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To me the outcome is all very much in doubt and I tihnk a significant reshaping of society will be forced on us. You can call it luddite dreaming if you wish, but is techno-optimist dreaming any better? At least if I am wrong, I'll be perfectly happy to be wrong. At any rate I still lived life the way I wanted to.
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Jun 16, 2022 13:10
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CommieGIR posted:That assumes we consume fossils fuels at a steady rate rather than a rapidly increasing one.   I think we could be ok with a reasonable transition to mostly renewables
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Jun 16, 2022 13:18
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mobby_6kl posted:
No, you won't. Because a certain European country tried that and is now bailing out their coal industry. There hasn't been a country where mostly renewables ends up being anything more than a subsidy to natural gas and/or coal to back it up. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 13:23
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CommieGIR posted:No, you won't. Because a certain European country tried that and is now bailing out their coal industry. There hasn't been a country where mostly renewables ends up being anything more than a subsidy to natural gas and/or coal to back it up. Norway would like a word 
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Jun 16, 2022 13:50
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Wibla posted:Norway would like a word Norway is unique because they have the geography to support massive amounts of Hydro. That's very different. Its not something that can just be done anywhere.
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Jun 16, 2022 14:06
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CommieGIR posted:Norway is unique because they have the geography to support massive amounts of Hydro. That's very different. Its not something that can just be done anywhere. Couldn't we just flood the Netherlands and use that to generate hydro power?
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Jun 16, 2022 14:08
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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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We'll need lots of extra energy when we try, in vain when it's far too late, to contain some of the worst effects of climate change.
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Jun 16, 2022 16:25
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I still can't believe we're just so stupid and won't build nuclear plants because we're not sure we can make enough money off of them. It's like a really slow and boring version of don't look up but instead of a meteor, it's the wet-bulb temperature.
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Jun 16, 2022 16:30
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:I still can't believe we're just so stupid and won't build nuclear plants because we're not sure we can make enough money off of them. It's like a really slow and boring version of don't look up but instead of a meteor, it's the wet-bulb temperature. Green groups have pretty well ensured that resistance to nuclear is maintained. For a lot of them (Greenpeace, et al) this resistance is their crowning achievement. For them to admit they have been so comprehensively wrong is not something they are willing to do and would rather the world cook instead. If green groups got out there advocating as strongly for nuclear as they currently do against it, nuclear projects would be getting stood up within months. Big businesses like the oil companies would love to get into nuclear. It requires huge capital, huge project management expertise (high barriers to entry that they are placed to overcome) and has long predictable income streams (predictable profit is rewarded more than blue sky intermitted profit) - a few really big projects rather than lots of little ones. The problem is that while filibuster resistance can be organised so effectively, the risk profile is just too great that the multi billion investment becomes delayed by five to ten years or even cancelled by every trick in the book to hold it back.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:05
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Big businesses like the oil companies would love to get into nuclear. It requires huge capital, huge project management expertise (high barriers to entry that they are placed to overcome) and has long predictable income streams (predictable profit is rewarded more than blue sky intermitted profit) - a few really big projects rather than lots of little ones. The problem is that while filibuster resistance can be organised so effectively, the risk profile is just too great that the multi billion investment becomes delayed by five to ten years or even cancelled by every trick in the book to hold it back. I don't feel like this is true, oil companies were some of the key people who fought and worked to undermine nuclear precisely because it undermines their profit and business model. Also: Oil companies are not huge on being regulated to the level that nuclear industry is.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:13
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CommieGIR posted:I don't feel like this is true, oil companies were some of the key people who fought and worked to undermine nuclear precisely because it undermines their profit and business model. Oil companies also own and operate the Green movement soo it really just comes down to Oil Companies don't want Nuclear Power. Seems like another good reason to build nuclear power, costs and profits be damned.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:16
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It is the most American thing ever that we will rather go full coal ahead than admit we were wrong and build one nuclear plant.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:20
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Dameius posted:It is the most American thing ever that we will rather go full coal ahead than admit we were wrong and build one nuclear plant. Who knew Germany was so American?
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Jun 16, 2022 18:48
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Phanatic posted:Who knew Germany was so American? The Marshall Plan finally delivers.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:09
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CommieGIR posted:I don't feel like this is true, oil companies were some of the key people who fought and worked to undermine nuclear precisely because it undermines their profit and business model. Nah, this thought that the investors in oil companies (ie the real mover and shakers) have some conspiracy against high barrier to entry business model that if it can overcome the delay/cancelled risk is solid predictable profit is misplaced. Sure, some oil industry specialists will be anxious about nuclear reducing the need for their specific skills and there are individual countries and field owners that will be losers but if my industry is any guide, the higher you go in it, the more likely it will be bean counters/MBAs background that are actually calling the shots. The big investors are looking for places to invest 100's of billions of dollars and not all that excited by solid business models getting stuffed up by individual weirdos in their midst. The green movement being owned by the illuminati is just a cope cage for justifying how the intent of saving the environment (by fighting against nuclear) ended up doing more damage to the environment than nearly any other interest group - a humiliating own goal. The bulk of environmentalists are not on a company payroll, they are just wrong but enthusiastic grass roots activists. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Not all are the same of course, PETA actually grosses me out as an org but they definitely are as committed to their goal of helping animals as a good portion of anti-vaxers are in their particular belief of protecting their health through avoiding autism. The regulation of the nuclear industry probable needs a clean up in some countries and needs to be developed from scratch in places like Australia. Which is actually an opportunity to put in place risk based standards and proscriptive regulations instead of prescriptive regulations. The same activism that is preventing nuclear roll out of a scale achieved by France 70's and 80's has likely been limiting science and risk based regulation creation. One final thing about regulation and risk management. Offshore O&G is essentially the gold standard for managing risk at an operational level. Relying upon a countries regulations to keep you safe versus the standards in use by any significant player would put you in a very dangerous situation most of the time. I am literally organising a local regulator visit to Australia (to meet with Aussie regulators) to help educate them on an aspect of my own industry where the local regulators do not know enough to move away from pre-2000's thinking.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:20
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That doesnt follow, because we have actual evidence that the Natural Gas industry was donating to and helping Green groups push anti-nuclear propaganda and legislation. And dude, offshore having the Gold Standard for safety? You need to expound that, because I dont have any reason to believe the fossil industry gives a poo poo because they have never been punished for safety violations in any way that matter.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:29
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CommieGIR posted:That doesnt follow, because we have actual evidence that the Natural Gas industry was donating to and helping Green groups push anti-nuclear propaganda and legislation. I have no doubt, as mentioned in my post that there is weirdos working against the interests of the investors and real decision makers. I can find examples of nearly any absurd thing. The Koch brothers were real and real pieces of work. They weren't the totality of the the O&G industry. If the Koch bros, et al throwing a few million dollars at resourcing the green movement was all it took, then GE, Siemens, etc were idiots not to do the same in the other direction for their own business interests. The union movement fought a lot for the standards of safety in O&G. Pipa Alpha in particular showed that that the standards were insufficient and the O&G industry took it to the next level over the subsequent decades. Permit to work, Control or Work, Intrinsic safe equipment, risk based assessment are all taken to a much higher level in O&G compared to any other industrial/civilian/military application I have seen. As a counter example, American Police services are still doing high speed chases despite the evidence being very clear that it is loving stupid. That is government organizations with huge union influence, plenty of resources and huge public profile. Killing more people needlessly and preventably than O&G does many times over.
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Jun 16, 2022 20:57
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As Stephanie Sterling says, corporations would rather have all the money, than only some of the money. Getting into the nuclear industry only gives them some of the money, probably less money because it means retiring coal, oil and natural gas plants in order to transition to nuclear. This is the problem and why they resist efforts to popularize nuclear power as a solution to climate change.
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Jun 17, 2022 03:32
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mobby_6kl posted:Couldn't we just flood the Netherlands and use that to generate hydro power? There was semi-serious discussion in the 20th century about damming the Mediterranean to create, among other things, a giant hydroelectric plant at the straits of Gibraltar.
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Jun 17, 2022 03:44
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The thing is, oil companies have had half a century to get into nuclear and other forms of energy generation if they wanted to. As you say, they have the capital. The reason they have not spun up nuclear plants (or solar, or anything else) is because they don't want to. They have instead stridently opposed nuclearization via multiple indirect routes, including green funding, lobbying, and media manipulation, and do so to this day. I'd hazard a guess that it's because they know that it would make them far less money than their current business model does.Phanatic posted:Again, the site-specificness is a regulatory requirement that we have created for ourselves. Simply being able to produce SMRs does not reduce that requirement, and if we want to reduce that requirement we could do it even without SMRs. I am aware of this, but the way that most countries run their nuclear programs (by not running their nuclear programs and instead letting private companies do it) means that every site will select a different design or at least one of a few, and that in turn means many different plants. This is also in part because if you want to hit a specific electrical target, you wind up customizing the plant to do it, rather than just scaling the number of modular reactors you have. But you are correct, and what I base my optimism in SMRs on is the fact that France uses standardized reactor designs, which lowers the costs of construction, maintenance, training, and logistics. The results show that this is the correct way to run a nuclear fleet, and maybe having SMRs will be the right nudge to force other countries into some semblance of standardization.
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Jun 17, 2022 09:27
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aniviron posted:The thing is, oil companies have had half a century to get into nuclear and other forms of energy generation if they wanted to. As you say, they have the capital. The reason they have not spun up nuclear plants (or solar, or anything else) is because they don't want to. They have instead stridently opposed nuclearization via multiple indirect routes, including green funding, lobbying, and media manipulation, and do so to this day. I'd hazard a guess that it's because they know that it would make them far less money than their current business model does. Could it be that for fossil fuel companies and investors the size of the supply chain - wells, mines, conveyors, pipelines, refineries - is a feature? Nuclear plants run on a fraction of the physical fuel, is that a turn off for these people?
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Jun 17, 2022 10:16
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Oil & Gas companies are also specialized in.. oil and gas. Nuclear would have almost no overlap with their expertise beyond like "project management" and "build stuff". I don't see why some other greed capitalists wouldn't jump into it if it made sense. But over the decades, through cold war paranoia, Chernobyl and Fukushima, proliferation and other fears, we now have an environment where it' a very difficult and expensive proposition. IIRC one of the main killers are the high upfront costs, even with very low interest rates, it takes a very, very long time to start getting returns. You have to finance like $10b and it can take a decade before the plant is operational.
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Jun 17, 2022 10:32
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From a capitalist point of view, nuclear is bad. Huge investment, long time to get repayment or maybe not at all. Wind power however is good from a capitalist POV now. Smaller investment, faster repayment, particularly with higher eneryg prices. As long as there's nothing in the regulations about having to provide a measure of stable power generation (backup) and there aren't any other regulations about requiring grid stability then it's a real swell deal to invest in.
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Jun 17, 2022 10:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:As Stephanie Sterling says, corporations would rather have all the money, than only some of the money. Getting into the nuclear industry only gives them some of the money I don't really believe the thread thesis which is that world governments, energy companies, and environmentalists (lol) conspired to not exclusively power the world with nuclear energy, and that nuclear power is a perfect technology which cannot fail, it can only be failed. I think the truth is more like what you unintentionally suggest--nuclear power is not as economical as fossil fuels & (in very recent history) renewables. Nuclear power is complicated, expensive, prone to fuckups and expensive premature plant closures unless great care is taken and much government regulation is applied, etc. If the technology didn't have those problems, the energy companies would be lining up to build a bunch of nuclear power plants. And it isn't just a profit thing as is commonly believed in this thread--if you are a government not in the post-scarcity Star Trek universe and as a consequence, have a limited budget/ability to get things done, you tend to value more economical, efficient technical options over the more costly and slow technical options. You can get more of a result/more output for the same amount of $$$/effort spent, just like what profit-seeking corporations tend to do to maximize profit. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) silence_kit fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Jun 17, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2022 10:47
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Could it be that for fossil fuel companies and investors the size of the supply chain - wells, mines, conveyors, pipelines, refineries - is a feature? Nuclear plants run on a fraction of the physical fuel, is that a turn off for these people? LNG plants built in Aus have almost nothing to do with original oil wells. They are massive facilities with huge pressure vessels that can't be much easier to EPCM than nuclear plant. Huge capital; 10's of billions, with long payoff (30 year takeoff agreements to source funding). Nickle laterite mines have pressure vessels built out of titanium with steel liner that is exploded onto it to get it to meld properly built buy the Australian Submarine Corporation (several thousand cube capacity, elevated temps, elevated pressure, pH1 abrasive slurry that settles quickly). Industrial companies can implement big engineering solutions outside their original organic knowledge base. Again I re-iterate my point that the technical people don't call the shorts at the highest levels, it is the funding gurus. The single biggest risk to a nuclear project is filibuster resistance to construction and active ongoing legal and illegal hassling and negative association during operation (delayed and reduced cashflow). O+G was not even the biggest loser out of nuclear anyway. Coal was the predominate power generation source for most of the world and government run coal mines with steam plant beside them does not sound like something Total, Shell or Chevron would give much of a poo poo about. The proof is that when the world was positive on nuclear, France converted predominately to nuclear. The engineering challenges were overcome. France has cheaper power than a good chunk of peers. Its plants are run in a worker friendly way, not relying upon sweatshop conditions to work. A number of nasty incidents (none of which were remotely on a scale of Bhopol) and the rise of activist environmentalism similar to the current rise of anti-vaxor now makes universal vaccination a thing of the past just like nuclear rollouts are currently a thing of the past.
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Jun 17, 2022 12:04
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I agree with the idea that we are idiots is the problem, not the tech. It's very easy to strawman the thread as incorrectly worshipping nuclear because it is factually true that it was our only hope of preventing global devastation. I wouldn't be so smug about having killed the planet as the most 'economical' choice. The stronger hurricanes just aren't looked at on quarterly balance sheets. Can you even define the tech "failing" as opposed to humans? Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Jun 17, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2022 13:57
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His Divine Shadow posted:From a capitalist point of view, nuclear is bad. Huge investment, long time to get repayment or maybe not at all. By that argument oil is also bad. Huge capital investment, long time to get repayment.
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Jun 17, 2022 14:07
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It's all relative. We allow our oil companies to ignore externalities so it keeps being better on paper.
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Jun 17, 2022 14:09
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Fossil fuels are massively subsidized in the form of direct payments to both producers and consumers, industrial tax exemptions, and safety and environmental regulatory waivers. The hard numbers are open to debate (eg. How should we consider the cost of building and defending global oil infrastructure, or the legal protection against climate damages, or the healthcare cost for victims of poor air quality), but the US spends something like $20 billion/year on direct subsidies for oil, gas, and coal. In comparison, nuclear power basically has to pay for itself - the plants are generally funded by bonds or energy revenue. The Biden administration has tried to help them with that by offering some subsidies to nuclear power plants, but it's a real economic problem. You can compare it to how public transit systems often struggle to pay for themselves, whereas road infrastructure isn't expected to do that and receives buckets of taxpayer spending as a result. https://generation180.org/the-absurd-truth-about-fossil-fuel-subsidies/
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Jun 17, 2022 15:17
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Nuclear is also one of the only industries required to manage its own waste to the decimal point versus the fossil industry and a lot of the chemical industry et large.
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Jun 17, 2022 15:32
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Phanatic posted:By that argument oil is also bad. Huge capital investment, long time to get repayment. Energy companies tend to be regulated monopolies. You need public approval to raise rates. While they frequently do seek higher rates to help pay back capital investment, it's not a guarantee, and past nuclear project cost overruns and premature shutdowns have done a great job souring all parties on the economics. Bout the only fix would be SMR designs so standardized, affordably manufacturable, and easy to operate that it becomes a 2-4 year process from completing a site assessment to generating power. Still too far from that to make me cheery on the possibility of moving prime generation away from fossil fuels in the next 30 years.
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Jun 17, 2022 16:18
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Pander posted:Energy companies tend to be regulated monopolies. You need public approval to raise rates. Offer not valid in Texas.
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Jun 17, 2022 16:20
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CommieGIR posted:Offer not valid in Texas. Absolutely the exception I inferred with "tend".
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Jun 17, 2022 16:25
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silence_kit posted:I don't really believe the thread thesis which is that world governments, energy companies, and environmentalists (lol) conspired to not exclusively power the world with nuclear energy, and that nuclear power is a perfect technology which cannot fail, it can only be failed. Uh, "economical" and "profitable" are I think very clearly not the same thing? Economical has context. Building a T-34 to smash Germans is not economical compared to making a tractor; a tractor can farm very well, it can even pull other tanks! What tractor's can't do is smash Germans. If we ignore the Germans invading the USSR in 1941 we would conclude that building T-34's was not a economical use of the USSR's resources. Which would be silly. Because we really need and should be including such externallities in order to contextualize properly the economics of that particular activity. As such it follows then if we factor in the fact of man made climate change and the need to rapidly decarbonize our economy; we should easily be able to conclude that nuclear power is vastly more economical than fossil fuels; it just happens to be not the most profitable option for corporations. Building nuclear reactors is well within the economic means of basically every and any government around the globe. The problem is mainly politics, not economics. Most importantly there is basically as far as I can tell from reading this thread, no viable alternative. Renewables are simply incapable of meeting global energy needs of first world and rapidly developing nations at peak hours when needed. And if we want to decarbonize we need to dismantle and shutdown fossil fuel sources of energy, which is impossible while also providing energy needs without an alternative base load source of energy, of which only nuclear (and eventually fusion) can actually provide. I think as CommieGir has often said either we need to treat the problem as a crisis and spend the amount that's needed or it isn't; and thus we should be willing to spend all that is required to get it done. Whatever that expression for having unlimited budget is, but when it comes to averted climate change; money is no object?
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Jun 17, 2022 18:17
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silence_kit posted:
Yeah, this is true for gen 2 design, which the US fleet presently is. Much of the technical complication is due to redundancy to account for designs that aren't inherently safe, that risk fuel or core meltdowns with loss of coolant, and that use fueling methods that require 6-24mo fueling shutdown cycles, which are bad for a host of reasons. The new technologies mostly avoid those problems. The primary gen IV and SMR designs strategy revolves around passive safety to simplify design and reduce redundancy. Yet the orders aren't coming in, for reasons ranging between the industry having been burned too much between green/NIMBY pressure and the economically catastrophic equipment failures of the past (crystal river, san onofre, fort Calhoun). And given how the NRC regulations ratchet, expect scant regulatory relief or credit given for designs newer than 1984. So what is the incentive to build nuclear, if the government doesn't either grant massive tax breaks (GOP wouldn't accept this unless it also extended to gas/coal), or nationalize power generation to force it (non-starter)? We can be pretty clear that oil/gas companies are very happy with the status quo, so either you're predicting a radicalization in national political sentiment or hoping for a very gradual process to make the conditions more favorable for nuclear investment. Which I hope for, but don't really expect.
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Jun 17, 2022 22:25
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Could it be that for fossil fuel companies and investors the size of the supply chain - wells, mines, conveyors, pipelines, refineries - is a feature? Nuclear plants run on a fraction of the physical fuel, is that a turn off for these people? I've been wondering/thinking/leaning towards something like that for a bit now. If you are an exec at a fossil fuel major, you are capital-I Important: your corporation employs tens of thousands of workers directly and indirectly far more, and your work exerts power over millions more lives than that. You oversee a globe-spanning network of extraction, transportation, and refining, with enormous significance to numerous commodities markets as well as agriculture. You have high-level access to government officials the world over; you are intimately intertwined with the war machine and broader Western hegemonic imperialism. Your products literally fuel the empire — yes in terms of military hardware, but also the movement of nearly all other goods plus individual people themselves. In some sense, the above constitutes a vast engine whose embodied purpose is to extract + consume fossil fuels in order to grow and be able to extract + consume even more fossil fuels in the future. Compare that to a potential (and hopefully feasible) nuclear future: even if fissile material are mined, the raw quantities of stuffs, the extractive/transport/refining facilities, and the land necessary for nuclear power are all negligible compared to those needed for fossil fuels; this only grows more true with viable seawater uranium extraction, as the thread was discussing recently. In a nuclear future with e.g. atmospherically-sourced synthetic hydrocarbons for non-train hauling and transportation, so much of the transnational infrastructure and force projection capabilities built up by and for fossil fuels are just... unnecessary. Widespread nuclear power completely fails to provide the kind of logical foundation for empire that fossil fuels do. (Not to say that Empire Cannot Find A Way! But the bottom falls out of one of the broader motivations/rationales.) As an exec in this nuclear future, you may still be still lowercase-i important, but your job is of far more limited scope -- you are the steward of a required utility, and an integral piece of numerous facets of public life and modern technology, but no longer the Prime Mover who sets the world in motion. The leaked "global warming is real, caused by us burning fossil fuels, and bad" research from the 70s show that the fossil fuel companies have, for generations, chosen their current form of business over the climate, and over people's lives. Their more public actions have long shown similar. What I am describing is a loss of stature and power for a hypothetical fossil fuel exec vs nuclear energy exec, and while I would not claim it is their only consideration, I think the comparison runs as an undercurrent in all sorts of calculations by the powerful people in question. I'm not a professional smart thinkpiece woman or nothin but this all feels sensible at least to me (and so it must be true,)
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Jun 17, 2022 23:12
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The oil and gas industry employs really, really smart people and they freely discuss everything without the veneer of conservative bullshit that they spew on Fox News or wherever. They've looked at the numbers and and decided it was cheaper and much more profitable to ride the fossil fuel dragon and destroy everything else via regulatory capture.
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Jun 17, 2022 23:19
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SOMETHING AWFUL DOT COM, FRESH-FACED COMEDY WEBSITE, 2002 posted:y'all, have you SEEN this goatse dot cx website?! ROFLMAO!!! SOMETHING AWFUL DOT COM, DEAD GAY COMEDY WEBSITE, 2022 posted:In a nuclear future with e.g. atmospherically-sourced synthetic hydrocarbons for non-train hauling and transportation, so much of the transnational infrastructure and force projection capabilities built up by and for fossil fuels are just... unnecessary.
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Jun 17, 2022 23:59
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Yes, it's another sad example of how the internet made us all stupid over time
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Jun 18, 2022 00:04
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