'll even go a step further. Have a rotation of orbiting satellites. Build the pieces on the moon, launch them into lunar orbit for assembly, after it is assembled keep it in orbit for a while for powering the moon base and for testing. When the next satellite is complete the previous one can be taken from lunar orbit and placed in Earth orbit. Keep doing this at a pace to keep up with demand for new and replacement solar power satellites.
I also have a possible solution to part of the rocket fuel problem. The moon's gravity well isn't as deep as Earth's, and there is no atmosphere to speak of, and no inhabited places to worry about launch failures landing on someone's house. This opens up technologies that are not feasible on Earth, like space elevators, space guns, and perhaps others. There would still be a need for rocket fuel for station keeping thrusters, and to transfer satellites from lunar orbit to Earth orbit. These might be supplied from Earth more easily than the moon.
This still leaves over a dozen logistical details that need to be worked out before this can be considered viable. It also ignores that if we have the ability to build fully automated solar panel factories then we could likely do so at much less cost on Earth and leave these panels on Earth's surface, and do so in a way that would be more profitable than going through the trouble of making it work on the moon. It also ignores that if we have these technologies then we can apply them to nuclear power plants and get a much better return on our investment. Fully automated nuclear power plants would avoid a lot of risks to human life.
"A lot is being said (not necessarily being done, yet, if at all) about CS in K12, but to what end if there is little or no bridge to the market?"
The K-12 education system is not supposed to be a job training program. At least I don't think it should. I thought that teaching CS in K-12 was to better prepare future adults for college, life in general, or at least let them try things to find out if it appeals to them before choosing a major in college, a trade school, or military specialty.
In my high school we had computer classes, not "computer science" classes since I don't believe these qualified. I took two such classes, each a semester long, and the first was more of a computer literacy class, we got to play with word processors, graphics programs, and a little bit of BASIC programming. The second class might be called a computer science class since the teacher wanted us to create what might be considered rudimentary "functions" in the form of subroutines, we did some basic sorting routines, and some rudimentary databases.
Why do this in high school if it does not prepare a student to be a programmer after graduation? Because in college when my classmates were struggling with even typing on a keyboard or understanding basic program layout I was getting my homework done. Even a customer support drone that has to follow a script while talking on a phone will find these skills helpful to interact with a computer and manage data on a screen.
What you are asking is, why bother teaching algebra in high school if students will be taking calculus in college? Because while I was taking Math 185: Calculus I some of my classmates were taking Math 10: High School Algebra. Yes, some students graduated high school, were accepted into college, and were in a pre-engineering program without having passed a high school algebra class. I do not know how many were successful in engineering since I was already from high school effectively a year ahead of them, I never shared another class with such students again.
In hindsight I see that my high school was unusual in that it had created paths for college bound students, and a path for those wishing to enter a trade school or work on the family farm. Those that wanted to go to college took pre-calculus, those that did not took wood shop.
Perhaps a silly question but something that must be worked out, this base needs power but the sun sets on the moon just like it does on Earth, is this moon base solar powered too? If so then what do they propose the base do while the sun goes down for something like 400 hours?
I suppose the base could be placed on one of the poles, that would give it 24/7 daylight but I suspect this messes with the launch of the solar collecting satellites. I'd expect that a launch from the equator would take less energy than a launch from a pole. If there are three or more solar collectors on the equator, spaced somewhat evenly, and connected with long wires, then it could get 24/7 power. At that point it might be easier to have a polar power station and an equatorial launch station, again connected with long wires.
What else could power this moon base? Even if there was coal or oil on the moon there's no oxygen in the atmosphere to burn it with. There's no flowing air or water to derive energy from. What else is on the moon for energy? Uranium perhaps? Thorium even?
They'd be digging up all kinds of rock to get out things like iron, aluminum, and silicon. So what's left over? Well the processing of the rock for the solar panel material already gets you at least half way to extracting the fission fuel. Why not harvest that for energy too? Sounds more productive than building a trans-lunar power grid. It would also mean more solar panels launched instead of being used to power the base.
Another question, how much energy does it take to launch something to Earth orbit versus launching it to the Earth's surface? I'm curious since if we are extracting this fission fuel, and we have a launch system that can carry large solar arrays, there might be some left over thorium that can be dropped to Earth. Solar panels in orbit might be more efficient than those on Earth but Earth based nuclear power plants work much better than those in orbit.
Another question, aren't moon rocks a lot like Earth rocks? They'd have similar compositions as far as content of nickel, iron, silicon, and thorium, no? We'd have to build robots that can dig up rocks, extract the minerals, sort them out, and form them into parts suitable to create things like solar panels, rockets, and more (for growth or just replacement) robots. Why not just use these robots on Earth to build solar panels on Earth? The thorium and uranium they extract as byproducts could be used in nuclear reactors. We'd also be able to skip the step of building rockets and rocket fuel and simply build more robots, solar panels, and nuclear reactors.
These Earth based solar panel making robots would not need to be completely autonomous since they'd be easily accessible to us fragile humans that can't work on the moon without a habitat or cumbersome protective suits.
One last question, what do they propose these lunar robots use for rocket fuel? The stuff we use to launch rockets from Earth tend to be based on petroleum. These rocket fuels might be in the form of kerosene, derived from petroleum, or hydrogen, typically derived from natural gas. These fossil fuels do not exist in vast quantities on the moon. Even hydrogen derived from hydroxide minerals would be difficult to obtain. The rockets could be nuclear powered and use a variety of gases for the working fluid, that might cut down on the mining required for rocket fuel. Getting enough gases to use as a working fluid is likely problematic on the moon as it has no atmosphere to speak of.
I have to wonder how much actual thought was put into this proposal.
I'd consider that "quite a while ago" for our purposes.
A lunar base even with highly optimal robotic workers would still likely need periodic supplies from Earth. It can build solar panels but can it build more robots?
There are manned flights to the ISS every 3 months or so. I suspect unmanned supply flights are more common. Sending a rover every three years or so to the moon would take a long time to build a factory that can build solar power satellites and launch them to Earth orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Compare the generating capacity (GWe) to the energy produced (TWh). The 21 GWe in nuclear power produced 124 TWh of energy, which if I'm doing my math right means a capacity factor of over 60%. Solar capacity of 28 GWe produced 9 TWh, a capacity factor of 3%.
Let's assume solar capacity doubles every 5 years, and nuclear capacity doubles every 15 years. In the year 2030 we should see nuclear generating capacity of about 40 GWe producing 240 TWh per year. At that same time we'll see 240 GWe in solar producing 80 TWh per year. Can we extrapolate that out another 15 years? I'm not so sure, exponential growth like that can only go on for so long.
If we add electric storage systems to make up for the poor capacity factor of solar then that adds to the cost. Even with an optimistic capacity factor of 25% the amount of storage needed would be massive. Nuclear, with even a poor capacity factor of 60%, could use that storage much more efficiently since the nuclear reactors can produce power all night for the daily peaks.
If nuclear power improves modestly in capacity factor to 75%, and solar reaches an unlikely capacity factor of 25%, then we'd need three times the solar capacity to match what nuclear could do. You'd also need three times the energy storage for solar. Excepting pumped hydro these energy storage systems are theoretical, and pumped hydro needs favorable geography to work. Nuclear may be expensive now but how much is this storage going to cost? We can avoid storage with nuclear by over building, which places a cap on the cost of energy to that of a new nuclear power plant. It is simply impossible to build enough solar to last through the night, which places the cost cap at some unknown value since this technology does not yet exist.
Perhaps you see now the desire for China to invest in nuclear even though they are going bonkers for solar? Nuclear can stand alone on the electric grid, solar cannot.
While China is building all this solar they are also building nuclear. China currently has 30 operating nuclear reactors, and 24 more under construction. They plan to have 150GWe capacity in nuclear power by 2030.
China figured out how to build nuclear power economically, I suspect that we can as well.
Now, where are my slippers?
I have nothing against Nuclear but it's cost make it a dead technology.
I have nothing against solar but it's costs make it a dead technology.
Oh, wait, you say that solar power can get cheaper with more research and development? But then so can nuclear, no?
What happens when the cost of solar halves and the cost of nuclear halves? Over time what happens is that the ability for nuclear to operate during the night makes solar very expensive by comparison. Any technology that can store energy from solar panels can also store energy from nuclear power so any leap in energy storage technology won't save solar. What grid level storage might do is actually the opposite, make solar quite worthless. Solar power takes more land area, more labor, and more materials for a comparable power output than just about anything else we have. Advancements in automation, 3D printing, materials, or whatever that can be applied to solar power can almost always be applied to nuclear power. So for every step forward that solar makes we will see nuclear power take two.
I change my mind, I do have a few things against solar. With the exception of pocket calculators, communication satellites, and a few other niche uses, solar is next to worthless. It's a distraction. We could be doing so much better if we left solar alone and started building nuclear power.
Like I said in the GPP, just don't even try to tell me that solar is "better". We've dumped all kinds of money into it, my tax money, and I'm tired of seeing good money flushed away like that. We have something better than solar already but the US Department of Energy seems to have forgotten that their mandate is to encourage energy development, not hold it back. Get rid of them and we could be building nuclear power at a pace faster than China.
China now has about 30GWe in nuclear power capacity, plans to have 60GWe by 2020, and 150GWe by 2030.
I point this out because the articles linked above might lead people to think that China is abandoning it's nuclear power for solar power, it is not. They are investing in a number of energy sources and I believe that they are wise to do so. It would be nice to see the same investment in nuclear power in the USA.
To all of those that will inevitably reply with doomsday scenarios of piles of radioactive waste, meltdowns irradiating schoolyards and hospitals, and on and on, just don't. We don't build power plants like Chernobyl or Fukushima any more so the scaremongering based on those failures do not apply, we can build them better now. We can build them better because we learned from those mistakes. We can choose to join China in this new nuclear powered age or we can watch them surpass us in technology, in wealth, and in military capability.
One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
Molten salt reactors can reach temperatures of 800C making air cooling viable. That means even in a desert the plant can produce power. A typical coal plant can get to 300C, making water cooling necessary for efficient operation. Steam cycle nuclear is similarly constrained.
Not only can molten salt reactors operate without water cooling it can load follow like natural gas turbines. The turbines used for both natural gas and molten salt nuclear are very similar, the difference is how the heat is produced. Coal, solid fuel nuclear, and some natural gas plants use steam which is very slow to react to changes in demand, if load changes too quickly the turbines can be damaged.
As the amount of energy from sun and wind increases the load seen on the grid can change much more dramatically. Not only do you have people turning electrical items on and off but the energy sources can come and go with changes in weather. This need for peak power is usually met with natural gas. If we get molten salt reactors then we can replace the natural gas power plants.
What I expect to happen over time is that people will realize that with a nuclear power plant that is capable of load following, and the cost to run it varies little based on the load, that wind and solar will become unprofitable.
Right now wind and solar are basically proxies for natural gas, since with every watt of capacity from wind or sun there must be a watt of reserve in natural gas. We are seeing coal power plants getting replaced but not with wind and sun but with natural gas, the windmills and solar panels are there for government subsidized greenwashing. When the US federal government gets their thumbs out of their asses and starts to do something meaningful about our reliance on fossil fuels we can expect a nuclear renaissance of sorts. At which point I expect to see wind and solar to fade as grid power.
If what I predict does not come true then so be it, so long as the USA is providing its own energy instead of importing it from Mexico or China.
Does this look like a theological forum to you?
No, but any mention of requiring a number to do business seems to bring up that warning in the Bible. The Christian Holy Bible, in it's many variations, is the most read book in all of human history. Google tells me that roughly 1/3rd of the world population, and 8/10 of Americans, identify as Christian. Even those that do not believe in any god would still see it as a valuable historical document with many hints on how civilizations have thrived or perished. It would seem wise to consider the warnings the Bible has given us. Those that do see the Bible as more than just a historical document will feel compelled to consider its societal norms and warnings for reasons beyond being just good ideas. Any law that opposes Biblical guidelines will find resistance from the public.
"You're the one claiming radiation isn't a problem. Prove it's safe."
What is there to prove? Just think it through. The waste from current reactors is a mix of many things, much of which is not radioactive. If we separate the radioactive stuff from the not radioactive stuff then we've likely reduced the mass by 90%, it's at least half of what we started with. The radioactive stuff can be separated further into long lived, short lived, medical isotopes, industrial isotopes, fission fuel, fission poisons, and so on. The fuel is put back in the reactor, the useful isotopes sold off, and so on. When we are done there is very little that we need to dispose of and while it is radioactive it does not pose a threat for thousands of years, merely a few decades. We can build containers that last decades easily.
We know how to do this but a lack of economies of scale (basically we don't have enough reactors to make this processing profitable) and stupid federal laws restricting such reprocessing prevent this from happening. While we don't currently have the infrastructure to do this processing we can do the research and engineering to make it possible.
"Nice straw man. Radiation is all about concentration."
Again, think it through. Mining anything means taking what we are looking for and throwing the rest back in the hole we dug. If we are mining uranium and thorium then we take the bulk of the radioactive stuff and use that as fuel. If we are mining anything else then we leave the radioactive stuff in the leftovers, dump it back in the hole, and just pretend we didn't just concentrate the radioactive stuff. Nuclear reactors destroys this radioactive material, making solar panels concentrates it in the environment.
"Actually we know the amount of solar energy that hits the earth."
Yes we do, and it is very expensive to harvest. Nuclear is cheaper now, today, not in some future after we've done more research. While we're waiting for solar to get cheaper we could be building more nuclear power plants. If that future of cheap solar power, cheaper than nuclear, does actually come then we can shift to a solar powered economy. Imposing solar power onto society before it is ready is imposing poverty onto society.
Think about that for a but. While we are waiting for solar panels to get cheap enough to replace coal we will continue to burn coal. Nuclear is already cheaper than coal. We could reduce our carbon output right now, see no increase in the price of energy, and we could still do research on solar power.
"hence the need to massively refine it to use in fission. "
We refine it because we don't use breeder reactors. If we had breeders then we'd be using this stuff as fuel rather than trying to find a big enough hole to dump it into.
"The dangers and costs of storing voluminous waste for 10s of thousands of years "
Go read a book on radioactive half life. Something that is radioactive for thousands of years is not a radiation hazard. Most of the things radioactive for that long is actually fuel.
The rest of your comment is just speculation on future gains in solar energy collection that may never come. Fission works now. The problems with nuclear power are minute compared to solar.
If radioactive waste concerns you then answer me this, where do you think all the materials for the solar panels come from? Mining, no? When you dig up this stuff don't you think that some radioactive stuff won't come out of the ground with it? What are we going to do with all that radioactive stuff? How is disposing of that any different than disposing of the radioactive stuff from a nuclear reactor?
So many comments and so few mentions of the mark of the beast?
What people value in money is the ability to spend it as they wish. A cashless economy removes this freedom. This will drive people to seek other means of trade. Expect barter, silver, gold, bit-coin, soup cans, laundry detergent bottles, whatever.
I heard some people discuss alternative currencies on late night talk radio not too long ago and the expert they had brought up several means to bypass reserve notes and coins. The topic was not on a cashless society exactly but more generally about the value we place in government issued money.
One thing mentioned in this talk show was the potential use of currency from another country. There are laws already existing in the USA protecting the right of people to keep foreign bank notes. For a cashless society to work then laws like this would have to be repealed to prevent people from just using Euros or whatever, not that it'd prevent it completely but it would drive it underground.
As mentioned in the article there's just too many transactions where electronic transfers just aren't suitable. There's a lot of charities and such that live on small cash transactions, we even have a name for them, "a penny drive".
Oh, and the biblical reference to a mark of the beast will cause a problem with a lot of people.
"You're the one arguing you don't want to pay your fair share for the costs of doing this... "
There are many paths to a carbon neutral economy. I choose a path powered by nuclear power. In which case my "fair share" does not change. All it takes is a change in government policy and the nuclear power plants will effectively build themselves. My part in this is small, I'll leave the building of the nuclear power plants to the mechanical, civil, and nuclear engineers. I'm a computer engineer, if they need me to write some software or design a circuit then I'll help but they will do the heavy lifting on this.
Any other path means higher costs, less freedom, and a reduction in everyone's standard of living. I don't want that. We can grow our economy and reduce our carbon footprint but barring some leap in technology the only way to do that is with nuclear power.
With nuclear power a lot of things that did not make sense with coal now becomes feasible. Things like making diesel fuel from seawater. Do that and we close the carbon loop on hydrocarbon based fuels. That and my next truck will be running on "green" diesel fuel.
That stupid "cash for clunkers" didn't reduce our carbon footprint. All it did was break some windows so the glazier could buy some new shoes. We can't legislate ourselves out of this, we must innovate ourselves out of this. Just like how breaking windows doesn't improve the economy.
"You're so much more qualified to decide whether they are right or not?"
Perhaps not. What I have seen is over the decades these people have failed time and time again to both make accurate predictions on how climate would change and fail to find ways to move away from fossil fuels.
"Do you understand that reality is not up for debate?"
Do they? They claim that by stopping the building of a pipeline we will some how use less oil. I can show them the truth but that does not seem to stop them from promoting backward policies.
If we assume that burning coal and oil is bad then people will have to be lead in a different direction with a carrot of a better alternative. Using a stick from government mandates, taxes, subsidies, and so forth only make people resent government, hate those that imposed their beliefs upon them, and that makes people angry and they push back. What they see is a bigger government, more taxes, less spending money, less freedom, and just generally a reduced standard of life.
This is not a problem that can be solved with taxes and subsidies. We cannot simply legislate wind and solar power to be cheaper than coal, the world does not work that way. This is something that must be solved with engineering and technology, not legislation and regulation.
What we have is a world where policy and legislation is easier than engineering and technology. So these idiots take a path of changing policy. That might create an economic incentive to innovate but it also creates an environment where people have less freedom to do so and less money to fund it. That's assuming that there is no incentive to find something better already, given the amount of money that could be made with a carbon free energy source that is cheaper than coal I believe that there is plenty of incentive for green technology without the tax and subsidy nonsense.
These people protesting oil pipelines, nuclear power plants, and so forth are only making the problem worse. They might be happy living in a cabin off the grid, located in a commune, with non-hybrid vegetables grown in the community garden. But if they break their leg on a hike they will be happy to get on a helicopter to carry them to a hospital where they'll get the best medical care in the world so they don't lose their leg to gangrene. That helicopter does not run on non-GMO tomatoes. Those hospitals aren't lit with beeswax candles. If we are going to have life-flight helicopters and 24/7 emergency rooms then we are going to need coal and oil or something better. Wind and solar will not make a helicopter fly.
Come up with something better or go away.
We are going to burn oil. How do I know that? Because I have a Ford truck and it runs on gasoline, and I don't plan on replacing it any time soon. I am also one of 100 million people in the USA in a similar situation. To get that oil we can build a pipeline or we can keep moving it by train. Trains compared to pipes use much more fuel to move that oil. Trains compared to pipes are much more likely to leak that oil.
By protesting the pipeline these people are making the problem WORSE, not better.
The more you inhibit supply the more the price goes up, because demand is relatively unchanged. When the price goes up then more means of supply become viable. This is like fighting alcohol prohibition by arresting the bootleggers. For every one you arrest two more pop up. What needs to be done to stop these addicts is find a better alternative.
Furthering this addict analogy there was a study of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam. These soldiers were consuming massive amounts of drugs to deal with the hell that is war. When removed from that hell almost all of them stopped with the drugs. They found living a life among family and friends more valuable than the drugs. The few that kept taking drugs when removed from the war likely had issues prior to the war or lacked a safe environment to go to.
If you want people to stop burning oil then give them an alternative. Give them an offer they cannot refuse. If you don't then expect the people that are "addicted" to oil to fight like any addict would for their next hit.
What is a better alternative to oil? I don't know. I also don't care. I'm happy with burning oil. I say this because I do not believe oil is as destructive as people claim.
A scene from Olympus Space...
Tartarus: "You killed off the humans?"
Gaia: "No, no, of course not. I fixed the glitch."
Tartarus: "But the humans are gone. You sure you didn't kill them?"
Gaia: "I fixed the glitch, what happened after that just came naturally."
1000 runs and a 1000 different outcomes.
I believe this is called a Monte Carlo Analysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is a very valuable means to analyze a complex system. I got to play with some circuit simulators in college that did this for analog circuitry. It can tell you how stable your system is or if it is sensitive to small changes to certain values.
I'm not a big believer in the global warming theory but I do see why people would run a simulation knowing that each and every run, even with the same input parameters, will give them a different result. If run enough times with a good random number generator and you can get some valuable statistical data.
So your trading pollution in the "short" term (less than 10k years), for pollution in the extreme long term (less than 100k years) and you consider that good?
I believe that you do not understand the concept of a half life. Perhaps you have heard this phrase, "a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long"? Same goes for radioactive material, if it has a half life in the thousands of years then it is effectively inert. The cut off between something that is dangerously radioactive and something that is not is somewhere between 100 and 1000 years, as I understand it. Something with a half life less than 100 years will glow red from the radioactive decay. Something with a half life of 1000 years or more will outlast anyone exposed to it, the person will die of natural causes before it can release enough radiation to even make them sick.
Something with a half life of 10k years is no more radioactive than the dirt it came from, that might be a bit hyperbolic but generally true. It might need to be handled with gloves and goggles because of the minute radiation, any chemical properties this stuff might have is certainly something to be concerned about, but generally this stuff poses little hazard to life.
The really radioactive stuff has half lives that are in the decades or shorter. These kinds of fission products will fade quickly, in a short enough time that we can build structures to contain them with little cost. Some of them are quite valuable because of this radioactivity. They can be used as a power source for radio-thermal generators or off grid lighting, used as a gamma source for detecting flaws in metal welds or irradiating food to kill bacteria, there's also a number of medical uses.
Assuming we can process the fission products effectively, and there are numerous proposed means to do so, we can harvest a number of useful isotopes. The long lived isotopes are almost always useable as more fuel. The short lived stuff will become inert on it's own typically even before it leaves the power plant site. Some of the really nasty medium lived products can be put back in the reactor, disposal by neutron bombardment. What is left would be medium lived isotopes that are considered "poisons" to the reactor because they eat too many neutrons, have no uses in medicine or industry, and would be in such a small quantity that disposal by dropping it in a hole for a century is feasible.
The future is obviously solar, wind, tidal, geothermal.
No, those are the energy sources of the past. Sun, wind, and tide is how we traveled in the days of sail. Now we have ships that can travel 50+ kph over the sea and do so without stopping for 50+ years. I keep hearing about how abundant power from the sun is but it is so diffused that it is nearly worthless. A plane cannot fly on wind and sun power. Trains won't move under such power either.
We've been researching solar power for over 50 years! We've dumped all kinds of money into it. As of now it provides less than 1% of the power in the USA. How long must we keep banging our head on that wall before we decide we've had enough headaches from it?
Nuclear power is functionally dead for future power plants because of fanatic NIMBYism from a population that has had a demonized view of 'nuke-u-lar' radiation pounded into it year after year, making new nuclear generation facilities hideously expensive both in money and pre-construction approval requirements.
Then we are doomed. Barring that there is some eureka moment in carbon free technology or that the global warming theory is wrong then we are simply doomed to live with the effects of our carbon output.
I disagree, we can easily replace a large part of our carbon output by switching from coal power to nuclear power. We can make a further dent in this by using electric and natural gas for transportation. Only then does the problem become hard and returns diminish.
The hard part would be the relatively minor carbon output from aircraft and watercraft. Large ships could be powered from nuclear power plants on board like military ships are now. Smaller ships and aircraft could be powered by synthesized fuel (ammonia, liquid hydrogen, synthetic hydrocarbons, etc.) or we merely agree that the carbon output from these is worth the cost to the environment.
If natural gas is problematic in the long run then at least we can used natural gas as a transition and compromise since the carbon output compared to oil and coal is preferable to the status quo. The US Navy has shown that we can close the carbon loop with nuclear power and synthesizing aviation fuel (also suitable for turbine engines and diesel cycle engines) from sea water. When the fuel is burned it enters the atmosphere as CO2 and H2O, the same molecules from which the fuel was derived. No net carbon added.
Just like the transition away from CFCs and acid rain producing power plants this will take a long time. I suggest we start this transition with a speed and determination like we've never seen before. This nonsense of subsidies for ethanol, wind power, and solar panels is just feel good greenwashing, they don't hit the heart of the matter with any real results.
We need nuclear power. We, as Americans need to be building a new nuclear power plant (with about 1GW capacity) every week. We, as humans, need to be building a nuclear power plant every day. We need to do this from now until we replace all coal and natural gas power plants, and then keep going to replace the nuclear power plants that we'd retire in 40 years. At some point we'd likely have to build them at an even faster pace to account for an increasing population and/or an improved standard of living.
To those of you that think we could never build such complex machines at such a pace I say look at the numbers of commercial jet aircraft or oil tankers built in a year, they are comparable to a nuclear power plant in size, cost, and complexity and we mass produce them. To those that think we'd create some sort of radiation hazard, well we can address the comparatively small problem of disposing of radioactive waste or we can deal with the problem of oceans rising, super storms, and so on. I'd also maintain that the problem of nuclear waste has been solved already, we'd just need to build reactors that can both produce power and consume the waste we have now.
To those that believe we can solve this problem with wind and solar I say these technologies produce less than 5% of grid power now after decades of government subsidized research and development. Nuclear power now produces 20% of our grid power and we've not built a new nuclear power plant in 40 years. Even if we built those same 50 year old designs today then we'd still be a century ahead of what wind and solar can do. If we build truly modern nuclear power plants, and mass assemble them, then we'd be able to bring costs down below that of any other power source based on economies of scale alone.
To those that think nuclear power is the path to nuclear annihilation I say there is no better way to make nuclear weapons worthless than to make them more valuable as fuel than as a weapon of war. A large problem of dismantling these nuclear warheads is that we'd have to find a way to make the nuclear fuel inert. We can make it inert by neutron bombardment in a reactor, and we'd get effectively free energy from it. The cost of mining and refining this uranium and plutonium is a sunk cost, we can power the world for a very long time on these warheads alone and in the mean time go out and dig up some more fuel in the form of uranium and thorium. With breeder reactors we'd have an effectively limitless supply of fuel.
Don't build the reactors on fault lines, or places known to have tsunamis, but put them on solid bedrock in the middle of a desert and use high temperature air cooled reactors so the lack of water is not only not a problem but makes containment in the case of a spill or leak much easier. In a dry place the radioactive material is much less likely to wash away, contaminate drinking water, or irradiate crops.
If this doomsday scenario is true, and I DO NOT believe that it is, then we need to do something about it now and quickly. We can hope these scientists are wrong and keep burning coal and oil, we can continue to maintain our standard of living free of global warming with nuclear power, or we can revert to a life of subsistence farming and beasts of burden where life is poor, brutal, and short.
"I've worked in the private sector! They expect results!"
I thought the point of all of this research was to better mankind. How is this research going to help mankind if all they produce are some papers that they file in the university library where the likelihood of someone reading it again is small? We would hope that at some point this research evolves into products and services that make our lives better. I mean that's why we spend our tax dollars on this, right? Even private schools get a lot of money from the government even if it is only the fact that they get taxed at a lower rate than any other corporate entity.
So what if a university has had a mass exodus of researchers. It's a university, they can make more. If they cannot create more researchers from their students and staff then perhaps the school is lacking in some way and needs to disappear, or at least get out of the research business.
But we don't have to think of a big picture of improving society, what of the individual? That person was doing this research for some reason. I'd expect, if asked, these people would state they were doing this research out of some personal desire to improve themselves. If they find a means to increase their happiness by leaving the university then there is nothing wrong with that.
I recall my time studying computer engineering and there were a lot of graduate students and faculty that left the university to find more profitable work during the dot-com bubble. The quality of the instructors took a dive. In one class we had a professor take over a lecture for one of the graduate student instructors to announce to the class that they realized the guy was not teaching well. They offered all students in that section to change to another section with no questions asked. It took a couple years but they got more and better instructors.
Now that I think about it this is just a different way to say, "Those who can, do, and those that can't, teach."
This might suck for CMU and the students that attend there but in the long run more people came out ahead on this.
"They included the technologies you speak of and found that nuclear power has a *negative* EROEI."
What you linked to did not show a negative EROEI for nuclear power for current technologies, it showed rather pathetic returns but not negative. These numbers are based on old technologies and the assumption that nuclear fuel will be harder to obtain in the future.
With breeder reactors fuel will become easier to find, because instead of the exceedingly rare U-235 we can use the much more plentiful U-238 and thorium.
The negative EROEI is speculation, based on no advancements in nuclear reactor design or in technologies to mine and refine U-235. If we made those same assumptions about any energy technology then we'd have a very gloomy outlook on its future viability.
This also assumes that the 20% of the electricity that the USA gets from nuclear power are from reactors that are operating at a loss. Same goes for France, Japan, and other nations that use nuclear power. If these power plants did not produce more power than what was put in then we'd have abandoned the technology decades ago. I suppose one could claim we are merely operating them as long as we can to make up for the energy sunk into them. If that is the case then it is quite possible we can keep them running until they do produce a net gain. Many of these reactors have been operating without incident for 40 years, maybe we can keep them running for 40 more.
Japan is returning to nuclear power even after a very devastating reactor accident. Could that be because they do in fact get net energy from them? Perhaps because they are profitable? Perhaps because they found out that without nuclear power they must either resort to very expensive energy, like solar and wind, or very dirty energy, like coal? Perhaps all the above?
"No it isn't. There are extremely complex geological problems that have to be solved so that the radioactive isotopes don't end up in groundwater."
I'm speaking of waste annihilating molten salt reactors. It is just wrong on so many levels to bury valuable nuclear fuel when we can get energy from it.
"The reactor you speak of, IFR..."
I speak of waste annihilating molten salt reactors, liquid fluoride thorium reactors, and other liquid fuel technologies. Anything that uses liquid sodium as a coolant seems like a very bad idea to me.
"So it is extremely unlikely that these reactors will ever be built commercially."
I believe that they will be built just not in the USA, at least not at first. The US DoE is exceedingly risk adverse and therefore I suspect that they will simply not allow a truly new reactor design to the built in its jurisdiction. We will see Canada, China, UAE, or some other nation do something new first. After a few years the DoE will be dragged kicking and screaming to allow something new in the USA. It doesn't help that the existing nuclear power industry lives on the razor blade model, they will practically give away a nuclear power plant just so that they can sell solid fuel assemblies to the new owners of the power plant at, no doubt, a very high profit margin.
The only exception that I can see to this is the Department of Defense, it has it's own nuclear power program and it does not need the permission of the DoE to operate. It does have to play nice to the extent that the current rules require all fission fuel to be bought from the DoE. There's probably ways around that too.
I can see that as a solution. I'll even go a step further. Have a rotation of orbiting satellites. Build the pieces on the moon, launch them into lunar orbit for assembly, after it is assembled keep it in orbit for a while for powering the moon base and for testing. When the next satellite is complete the previous one can be taken from lunar orbit and placed in Earth orbit. Keep doing this at a pace to keep up with demand for new and replacement solar power satellites.
I also have a possible solution to part of the rocket fuel problem. The moon's gravity well isn't as deep as Earth's, and there is no atmosphere to speak of, and no inhabited places to worry about launch failures landing on someone's house. This opens up technologies that are not feasible on Earth, like space elevators, space guns, and perhaps others. There would still be a need for rocket fuel for station keeping thrusters, and to transfer satellites from lunar orbit to Earth orbit. These might be supplied from Earth more easily than the moon.
This still leaves over a dozen logistical details that need to be worked out before this can be considered viable. It also ignores that if we have the ability to build fully automated solar panel factories then we could likely do so at much less cost on Earth and leave these panels on Earth's surface, and do so in a way that would be more profitable than going through the trouble of making it work on the moon. It also ignores that if we have these technologies then we can apply them to nuclear power plants and get a much better return on our investment. Fully automated nuclear power plants would avoid a lot of risks to human life.
"A lot is being said (not necessarily being done, yet, if at all) about CS in K12, but to what end if there is little or no bridge to the market?"
The K-12 education system is not supposed to be a job training program. At least I don't think it should. I thought that teaching CS in K-12 was to better prepare future adults for college, life in general, or at least let them try things to find out if it appeals to them before choosing a major in college, a trade school, or military specialty.
In my high school we had computer classes, not "computer science" classes since I don't believe these qualified. I took two such classes, each a semester long, and the first was more of a computer literacy class, we got to play with word processors, graphics programs, and a little bit of BASIC programming. The second class might be called a computer science class since the teacher wanted us to create what might be considered rudimentary "functions" in the form of subroutines, we did some basic sorting routines, and some rudimentary databases.
Why do this in high school if it does not prepare a student to be a programmer after graduation? Because in college when my classmates were struggling with even typing on a keyboard or understanding basic program layout I was getting my homework done. Even a customer support drone that has to follow a script while talking on a phone will find these skills helpful to interact with a computer and manage data on a screen.
What you are asking is, why bother teaching algebra in high school if students will be taking calculus in college? Because while I was taking Math 185: Calculus I some of my classmates were taking Math 10: High School Algebra. Yes, some students graduated high school, were accepted into college, and were in a pre-engineering program without having passed a high school algebra class. I do not know how many were successful in engineering since I was already from high school effectively a year ahead of them, I never shared another class with such students again.
In hindsight I see that my high school was unusual in that it had created paths for college bound students, and a path for those wishing to enter a trade school or work on the family farm. Those that wanted to go to college took pre-calculus, those that did not took wood shop.
Perhaps a silly question but something that must be worked out, this base needs power but the sun sets on the moon just like it does on Earth, is this moon base solar powered too? If so then what do they propose the base do while the sun goes down for something like 400 hours?
I suppose the base could be placed on one of the poles, that would give it 24/7 daylight but I suspect this messes with the launch of the solar collecting satellites. I'd expect that a launch from the equator would take less energy than a launch from a pole. If there are three or more solar collectors on the equator, spaced somewhat evenly, and connected with long wires, then it could get 24/7 power. At that point it might be easier to have a polar power station and an equatorial launch station, again connected with long wires.
What else could power this moon base? Even if there was coal or oil on the moon there's no oxygen in the atmosphere to burn it with. There's no flowing air or water to derive energy from. What else is on the moon for energy? Uranium perhaps? Thorium even?
They'd be digging up all kinds of rock to get out things like iron, aluminum, and silicon. So what's left over? Well the processing of the rock for the solar panel material already gets you at least half way to extracting the fission fuel. Why not harvest that for energy too? Sounds more productive than building a trans-lunar power grid. It would also mean more solar panels launched instead of being used to power the base.
Another question, how much energy does it take to launch something to Earth orbit versus launching it to the Earth's surface? I'm curious since if we are extracting this fission fuel, and we have a launch system that can carry large solar arrays, there might be some left over thorium that can be dropped to Earth. Solar panels in orbit might be more efficient than those on Earth but Earth based nuclear power plants work much better than those in orbit.
Another question, aren't moon rocks a lot like Earth rocks? They'd have similar compositions as far as content of nickel, iron, silicon, and thorium, no? We'd have to build robots that can dig up rocks, extract the minerals, sort them out, and form them into parts suitable to create things like solar panels, rockets, and more (for growth or just replacement) robots. Why not just use these robots on Earth to build solar panels on Earth? The thorium and uranium they extract as byproducts could be used in nuclear reactors. We'd also be able to skip the step of building rockets and rocket fuel and simply build more robots, solar panels, and nuclear reactors.
These Earth based solar panel making robots would not need to be completely autonomous since they'd be easily accessible to us fragile humans that can't work on the moon without a habitat or cumbersome protective suits.
One last question, what do they propose these lunar robots use for rocket fuel? The stuff we use to launch rockets from Earth tend to be based on petroleum. These rocket fuels might be in the form of kerosene, derived from petroleum, or hydrogen, typically derived from natural gas. These fossil fuels do not exist in vast quantities on the moon. Even hydrogen derived from hydroxide minerals would be difficult to obtain. The rockets could be nuclear powered and use a variety of gases for the working fluid, that might cut down on the mining required for rocket fuel. Getting enough gases to use as a working fluid is likely problematic on the moon as it has no atmosphere to speak of.
I have to wonder how much actual thought was put into this proposal.
I'd consider that "quite a while ago" for our purposes.
A lunar base even with highly optimal robotic workers would still likely need periodic supplies from Earth. It can build solar panels but can it build more robots?
There are manned flights to the ISS every 3 months or so. I suspect unmanned supply flights are more common. Sending a rover every three years or so to the moon would take a long time to build a factory that can build solar power satellites and launch them to Earth orbit.