To meet global warming objectives we must expand nuclear.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yes, money cannot by itself solve the problem of unit production in heavy industry, and people forget this problem exists because it doesn't exist in software, which as the new cutting edge thing, is what people think about for most "innovation", whereas greentech is still heavy industry.

[Adam Reynolds]

Yes, money cannot by itself solve the problem of unit production in heavy industry, and people forget this problem exists because it doesn't exist in software, which as the new cutting edge thing, is what people think about for most "innovation", whereas greentech is still heavy industry.

Perhaps the best major example of this is WW2 in which competing production lines were the bottleneck for everything, with money being almost completely irrelevant(as none of the nations involved were still on the gold standard, they could literally print their own money). Regardless of cost, building battleships didn't really stop one from building strategic bombers, but it did somewhat limit building tanks due to the shared resources for building armor, even of a slightly different sort.

[Mr. G]

It's all a matter of cost, nuclear today is probably more expensive than solar, hydroelectric and wind.

Not remotely true!!! Atleast from all the models and pricing regimes I've seen.

What's the production costs, could you share the information? I have read that costs of solar and wind power have fallen dramatically, extra subsidies will lead to an even more dramatic fall.

Annual subsidies paid for fossil fuel energies: 550 billion dollars

Most of this is things like alleviating fuel poverty in the third world and the fact like in the UK you pay reduced VAT on electricity consumption which is largely fossil fuel subsidy. In terms of cash paid out fossil fuels get almost no subsidy and are in fact massive tax payers. If you took all the subsidy from fossil fuels and spent them on wind and solar you would be left with a massive shortfall.

Well, it only leads to distortion in consumption. Third world countries use their scarce resources to make fuel artificially cheaper which leads to excessive consumption and inefficient use of energy, which makes them poorer in the long run and increases fossil fuel consumption artificially. Also air pollution is increased by this policies which damages the health of the population. China is an example, it's one of the world's least energetically efficient countries and it is probably also the country that subsidizes fossil fuel energy the most. As a result they are burning nearly 4 billion metric tons of coal which is more than the world consumed a few decades ago. These countries need to improve their energy usage efficiency.

One of the main problems with non-nuclear renewables seems to be that their energy production fluctuates too much over the seasons.

Nevermind seasonal it varies too much over hours - solar and wind work quite well when their complimenting gas and coal (or hydro if your country is blessed with sufficient mountainous areas to install it) because the gas and coal are quick and flexible enough to compensate for the varying load - without that fossil fuel capacity your left with either needing battery backup which is not technologically or economically feasible or blackouts.

Now that's a very convincing argument. Hydroelectric is a more stable source but only in some regions like South America it is capable of providing the bulk of the required energy.

[Mr. G]

Take one look at Tesla: A decade after they started, they're still producing one model of car in fractionally tiny batches. If simply pouring money at a problem magically solved production bottlenecks, why isn't Tesla building as many cars as Chrysler right now? Oh right, it doesn't. Worse, because of limitations at every level of the supply pyramid and in trained professionals, pouring more money into renewables after a certain point will have a completely useless return on investment as the cost per increased productivity unit sharply increases.

Eh, it's not so much an issue of broad limitations so much as it's the cost of Lithium batteries, and the fact that expanding supply of cars sold is difficult when you have to fight tooth-and-nail against the crooked car dealership cartels that dominate in most states (and tend to be very cozy with state legislatures). Tesla's working on the former with the factory it's building.

The problem is that issues like this are intrinsic to the nature of heavy industry. You do indeed have to overcome entrenched political lobbies. You have to build the factories to make the components to make your product, and the factories to make the components of those components, and the mines to extract the raw materials to make those components.

As a result of all this, you can't simply look at a blank slate and say "welp, let's throw X dollars at Y, which costs Z dollars per unit," and automatically get X/Z units of Y. Duchess contrasted this to software and I think she has a point. With a software project, there is lead time but you can basically develop anything within a year or three if you're willing to throw enough skilled manpower at it- and there is a nearly unlimited manpower pool if you're willing to spend enough money.

When talking about heavy industry, building up the capability to do something fundamentally new on a very large scale can take decades. Especially if (as is the case with renewable energy), you don't have a massive nationwide commitment to mobilize all the state's resources to expand that capability in a hurry. Something like the US mobilization during the World Wars, or the Five Year Plans, could get renewable energy out there a lot faster... but at the cost of basically drafting people to set up solar panels and build massive concrete tidalpower basins, and forcibly repurposing factories that now do something else to build wind turbines.

Economies don't normally work that way in peacetime.

A instantaneous reallocation of 550 billion dollars of annual subsidies from fossil fuel energy to renewables would be a similar economic phenomena to war time mobilization of resources: resources would be quickly "mobilized" from one point to another. It would make renewables an extremely attractive investment and the massive increase in demand for components of wind mills, for instance, would increase the price of those components, leading to a massive increase in investment in supplying those components. Multiple bottlenecks would quickly emerge from such subsidies and the prices of these specific components in high demand would skyrocket, but the price system would obviously adjust as information disperses and agents take action to bag in profit opportunities and over the course of several years firms attracted by the profits would invest to correct these bottlenecks and the overall effect would be to vastly increase the growth rate of installed capacity of renewable fuels, which would lead to a substantial reduction in the growth of global consumption of fossil fuels.

I am not seriously saying it's the "solution" but it's obvious that a massive increase in subsidies for renewable energy would represent a significant contribution to reducing Co2 emissions.

[Mr. G]

That's not true, Mr. G. You cannot just pour money to get results. There are industrial development and expansion curves which in heavy industry are not nearly as elastic as they are in software tech, the existence of which has been the bane of realism for the past two decades when dealing with economists

Oh, then you have a "problem" here. As I am someone working on a PHD in economics.

and libertarians.

It's the new communism. I was a libertarian when I was 18, because solving the problems of the world seemed to be a very simple and effective solution.

Take one look at Tesla: A decade after they started, they're still producing one model of car in fractionally tiny batches. If simply pouring money at a problem magically solved production bottlenecks, why isn't Tesla building as many cars as Chrysler right now?

If Tesla didn't receive massive government subsidies they wouldn't even exist as their cars wouldn't be profitable. In the case of Tesla there was a substantial change because now we have a multi billion dollar supply of electric cars. In the case of electric cars there are many reasons why they are not sold in huge quantities, from the fact the whole worlds' road infrastructure is build around gasoline and gas stations, to other technical problems involved in electric cars: gasoline is just much more practical and still much cheaper. In the case of renewable electric energy the solution is more simple: since the grid can accept energy from any source.

Investment in renewable energy is already massive, at over 200 billion dollars a year in construction of installed capacity. Extra subsidies will push investment into increasing installed capacity to even higher levels.

Oh right, it doesn't. Worse, because of limitations at every level of the supply pyramid and in trained professionals, pouring more money into renewables after a certain point will have a completely useless return on investment as the cost per increased productivity unit sharply increases.

This is only temporary. The supply pyramid has limitations indeed, however, due to the "subsidy shock" these bottlenecks will become apparent as the price of critical components will increase, and the demand for trained professionals will skyrocket, the fact that salaries of working as an engineer in the renewable energy industry become much higher will provide incentives for people to specialize in these areas. In the long term, after several years, when the market has fully adjusted to the "subsidy shock" and all industries related to renewable energy have adjusted to meet the new scale of demand for associated components of the industry, these bottlenecks will not exist anymore and we have perfect elasticity of supply to subsidies. Since reducing global CO2 emissions is a long term problem, not a short term one, the short run consequences of increasing subsidies are essentially irrelevant.

Look, I had wanted to be a nuclear engineer, looked at the US after Fukushima, and instead got my Master's in Ocean Engineering with my thesis work on a subject which materially contributes to renewable energy by helping improve construction techniques for offshore wind turbines. I know renewables are not some joke and can genuinely change our energy balance when properly handled -- though the lack of pump-storage construction to help make that possible is getting pretty pathetic.

Maybe because the need now for energy storage is not significant as fossil fuel and nuclear combined still account for the bulk of energy consumption so that the variability of renewables is not currently an issue. In the next years, when renewables become an ever increasing proportion of global energy supply, I guess substantial demand for pump-storage will emerge and them we will see a exponential increase in the installed capacity of pump-storage.

This article, however, simply reflects the fact that no matter how much money you put into renewables, you cannot expand their use fast enough to meet our warming targets, and can in fact only meet those targets by roughly increasing worldwide nuclear use to 250% of present levels.

I agree with you that if we just focus all resources on renewables we will perhaps run into diminishing returns and that reallocating part of these resources on nuclear would make it easier to solve the issue. I personally have no problem with nuclear but the public in general is really scared of it and this is the main issue with nuclear.

[aerius]

The appeal of renewables is that the pollution happens over there instead of over here. We just see clean solar panels and windmills, we don't see the environmental disasters that manufacturing them creates. Let's take solar, the reason costs are dropping so much is because manufacturing has moved to China, which is infamous for its lack of pollution control and environmental protection. Which leads to this. A few dozen highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals & byproducts getting dumped right into the waterways. But it happens over there and we don't see it so fuck it, that's their problem, not ours.

Or let's take wind turbines. There's a bit under a ton of neodymium in the generator set of every modern wind turbine in the form of neodymium-iron-boron magnets. The magnets are used to form magnetic field in which the coils rotate to generate electricity. Problem. Mining and refining neodymium is about as environmentally unfriendly as running an oil sands operation. Extracting and refining the metal from the ore requires a whole bunch of strong acids and other nasty chemicals, and creates a ton of toxic sludge & heavy metal residues. Which they just dump into a lake. Because fuck it, no can find Inner Mongolia on a map anyway.

Can we build all those things in an environmentally responsible manner? Sure we can. But they'd no longer be cheap and affordable. The cost would probably go up around 5-10 times, which makes the cost of a solar or wind farm about the same as nuclear, if not more. And there's no payback, ever, because the capacity factors and lifespan of the plant won't allow it.

[Guardsman Bass]

Those are localized pollution problems, though. If your primary goal is trying to slow down or prevent climate change, it doesn't change the calculus much.

[Simon_Jester]

This is a factor.

On the other hand, these countries which are living with the environmental consequences and cheap labor conditions... They're not going to put up with it forever. So it becomes an open question, if cheap wind turbines rely on cheap neodymium, what happens when the countries sitting on the neodymium reserves decide to hold out for higher prices? Or when the people manufacturing solar panels in China have to cope with higher wages in that country?

To some extent the manufacturing can run around the world chasing cheap labor, but there are limits to how far that can go. Especially since climate change and resource depletion are likely to make the remaining undeveloped nations into very difficult places to live and do business.

[K. A. Pital]

Those are localized pollution problems, though. If your primary goal is trying to slow down or prevent climate change, it doesn't change the calculus much.

Of course. Was it not the point that they are localized (and the best part - they are so conveniently localized in the developing countries)? If your primary goal is to reduce emissions, that is irrelevant, but shock subsidies as proposed here will likely lead to them being absorbed, partially, as collateral for the damage you are doing.

That has happened with China trying to keep rare earth products inside the nation (logical as they are carrying all the environmental costs for extraction and processing), and it will happen again elsewhere, especially if the nation in question knows the clients have the money to pay, and so partially cover the ecological damage with financial compensation.

[Simon_Jester]

That's not true, Mr. G. You cannot just pour money to get results. There are industrial development and expansion curves which in heavy industry are not nearly as elastic as they are in software tech, the existence of which has been the bane of realism for the past two decades when dealing with economists

Oh, then you have a "problem" here. As I am someone working on a PHD in economics.

Consider the tendency of certain economists to assume humans are ideal frictionless spherical homo economicus specimens when it comes to explaining why the market will make it unnecessary to do whatever they don't want to do.

While this is not a universal fault of economists, it is a fault of a large enough subset of them to cause problems with real consequences. Because "never mind, the market knows what it's doing" is a bad answer to problems that the market doesn't encode properly.

Say, the idea that discrimination in wages on the grounds of race could never last long because it would lead to arbitrage or something akin to it- all black workers would automatically migrate to the handful of enlightened employers who pay them salaries competitive with whites, or all employers would start paying everyone else the same reduced salary too, or some such thing.

This is unrealistic, but it's not hard to find actual economists advocating it, and there are swarms of half-educated people out there who claim the principles of economics support it.

Investment in renewable energy is already massive, at over 200 billion dollars a year in construction of installed capacity. Extra subsidies will push investment into increasing installed capacity to even higher levels.

The main question is limiting factors

Maybe because the need now for energy storage is not significant as fossil fuel and nuclear combined still account for the bulk of energy consumption so that the variability of renewables is not currently an issue. In the next years, when renewables become an ever increasing proportion of global energy supply, I guess substantial demand for pump-storage will emerge and them we will see a exponential increase in the installed capacity of pump-storage.

If it turns out to be physically impossible to install acceptably cheap pump-storage this still becomes an obstacle. And since a pump-storage system is essentially a hydroelectric dam capable of running backwards... the capital costs are always going to be high. They're unlikely to get much cheaper because the things needed for construction (concrete, steel, turbines, hard-rock digging and construction workers) are all mature technology.

So it may never become profitable to build masses of solar panels combined with pump storage in the night, as an alternative to building nuclear reactors. In which case we have to expend massive unnecessary resources to rely on solar.

This article, however, simply reflects the fact that no matter how much money you put into renewables, you cannot expand their use fast enough to meet our warming targets, and can in fact only meet those targets by roughly increasing worldwide nuclear use to 250% of present levels.

I agree with you that if we just focus all resources on renewables we will perhaps run into diminishing returns and that reallocating part of these resources on nuclear would make it easier to solve the issue. I personally have no problem with nuclear but the public in general is really scared of it and this is the main issue with nuclear.

One big problem is that many of our warming targets are short-term because we have to start reducing carbon dioxide levels... well, frankly we already have to start doing it yesterday. The levels have already risen enough that global warming is occurring and will continue; it's just a question of to what extent Hy-Brasil is going to continue to sink before people acknowledge and resolve the problem.

[Mr. G]

That's not true, Mr. G. You cannot just pour money to get results. There are industrial development and expansion curves which in heavy industry are not nearly as elastic as they are in software tech, the existence of which has been the bane of realism for the past two decades when dealing with economists

Oh, then you have a "problem" here. As I am someone working on a PHD in economics.

Consider the tendency of certain economists to assume humans are ideal frictionless spherical homo economicus specimens when it comes to explaining why the market will make it unnecessary to do whatever they don't want to do.

While this is not a universal fault of economists, it is a fault of a large enough subset of them to cause problems with real consequences. Because "never mind, the market knows what it's doing" is a bad answer to problems that the market doesn't encode properly.

Indeed. That's why I propose subsidies, it's a way to incorporate into market prices the environmental benefits of renewable energy.

Say, the idea that discrimination in wages on the grounds of race could never last long because it would lead to arbitrage or something akin to it- all black workers would automatically migrate to the handful of enlightened employers who pay them salaries competitive with whites, or all employers would start paying everyone else the same reduced salary too, or some such thing.

This is unrealistic, but it's not hard to find actual economists advocating it, and there are swarms of half-educated people out there who claim the principles of economics support it.

Do you have any source for empirical studies estimating the degree by which racial discrimination affects wages?

Maybe because the need now for energy storage is not significant as fossil fuel and nuclear combined still account for the bulk of energy consumption so that the variability of renewables is not currently an issue. In the next years, when renewables become an ever increasing proportion of global energy supply, I guess substantial demand for pump-storage will emerge and them we will see a exponential increase in the installed capacity of pump-storage.

If it turns out to be physically impossible to install acceptably cheap pump-storage this still becomes an obstacle. And since a pump-storage system is essentially a hydroelectric dam capable of running backwards... the capital costs are always going to be high. They're unlikely to get much cheaper because the things needed for construction (concrete, steel, turbines, hard-rock digging and construction workers) are all mature technology.

So it may never become profitable to build masses of solar panels combined with pump storage in the night, as an alternative to building nuclear reactors. In which case we have to expend massive unnecessary resources to rely on solar.

I agree. But we don't know that yet. As well as that for the near future investment in solar doesn't require pump-storage.

[Simon_Jester]

Do you have any source for empirical studies estimating the degree by which racial discrimination affects wages?

Start here:

http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/worksho ... /pager.pdf

Which is an example of the oft-cited result that whites recently released from prison get about the same treatment in terms of hiring conditions as blacks with no criminal record...

Again, this really is impossible to explain in terms of market economics unless,
1) We posit that blacks are objectively less desirable workers, so much so that a white ex-con is is arguably preferable, or...
2) We posit that employers are often irrational in their hiring decisions and are likely to come up with spurious reasons to not hire blacks, whether this decision be made consciously or subconsciously.

(1) is transparent nonsense. (2) undermines the basic premise that we can rely on the efficient market hypothesis and conclude that the market prices for a commodity (such as labor) accurately encodes all objectively true information about the commodity.

[FireNexus]

I was wondering what people think of the potential of the California drought to kickstart the nuclear industry. I know Californians are probably more wary than most of nuclear, but nuclear desalination is probably one of their only options if the situation stretches past a decade like it looks to. It seems like a state with high demand for energy and water and an ongoing, worsening drought combined with an economy highly dependent on irrigated agriculture would be an excellent test-bed for such systems. I understand this is probably fantastical as something a modern US government in a state like California could accomplish, but if the drought is a disaster of the likes it looks to be, could it go from fantasy to reality?

Would a full-scale push on nuclear desalination projects with state or even federal backing have any hope of helping the drought in the medium (10-20 years) term assuming all the political resistance faded with the rise of thirst, or is this a techno-wank fantasy that will not only never happen but couldn't solve the problem if it did?

(Edit: Apologies if this is a necro. I know it's close to the month limit, but I honestly didn't realize the date until after I posted.)

[aerius]

There's a bunch of problems on multiple fronts with regards to nuclear & desalinization in California.

1) It's an earthquake zone. Environmentalists, hippies, and NIMBYs will scream FUKUSHIMA!! at the top of their lungs. And there's a fuckton of those folks in California, so they will be heard.

2) Financing. At a rough guess you're looking at a $200 billion or more project, California already has a massive hole in its budget so there's no way they're financing those costs. So the Federal government would have to pay for it, and you can bet that a bunch of Redneck state Congressmen & Senators will be doing their best to block the funding. Because fuck you California for taking my money.

3) I think I may have underestimated the cost. I just looked up the water flow for the All-American Canal which carries all the irrigation water for Imperial Valley. It carries up to 60 billion litres a day. The largest desal plant in the world is about a billion litres a day and cost $7.2 billion to build. Apparently it has a built-in power plant, but that still works out to $430 billion or so. Good luck paying for that.

Then you account for the endless environmental assessments (this is California) and lead time for those projects and yeah, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet it'll be too late to do any good in the next 20 years.

[Terralthra]

"California is an earthquake zone" is very...simplistic. There are more and less seismically stable areas within California, and there are already a few nuclear plants operating in the state. More importantly, earthquakes don't really faze nuclear plants, honestly. The building can be designed to withstand extremely powerful quakes. See for reference DCPP.

Political forces exaggerating the danger posed by nuclear are much more likely to scuttle a plant than actual dangers of earthquakes.

[aerius]

We both know that nuke plants aren't a problem unless you build them right on top of a fault line, but trying to get that message across is likely futile. So yeah, it's mostly a political and PR problem. And financing. Unlike "too big to fail" banks, no one else gets multi-hundred billion handouts from the Federal government.

[Sky Captain]

Desalination might be one of the applications where solar energy could work well. Desalinated water can be easily stored as long as required so unreliability problem solar energy faces when fed into a power grid goes away. Just run the desalination process when there are surplus energy available and store the fresh water for use for night and cloudy days.

[Darth Tanner]

Except now your 1 billion litre facility is only producing 0.24 billion litres because it only runs when the solar panels its hooked up to are at sufficient output... you would be wasting a massive amount of very expensive plant capacity.

[Sky Captain]

Except now your 1 billion litre facility is only producing 0.24 billion litres because it only runs when the solar panels its hooked up to are at sufficient output... you would be wasting a massive amount of very expensive plant capacity.

That would be an issue. Economical viability of such solar powered desalination facility would depend on whether it is cost effective to have large facility with capacity that is fully utilized only during daytime, but running on cheap electricity vs smaller facility that runs 24/7 but uses electricity generated by more expensive, but stable sources.