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Aethernet posted:The rectenna needed to receive the power is alas several square kilometres in size, so there's plenty of scope for NIMBYs to gently caress this one up too. The logical location for that is the offshore world farms the UK already building, despite the objections of NIMBYs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-47400641 I guess some people in HMG have worked out that if solar power does becomes the only viable way of generating electricity, the UK, which gets perhaps 3 sunny days a year, is hosed.
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Oct 1, 2021 12:13
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silence_kit posted:Oh yeah, it is an old idea. It was probably a more attractive idea back when it was expensive to produce solar panels. People were really more into ideas like this and engineering solar concentrators back then. If you point a solar cell at a more concentrated resource, you don't need to manufacture as many to get the same power output. I wonder if you used a lower power version over a city-sized region you would have a thing that could power phones.
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Oct 1, 2021 19:14
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Wibla posted:
The root economic problem with nuclear is that it has the potential to produce electricity too cheaply, meaning the profits to be made from selling that are too small to generate an attractive rate of return. The benefits flow to the consumer, not the producer. The usual ‘workaround’ for that problem is for governments to guarantee high prices for a given capacity. Which adds additional perverse incentives; companies building plants now have no incentive to invest in being successful at low cost generation, as that would just enable competitors to enter the market. It would very likely be simpler to just have governments pay for the plants out of general taxation, and then give out free domestic electricity to all voters, and greatly discounted power to industrial employers of voters. If that can’t happen politically, maybe some kind of glorified mega-kickstarter thing could work as an economic model?
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Oct 25, 2021 20:47
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mobby_6kl posted:Nuclear energy too cheap to measure? Where have I heard this before? You heard it from engineers who didn’t understand, and had no practical experience of, economics. _Actually is_ means _under the rules of investment finance_. As someone says above, nuclear is a bad capital investment vehicle. It is a means of taking concentrated capital and creating widely distributed returns which you have no ability to collect. Which is another way of saying ‘make a loss’. The fictional nation of Wakanda, with its Vibranium, was written in the sixties partly taking inspiration from contemporary Ghana and the new wonder-metal, aluminium. Ghana had both deposits of bauxite and rivers suitable for generating hydroelectricity. The bankers of the world were happy to fund either, but not both. At the engineering level, it makes sense to make aluminium using cheap hydroelectricity, reducing shipping costs by refining locally. But at the economic level, it doesn’t. You don’t get your money back from someone who has no need to do business with you any more. The chief advantage of most forms of renewables is little to do with engineering, but that they don’t have that problem. Fundamentally the customer pays for their own solar panel, either directly or via some form of simple indirection. For nuclear to prosper, the required innovation would be mostly financial or political, not a matter of engineering.
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Oct 26, 2021 10:48
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Is there any feasible scenario where nuclear generated power becomes substantially cheaper, whilst maintaining/improving actual (not regulatory) safety standards? Say, 50% cheaper? All of those are engineering ideas, none of which would address the actual problem; the inherent cheapness of the generated electricity, and the consequent lack of a market-based means of recovering the high fixed costs of construction. Most would make it worse, e.g. thorium would presumably further reduce fuel and security costs. French electricity, almost entirely nuclear, costs 0.17 Euros per kilowatt, about half that of Germany. This is already too low for the companies involved to make expected profits; Only a fool would invest in French rather than German power companies; any further price reductions would completely bankrupt them. Any successful change would be politically driven; at most some engineering fix might help with public perception. Something like reclassifying spent nuclear fuel as a financial asset, rather than a liability, would probably be along the right lines.
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Oct 26, 2021 14:34
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mobby_6kl posted:
In a commodity market, you can’t just choose to charge a higher price; people will buy from your competitors and you won’t sell anything. Any engineering practices that reduces costs also reduces your competitors costs, leading to a price war and collapsing profits all round. To cut the complex game-theoretical modeling short, you can only charge a given margin on your inputs, expressed as a percentage. Uranium costs ~130 dollars per kilo, so the marginal price of a kilos worth of nuclear electricity is some small multiple of that, Thorium is 30 dollars per kilo, so if the plants were similarly efficient, the same percentage markup gets you a lot less actual money. A few plants won’t bring down the price significantly; a large number would. So the economically optimal thing is to ensure the cost to build plants are as high as you can get away with; this is much more profitable than supplying electricity cheaply. So, since the failures of the seventies, all existing nuclear companies have successfully migrated to this business model. The same economics applies to fighter planes, subways, train tracks and so on. The French were perhaps the slowest to learn that lesson, but they seem to have got there in the end.
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Oct 26, 2021 16:10
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Capt.Whorebags posted:But isn't this the same economic model that solar and wind has? All the costs are all upfront capital build costs, marginal cost per MWh to generate is almost zero. Sure solar build costs aren't the same as nuclear but neither is output. A solar farm with 100MW nameplate still costs hundreds of millions to build, and has a much lower nameplate output and capacity factor than a modern nuclear plant. All the technology development for solar costs go into how to manufacture better solar panels (and a few other bits of auxiliary equipment) . These are sold as items either directly to consumers, or to operating companies that do simple bundling. If prices drop in future, that matters not to the manufacturer; they already got their money. So investment in reducing costs is a viable strategy to the one actor that is in the position to do so. In other words, solar has the same economics as car or computer manufacturing; the customer is continually getting a better product at an ever-lower price; the manufacturer still gets high profits from the expanding volume of sales. This is why the only private money considering investing in nuclear is looking at small scale modular reactors that can be built on an assembly line and carried on the back of a truck or barge. Engineering concerns say, all things being equal, these will be much less efficient, and probably somewhat more dangerous, than larger reactors. But selling such reactors does have at least the potential to be a viable business model without requiring political or regulatory change. Or at least, companies like Seaborg technologies think so. If their product ever does materialize, no doubt it will be reassuringly expensive.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:47
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CommieGIR posted:Except for all the places that didn't happen like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to name a few. At the time there was no such disproportionate nuclear fear; it was the era of radium watch dials. If you disassembled the guts of a hospital radiotherapy machine, scattered it across Times Square, and called it a dirty bomb, probably no one would be killed. But it would be at least a decade before it reopened.
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Nov 22, 2021 13:23
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The basic claim is that oil/gas companies should not invest in green energy, because they are going to be replaced by new companies doing green things. Instead they should just extract gas and return money to shareholders, while making just enough environmental concessions to avoid being literally arrested. The claim is that no corporation ever survived a phase change in the nature of what the market is based on. That seems wrong. True, you can find examples of companies that bet wrong, like Blockbuster, easily enough . But what about, say, tobacco companies and e-cigarettes/vaping?
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Nov 26, 2021 11:54
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Did you even read the article because did vouch for regulations especially over methane emissions. Tobacco use is dramatically over over the last few decades but that is completely different situation - you can live without tobacco. Oil and Gas makes up hundreds of necessary products and services that are never, ever going to go away unless they are replaced by alternatives. Yes, hence the phrase ‘just enough environment concessions to avoid being arrested’. Now, It is certainly true that many necessary things are and will continue to be made from oil (though not so much gas). But what he is arguing is for is not buying shares in oil companies that attempt anything beyond that legal minimum. Because while even though they can see the change to green energy coming, he claims history suggests they will try and fail to adapt. Which wastes money he would rather have for himself. However, even accepting that entirely amoral viewpoint, he is too busy gloating over how clever/evil he is to actually make his case. Netflix won over Blockbuster because the latter had a large number of soon-to-be useless retail locations, workers and pension liabilities. Starting from scratch was a clear winning proposition. Tesla is a more ambiguous case, where there are clear downsides as well as advantages to starting from scratch. Other car companies catching up on EVs is a thing many people can see happening, simply because they have decades of experience in making car doors, seats, steering wheels, and so on. In any case, not properly investing in EV development was a clear unforced mistake by car manufacturers, not something to be argued for. If the future of energy is largely nuclear or offshore wind, then companies with workforces that know how to build turbines and offshore oil platforms are going to have a shorter learning curve. Only if it is all manufacturing solar cells in a Chinese factory and jobbing tradesmen installing them on roofs do the existing energy companies have nothing useful to offer.
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Nov 26, 2021 17:41
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CommieGIR posted:That assumes we consume fossils fuels at a steady rate rather than a rapidly increasing one. If that happens, it would be bad. The question is how could such a thing plausibly happen? Capitalist-run Industry is not going to suddenly arbitrarily decide to use a bunch of extra energy; that would raise costs and so hit profits. So any such increase would have to come from consumer demand for new things that take more energy. There are 3 candidates for driving such demand I can think of; flying cars, orbital tourism and bitcoin. Two of which don’t seem imminent or compelling for truly mass adoption. The one to watch out for is bitcoin/crypto; all backlash against it should be thoroughly encouraged,
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Jun 16, 2022 16:15
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Pander posted:Better add ableist after I call that author certifiably insane. Nah, she just knows what pays her bills. I don’t know if she is any relation to the Paul Gunter who founded the organisation she works for. But when asked why he protested nuclear and not coal, he once said: quote:“Because that is not what I get paid to do. If you want to pay me to protest coal, I will.”. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2010/05/beyond-nuclear-financials-and-funding.html https://beyondnuclear.org/about/ A single billionaire with a casual donation to a cause fashionable in 1970 can create a self-sustaining fund legally unable to consider any contrary evidence or arguments. And one that will keep on paying people’s salaries up to the point of civilisation collapse.
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Jul 20, 2022 23:26
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Discendo Vox posted:I’d like to again ask if it would be possible to zero in on the regulatory obstacles to wider nuclear development in the US: what are the rules subject to citizen petitions and notice and comment rule making that are part of the problem? The rule that is usually cited as effectively preventing profitable private nuclear is the one that says _every_ reasonable precaution must be taken. So you can never get ahead of the game by designing a cheap and safe plant. That rule says no matter how safe it is, you still need keep adding safety features until the spreadsheet says you have run out of money. I am not particularly confident of the ability of the US government to solve that problem by deregulation; that would require knowing how safe something is without having been involved in designing and building it. It seems much simpler to have them simply own and operate the plants. Building can still be done by a subcontractor,; if you simply build enough you can actually end up with a competitive market.
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Jul 23, 2022 14:23
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Discendo Vox posted:Can you cite the rule you’re referring to? As I implied, I don’t think there is a specific piece of legislature that can be reworded and everything suddenly works cleanly. It’s embedded in the whole philosophy and institutional culture of the regulatory institutions. The only possible legislative change would be to remove their authority. Which, to be clear, would be bad. https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/radiation-protection/protection-from-exposures/alara/alara-and-alarp-principle/ radmonger fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 15:45
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MightyBigMinus posted:what if i told you eroei and return on capital were the same thing Then I would say you have been ideologically poisoned to the point where you are incapable of doing basic math. Infiinite free energy at a cost of 10$ would have a zero rate of capital return. I guess at that price it would be built anyway, by someone one or other. But on any kind of more realistic assumptions, creating abundant, cheap and clean energy is always going to compare unfavourably as an investment to producing scarce, variably-clean and so expensive electricity. So as long as the latter remains possible, it will be what private money does.
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Jul 25, 2022 10:52
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SlowBloke posted:I do hope that, since half of those studies are penned by countries that voted to leave, they will get quietly forgotten rather than wasting resources on pie in the sky bullshit. The UK has not left ESA. It is one of the 5 countries, including Canada, that are not members of both organisations. In fact, as the UK budget contribution no longer gets spent on EU-driven stuff like Galileo, ESA is likely to defer to UK priorities somewhat more. Space-based solar seems likely worth investing in on the same basis as fusion, energy storage, thorium reactors, etc. At least one of them is going to need to prove technically feasible to move beyond gas having a role for power generation. Four chances for survival are better than three.
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Aug 18, 2022 19:48
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GABA ghoul posted:This will probably continue to be true until we are in the region of 60-90% renewables and decades into the future. So the question is if battery tech will be up to the task by 2042 to remove the last 10-20% of fossil power plants, not now. If Europe is still 40% gas in a few decades time, we are irretrievably hosed on a civilisational level. It is perhaps good that there will have been lots of profits made in the mean time, but I am not sure what there will be to spend that money on. The stated EU policy is carbon neutrality by 2050. Given that, I struggle to see how there is room for enough gas peakers to make unstored renewables a significant sector.
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Aug 19, 2022 18:08
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Senor P. posted:
That’s actually enough money that no single person could afford it, you’d have to get 2 or 3 billionaires to collaborate.
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Jan 2, 2023 16:17
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in a well actually posted:
Don’t both nuclear and renewable power generation share the feature that they require about that much excess power generation capacity to meet demand peaks?
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Mar 21, 2023 10:35
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mobby_6kl posted:
So that system would have 10GW available 50% of the time. other systems would have different amounts, most of them larger. The point is that it macroeconomic terms, that excess power is, for both nuclear and renewables: - on the same scale as overall world energy consumption - very nearly free, as a marginal cost of production The difference for fossil fuels is they can’t go below the cost of the stuff you burn. This is, incidentally, a key reason nuclear is not a safe and profitable investment. Even if you are confident in your own engineering. You can never be sure the overall market won’t price half of the stuff you produce at zero. What’s more, you can’t really take advantage of that potential for zero-cost energy as a private actor in a market system, because by using it you are creating demand, which means you are no longer getting it for free. But a government can just build carbon capture plants and pass a law saying they pay only a nominal fee for electricity. And that doesn’t break the economics or profitability of existing power producers. Even 20% of the world’s electricity production, at low efficiency,, would capture a lot of gigatons of carbon.
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Mar 22, 2023 12:30
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Phanatic posted:I have literally no idea what you're saying here. "Excess power is for nuclear on the same scale as overall world energy consumption." That sentence reads like gibberish. Ok I’ll take it slowly. If excess capacity in a system is anything above 10%, you have an amount of unused energy generation capacity that is of the same order of magnitude of the energy production of the system If that system is ‘the world’, then that is a large amount. Hence segment of the form ‘you can’t do that, it would require a massive amount of energy’ are at best suspect.
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Mar 23, 2023 10:06
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Local stakeholders are always the first priority and it seems only now green movements have an issue with them now that it impacts their dreams. Is it really meaningful to talk of a US ‘green movement’ as a thing distinct from oil industry lobbyists? Opposing alternatives to oil, gas and coal is where the money is, and the movement has never been organised or independent enough to go against that incentive. You can’t do studies, write reports or show up as a talking head on news media unless someone is paying your salary. And the energy industry is pretty much always that someone. It’s only actually governments, and to a lesser extent large non-energy corporations, that are an even attempting to do anything about carbon emissions. And that’s for self-interested technocratic reasons that will always wilt in the face of sufficient popular opposition.
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Feb 6, 2024 11:46
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