You don’t have to stop or even slow renewables deployment to do this. They are fairly different industries with different workforce’s, so there are resources to do both simultaneously without significant interference. And you’re not going to get “too much” electricity as cheap abundant electricity will help accelerate decarbonization of other things like building heat and transport and industrial processes.

Existing nuclear ESPECIALLY must be protected. And existing hydro. Number 1 and number 2 (tied with wind) clean energy sources.

Nuclear power produces as much energy in our country as coal. We can phase out coal twice as fast if we at very least keep nuclear around a few years longer.

The need for profit is killing our planet. When it comes to basic essential things like shelter, energy, food, water, profit is pure parasitic loss and should be eliminated. These things really should run at a loss, considering these things generate all other economic activity there is, but we insist that they must be run privately and for profit.

I think there's a big difference between running things "for profit," which I agree is not always necessary, and attempting to run things "cash flow positive."

When we have resources like electricity that are very feasible to charge for, one of the best ways to make sure our overall system is operating efficiently and not just wasting resources is to charge for the resource and aim for slight cash-flow positive - the goal being to break even with a small margin for error.

If break-even isn't economical under the current market rules, but something is a social good we want to maintain, like nuclear power, we can adjust the rules of the market. This actually makes sense for base load power, as we know there's a floor that we don't want to fall beneath, and renewables are so elastic that we sometimes fall below that floor. Plus the transmission network needs to be kept in balance, so we can't actually handle huge swings in power.

But the solution here is not to say "profit is killing our planet," it's to fix the rules of the market to get the outcome we want. Profit, in general, is a good thing. But yes, sometimes the system gets into a state where bad outcomes are profitable, and we do need to fix that.

I can't see any way of fixing it that doesn't entail interfering with the (supposedly) natural operations of profit seeking in the market.

At some point we need a state (or somebody or something that is in charge and able to reconfigure and manage economic processes "from above"), some agent or authority to be able to say, "Build this. Don't build that. Do it even if it doesn't make any money." Or we'll eventually experience our own very profitable self negation.

The parent comment is saying "profit is killing our planet", and you're basically saying "markets aren't killing our planet". The resolution, of course, is that non profit-motivated organizations can exist and participate in markets.

Seemingly just in time, solar, wind, and storage are scaling both in production capacity and in falling costs to solve our climate problems. These will be the backbone of getting to 80% carbon free electricity in the next decade, and 0% carbon not that long after. This will be far cheaper than any other source of energy generation we can use, and will save us massive amounts of money.

One of the better grid modelers out there, Christoper Clack, who has no opposition to nuclear and in the past has made strong arguments for it being a cheaper way to get to 0%, also has an amazing new mode out this year that says we should do something very unintuitive: deploy massive amounts of distributed solar and storage close to power meters (e.g. on people's homes). This will result in a much stronger distribution grid that can both shave peaks of demand, resulting in far less very costly distribution infrastructure, and which will empower far even cheaper deployment of larger amounts of utility-scale solar and wind in future decades.

Nuclear would be nice if it weren't so expensive, and if it were our only option we should keep it around, but there's little reason to create make-work when we have cheaper options, and options that will have additional benefits for the grid such as greatly increasing reliability and resilience. Massive distributed solar and storage will create an absolutist rock solid grid that will be able to weather disruptions far better than one with large generators that become almost like single points of failure.

""" Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.

This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. """

https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The thing is, we want more power. Like, a lot more power. Power is wealth, there is an unlimited number of good things we can do with it.

Nuclear power is qualitatively about the best power you can have. Absolutely enormous amounts, available on demand, constantly. You just can't beat it.

We should heavily subsidize reasearch and development on new nuclear energy, until we have ten times as much nuclear power as we have now.

And we should do that in parallel with building out so much solar that we can rapidly retire coal completely, because we want to do that in ten years and that is completely feasible with solar + batteries. The new nukes will barely be coming online when that happens.

But the 40s will be a renaissance of human culture if we have that nuclear power.

Battery storage can scale large, but more importantly, it can scale really small. This means that you can throw a couple shipping containers of it at one side of a congested transmission link, and save tons of money. It means that we can make all our houses self reliant for hours at a time.

Storage will help us solve the problem of transmission lines causing massive wildfires. It will provide massive reliability and resilience across the grid. Small nuclear won't help much with that, unless is also paired with storage.

If nuclear can provide electricity at rates competitive with solar and wind, then storage will help nuclear too. But if nuclear is not beating the cost of solar and wind, then we will have less wealth if we spend our labor building nuclear than if we build renewables and storage.

A world built on solar wind and storage will probable have peak power capacity 2x-4x more than we need, with 2-3 days worth of storage. The ratio between power and storage will largely depend on the relative costs of storage versus power.

And I think it's time to start thinking about the sort of word where we have an over abundance of energy that renewables will provide. We will have lots of excess energy being produced, and with the right applications that can tolerate intermittency, that excess energy will incredibly cheap.

Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100% renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store enough energy to handle long periods of low production. We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage hydro (expanding this capacity would run into environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't have enough water in convenient locations).

Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change, but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100% renewable power.

People are also seriously overestimating the time table needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now, we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next century.

Only about 14% of what we pay in Denmark and probably a comparable amount in Germany goes to paying for the actual electricity.

The rest is for "Green taxes" that pays for our new green infrastructure, R&D and lots of things that will benefit the transition.

So if we just said "we good now", 86% of the cost would disappear, and probably not be much more expensive than US energy, or even cheaper, at least soon!

Also it works as a magnet for business surprisingly maybe.

We have enormous new datacenters from Google, Facebook and Apple being built right at this moment, even though Denmark is tiny.

Taxation is extremely important when it comes to transitioning to green energy. As long as the taxation scheme favours green energy - granted that is difficult to define exactly.

We've had to same scheme with electric cars giving you about half the price of a conventional car.

This is exactly how government should help the green transition, instead of the exact opposite that for many years has been happening in the US with the corporate welfare and grotesque subsidising of heavy industry. Though again this is a contentious issue as Tesla has sucked a lot of green subsidies from the pool. So there definitely is problems to tackle.

This is too important to leave to the back of a napkin, is what I'm saying. Breakthroughs in nuclear energy would be a big win. The aesthetic and ecosystem costs of transforming hundreds of square kilometers of desert into solar farms are bearable, but they're real.

The power yield of solar panels in the Belt is also not superb given the launch costs. Pretty dangerous to go blasting uranium into space on top of a rocket, no matter how reliable, but we can go to where the uranium is, for the most part.

We don't want to be behind the curve when that time comes. Extracting metals from Earth's surface is just going to get more environmentally noxious and less profitable, as we work through the good veins. We might luck out and find a few more rich lodes, but we shouldn't count on it, and mining in the ocean is a whole unexplored world (just like the Belt): it's closer, but it's also an ecosystem, and water is capable of spreading solid pollution quite a bit more promiscuously than the air is. Groundwater and surface water leaching from mine tailings is already very bad, we don't want that happening in the ocean. We only have one of those and we already beat it up pretty badly.

This is a lie at our current technology levels.

Neither of these are true. We are current at 200-300GWh of production per year, and consistent with recent history are expected to grow capacity 10x every five years, so that by 2031 we will produce 20-30TWh of new batteries per year. That's 500-750GW per year, at a 4 hour duration.

In contrast, the idea of scaling nuclear production to 100GW of new capacity per year by 2031 is simply inconceivable.

In 2021, with current technology, nuclear simply can not scale as fast as storage, or for that matter solar or wind.

I'm far from well versed in this area but I was under the impression that renewables really suffer in this department. The lifespan of a wind turbine is about 20 years. We don't know exactly what the lifespan of a nuclear plant is but it's certainly longer than that. And of course the availability on solar and other "harvesting" type mechanisms can be inconsistent, up and down as a function of weather, etc. What am I missing?

There are two reasons why everything is still built for 20 years: Firstly, there is not pressure on the projects to increase lifetime, because the deprecated value today of further production in year 21 is basically zero. Secondly, the turbines we installed 20 years ago were so small that there is really no reason to keep them going.

It does require running the grid differently. But part of that is becoming more responsive to constantly changing conditions, and a grid that it used to that will have far fewer problems then one where a GW reactor trips off because of some sensor problem (as happened in Texas). As we get closer to 80% renewable grids, then we will be used to running backup natural gas plants to keep everything running. And the ultimate in resilience and reliability will happen as we add more storage. With batteries everywhere, we will have buffering all over the grid that will make it far far easier to make sure everybody has power, and to limit outages to the smallest areas possible.

The first year of power shut offs for PG&E's public safety in the face of high wind and fire conditions covered massive areas. This last year they covered far less, as they could focus the power shut offs far better with an extra year of work. This sort of finer grained granularity and control is what happens as more renewables and storage will be added to the grid, as we update this impressive machine that we started building a century ago. Adding modern communication and control will come along with more storage, demand response, and home-to-grid power from solar.

And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in some critical nuclear reactor core components.

Current state of the art storage with solar is commercial viable around 75% capacity for 4hrs, with a charge cycle of 24 hours. Those numbers are a good improvement over 0% storage, but there is a good reason why there are not a single commercial operated wind farm that use the same technology. Wind does not have a 24hr charge cycle, and 4hrs of 75% capacity does not do much when there first several weeks of good weather followed by several weeks of bad weather.

When northern European countries plans for stability, we are not talking about hours. This is why oil power plants get subsidized in countries who invest heavily in wind power. The reserve energy source need to be profitable while the weather is creating negative energy prices, regardless for how long such period last, because afterward you will need a lot of it to be available for an equal long period of time. This is the problem that storage need to solve and have yet to find any suitable commercial viable answers. You could improve the economic viability of current batteries used in PV by 1000% and it would still not be economical viable for wind.

When it comes to individuals and personal homes, the answer that most experts seems to conclude on is that solar and storage is something which comes after more fundamental improvements such as heat exchanges and replacing internal combustion engines with electric ones. Solar and batteries are nice, but the planet is still going to be quite damaged if we continue burning massive amount of coal, oil and gas in order to generate power that electric heaters demand during the winter.

I wouldn't get hung up on paring battery storage with a particular generation technology. Just connect it to the grid and let the market decide when to charge and discharge.

One good reason for colocating battery storage with renewables is that you get to share the grid connection. That connection can be expensive and will be under utilized due to intermittency. So store some of the energy in batteries and spend less money on expensive AC cables. You can even reverse the flow and take energy from the grid.

Costs are dropping so rapidly that typical 5-year timelines for utility planning and procurement is running into some problems. People who make bids have to anticipate their costs in the future, so there's considerable betting going on.

Agreed on the heat pumps versus fossil heat. I moved in the past few years, and replacing all the natural gas is my first task before installing solar. By replacing natural gas with a heat pump, my total energy consumption has plummeted drastically. However, my utility charges only about 15% as much for a unit of natural gas energy as it does electrical energy, which eliminated the cost savings! So now that I better know my total energy consumption the switch to solar will happen very soon, and save me a ton of money.

The event that is precipitating CA's shutdown has been planned for more than a decade. And the cost of keeping the nuclear plant would be $7B-$14B, before any of the inevitable cost increases that accompany large construction projects. $7B for solar and storage will easily replace nuclear. At $1/W for solar, and $250/kWh for storage, $7B will buy 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of storage, and cost overruns are unheard of for solar and storage installations.

The nuclear plant that is shutting down is already at the end of its original license, and the $7B of work would be for 20 years or less of nuclear.

People can read about the closure etc. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...

How silly is that? This is kinda my point. 8% of power for the most populous state in the second most populous nation is no small amount. The operator didn't want to do the necessary maintenance, so we opt for a cheaper, objectively worse solution, instead of spending the money required to do the job correctly. It's not like it was physically impossible to fix San Onofre, the engineers know exactly what work is required to be done, but the beancounters in charge of the purse strings ultimately thought better and we are all worse off for it in ways that will costs us far in the longrun than this maintenance would have.

It follows that correcting the energy market requires also restructuring the sector.

Solar and wind are pervasive and cheap in California. If nuclear is no better for the environment and more expensive, why should it keep running?

The whole "profit" thing is a way to manage scarce resources, i.e. minimize waste. That's exactly what we want.

You're right that for basic needs like shelter, energy, food, and water, we shouldn't accept that some people might have to go without. So we have tipped the scales through programs like section 8, progressive energy rates, EBT, etc to get that outcome will still seeing other resources efficiently used.

Nuclear generation can't react to changes in demand very fast and so doesn't play well with large amounts of wind generation. It's ok with solar, because you can predict night-time 8 hours in advance, which is optimal for ramping up nuclear generation.

Combined-cycle gas turbines, while they do use fossil fuels, are the most carbon-efficient way to get electricity from fossil fuels, and can quickly react to changes in demand.

So while I agree with the point about not getting rid of nuclear too fast, both nuclear and natural gas have their place in moving to mostly renewables. Natural gas could especially be important if it allows other fossil-fuel burning, eg for transport, to be replaced by electricity generated with non-zero but low carbon emissions.

40% of power in CA is generated with natural gas. If you can close the nuclear power plant and replace it with the equivalent amount of solar and wind, you should just keep the nuclear plant open and build that amount of solar and wind anyways.

Chasing that rabbit down the hole, what happens if the US does wean off fossil fuel entirely, but countries like Russia and China continue (and say it is projected to increase 400X like China in the last 30 years). Then its an existential threat, does that mean use of force, or limit ourselves to diplomatic means that will ultimately fail and just accept the resulting existential outcome? Does the analysis change when it is a less diplomatically controversial Country such as India?

Alternatively what if those Countries beat the US to weaning off fossil fuel and determine overnight any continued US use of fossil fuel is an existential threat and act of war?

It sounds like hyperbole but I remember when the US began regulating incandescent light bulbs and it was floated by certain media outlets as an attack on freedom and liberties. We have literally seen murders of people telling others to wear a mask during the pandemic, and I watched a news segment claiming a normal year sees 150-300 FAA incidents on planes and we have seen 1,300 already this year mostly related to passengers refusing to wear masks and many times escalating to attacks on the airline workers for attempting to enforce the CDC mask guidelines. We live in violent and chaotic times, where millions and millions of people allow themselves to be worked up into mobs by a media that does it willfully and deliberately. I don't see it as an easy transition domestically much less globally, and those in power don't care about the science but seem to froth at the mouth for this kind of discontent.

I think it would be like pouring sugar over a bacteria colony. The earth's crust could be economically strip mined. Ore could be smelted into metal at negligible cost, which could in turn be used to make more machines to strip mine the crust at a faster rate. Oceans could be boiled to access rare metals, or maybe just for fun by a bored teenager.

This isn't to detract from OPs practical comment, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

..and with infinite power, even that isn't necessary because we could simply create whatever matter we wanted directly from energy.

Funding for each may actually benefit the others. For example, FLiBe salt is being considered as a coolant in some Gen IV fission, as well as compact fusion and concentrated solar. Production will increase if there is a definite market for it, making it easier to obtain.

I very much doubt FLiBe was ever seriously considered for solar applications.

The ARC fusion reactor concept would require even more Be per MW(th) of output.

Nuclear is 4 times more expensive, it would be interesting to know if we could boost renewable much further much faster.

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Making+Climate+Policy+Work-p-978...

If we treat all industry as spherical cows, a common carbon price comes out as a great way to incentivize industrial change.

However, once we get into the particulars of different industries and the varying levels of difficulty they have in decarbonizing, and the very different levels of lobbying power they have to influence that price, and the difficult of enforcement across different sectors, a common shared policy across all sectors starts to be far less efficient than tailoring the solution to each industry.

For example, steel is pure commodity, very difficult to eat any cost from stranded assets, and has far less ability to call up capital to solve the problem than, say, natural gas. So the price will have hugely different consequences for steel than natural gas production, and there are different tailored industrial policies that will make the transition happen much more time- and cost-efficiently.

By the way, I'm working on the assumption of a carbon price applied on fossil fuels at the source, such as the Energy Innovation Act would include.

The downside to having separate laws per industry is that you’ll get insane workarounds (see import tariff law). Carbon is carbon — so workarounds are easy. For example if natural gas is taxed higher than steel, you’ll have natural gas companies producing just enough steel to be qualified as steel production companies so that they get the lower rate. Or something like that.

Choosing policy is tremendously difficult. We could deliberate all day. despite what I’ve said, a carbon tax is better than doing nothing, and we would be wise to start creating/increasing carbon taxes already.

1. In the short term it makes steel more expensive. But because steel is essential, we still use it, it just costs a little more. If you're building a clean energy power plant, or making a generator for a hospital, some of the tax revenues could go to you, to make those things still affordable.

2. In the longer term, there are now huge financial incentives to either reduce the carbon consumption of steel production, or to replace steel with something which uses less carbon. Which is what you want.

Your implicit assumption is that companies are willing to pay more for steel. An increase of just a single digit percent more to the price of steel is enough to be completely uncompetitive with overseas steel production, which would inevitably lead to the closing of all local manufacturing capacity of steel.

Steel production is also a commodity critical to national security. Losing access to foreign steel due to war or other concerns would literally bring the country to its knees for the duration of the encounter.

Shifting all local manufacturing capability overseas to where there is less regulation sounds good, until it doesn't... as we saw during the pandemic. The world would have looked a lot different today if Chinese manufacturing had closed or decreased for more than a few weeks (roughly Jan-Feb, much of which coincided with the usual Chinese New Year shutdown that is typically planned for).

2. Replace steel? I see how this rationale works, we strive to replace X for something that generates less carbon, this ought to work to some extent until nothing more carbon neutral exist.

You could also have tax paid off over time. E.g. a concrete building that lasts 60 years, vs a stick build that lasts 20. Bricks are frequently recycled, >100 year lifetime.

I'm open to hearing counter-examples, i.e., where there is an external cost to not manufacturing a high CO2 cost product. The examples I've seen so far are really arguments about competition with BRICS economies, and their bizarre exemption from controls.

That customers will feel price pressure from their most-carbon-emitting activities and commodities is precisely the point. This will encourage finding alternatives. No demand is entirely inelastic.

Squeezing extra tax out of poor people who have literally no alternative is not going to be a popular plan. Allowing for a hint of nuance in your public policy would incentivize switching to alternatives where possible, while also incentivizing the development and adoption of alternatives where they don't currently exist.

I am highly skeptical that is it possible for American legislation's 'nuance' to tilt a simple tax law in any direction but towards enriching the rich and powerful.

I feel like carve outs would be great for lobbyists and the politicians they pay patronage to, but it would destroy the effectiveness of the carbon tax: the industries with enough political power would negotiate exemptions because "there are no economically feasible alternatives" but making carbon-expensive activity economically infeasible is the core purpose or the carbon tax.

Exempting any industry in particular is just corruption.

I think a carbon tax with dividend actually fits the criteria you are describing pretty well.

If the amount of the tax were fixed, the dividend would decrease over time, but the tax gradually increases as we get better and better at doing things without emitting greenhouse gases. The eventual target being net zero carbon. Based on the tax level in the Energy Innovation Act as an example, this is predicted around 2050.

As to your second point - moving the goalposts every time progress is made eliminates any incentive to improve. If you're committing to keeping the dividend the same over time, that means you need to keep the tax take the same. And if you're gonna take the same amount of money off me regardless, why should I pay attention to my emissions? In the limit case, of zero carbon, the carbon tax rate is infinite and you're taking a bunch of cash off people for nothing. Somewhere along the way, something has got to give.

For the rest of the word, we are having that massive technological innovation right now that will increase quality of life globally. For electrifying the developing world, micro grids with renewables and storage will be immensely cheaper than building our massive transmission grids and large centralized production.

Industrial sectors have the least clear path to decarbonizations, as well as sea-freight and flight, but if we can solve electricity and transportation in the next decade we have a few years so solve these far smaller sources of emissions.

There is a lot of reason to be worried, but there's also a ton of reasons to be hopeful. GDP is already decoupling from emissions, and I think as we decouple it further, we will find a higher quality of life for the vast majority of people, both in developed or developing nations.

But if we have to drastically reduce ground freight and shipping emissions to reduce co2 emissions enough, which we do, goods will be more expensive. And it's also not free to switch private cars to EVs. If goods in general are more expensive, then peoples' money goes less far.

To be clear, I am in favor of this. Maybe you can make the very wealthy eat the cost, but somebody has to pay for it, and I can't see how it doesn't result in lower mean quality of life.

Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. The fleet gets swapped out naturally pretty quickly, and slight incentives would accelerate that. It's faster than swapping out electric generating capacity.

If we are at 100% of new vehicles being electric in 2030, I'd be surprised but also ecstatic.

I don't think that's necessarily true. It will be expensive to switch to renewables, certainly, but the ongoing externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are already extremely expensive to society. Even if you completely ignore climate change, the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous.

We have the technology we need to solve climate change already, the problem is not that people aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices, the problem is that it's hard to get past societal inertia and overcome entrenched special interests.

Not really, that’s why it’s an externality. The damage in the US caused by climate change is maybe a few billion annually in increased hurricanes right now. That’s only like $10/person a year.

This is why it requires getting people to understand the future damage that will be caused. What’s happening now isn’t enough to justify doubling electricity costs, etc because most citizens aren’t feeling any pain from climate change.

> the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous.

CO2 != “air pollution” in the sense that causes health problems.

In France we had a Citizen's Convention for Climate (CCC), basically a citizen's jury of 150 people tasked with finding solutions for the climate crisis.

One thing was extremely clear from their proposals: people are absolutely willing to have strong climate laws passed as long as they only constrain other people. Usually these other people being vague shapeless corporations, because it feels like any cost that they bear isn't a real cost.

Maybe a climate change solution won't reduce anyone's standard of living, but maybe it will. If we're content to say "we have to stop polluting activities unless someone's livelihood depends on it in which case we'll do something else", we're screwed. Every polluting activity has someone's livelihood depending on it.

If the price is set on carbon, I’d expect it to be proportionate.

If a ship burns the filthiest high sulphur bunker oil then it pays no more tax than a sail boat.

We can't fix climate change with exceptions for everyone.

So it seems to me the authors of carbon pricing proposals agree with this book, and pivoted accordingly.

See https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI... for more of that.

If anything, it's actually this sort of nuclear subsidy that could be too hands off --- if it's like a 1990s throw money at ISPs for fibre with no strings attached tpye thing. I would say Carbon tax and nationalize the nukes.

* First, academic economists have basically ignored the topic. A survey of top economics journals found that, out of 77,000 total articles published, only 57 (0.074%) were about climate change.

* Many of the most cited papers have turned out to be crap, with basic calculation and data coding errors the authors have had to publish corrections for. Smith argues that this is partly because economists don't collaborate with other researchers much, especially natural sciences like climate change.

* The most important model for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis is the DICE model created by Richard Nordhaus. But the DICE model has big problems, the most important of which is that, due to discounting of future economic effects, it basically ignores the welfare of future generations. The DICE model also assumes that preventing climate change will be very expensive, and hasn't adjusted for recent technology advances on that front.

* Last, economists have been obsessed with carbon taxes, and haven't dealt with how politically unpopular they are, especially in international negotiations. This is, IMO, similar to how economists love to promote free trade, saying that the losers can be compensated via money from the overall economic gains, leaving everyone better off, and ignoring that this never, ever actually happens.

I'm in the camp that thinks that economists haven't earned a ton of credibility on the specific topic of climate change. Our best shot, IMO, is massive R&D efforts and CO2-removal geoengineering (especially wave-powered olivine weathering, as promoted by Project Vesta). Accompanied by crippling taxes on heavy emissions industries, but I think people will have an easier time accepting those if it's clear that governments are pursuing alternatives to taxes too.

As a quick example, free trade has allowed more developed nations (like the US) to leverage the labor markets in less developed nations, like China. As a result, money has flowed into those labor markets and increased the quality of life in those areas.

To be clear, those labor markets aren't perfect, and free trade as a universal good is a ridiculous idea. My point is just that free trade has led to a lot of good the world over and the referenced statement is over simplifying something that is very complicated.

I wish there was some discussion of carbon tax and dividend though. Like I absolutely agree that the orthodox "supply constraints and everything is a tradeoff" macroeconomics is nuts, and climate resilience doesn't need to suck, but we also can't just have electric-car are way there.

We simply need to make driving suck more, separate from making taking the train suck less, and Carbon tax + dividend is a great way to do that fairly and with minimal pain.

As far as convincing people, the way Canada gives taxpayers a big carbon tax refund is a good way to sell it. People love getting a summer bonus, and it still pushes people towards better solutions.

Because "no hope" in politics can become "certain outcome" with only a few switches in influencers. The US is subject to minority veto in all of its national legislation, so if the Koch influence were to cease, or if there was a (shocking) change of heart from that huge influence on the minority political power that is the roadblock to a carbon tax, that could all change.

Carbon tax is different from other taxes as the primary purpose is not to raise money for govt, it's to reduce carbon producing activity.

So take all the proceeds and distribute directly to every citizen to use as they want - e.g to buy petrol if that's their choice.

When people see those checks arriving they'll be more positive.

The Washington state plan included this redistribution. People didn't go for it.

Say you are choosing between 2 otherwise identical apartments that include utilities in rent. One building is more energy efficient than the other thus can charge less in rent and still make as much profit. Even though you are getting a dividend check you will still choose the lower priced apartment (if you are a rational economic actor).

Multiply this scenario across the billions of economic decisions across the economy and it adds up quickly.

In your specific scenario, since the initial tax is low a few pennies in added cost won't really matter, gas prices go up and down already. But you know that the price will continue to rise, so if you are a rational economic actor, the next time you buy a car you will take that into account. And by the time you need a new car the price of EVs may have declined enough to be cheaper than a new gas car, as they are predicted to be by the middle of the decade (fuel and maintenance are already significantly cheaper).

In the US we are not in a situation where drivers are a small enough minority that they can be ignored.

They drive in a group of 4 or 5 families half way across the country towing their rally cars and entourage, let alone the actual racing part. It's a huge gas guzzling event.

Yes, they probably consider that they need to keep up this hobby "to live".

One of them said to me that she did feel bad about the environmental impact, but she had no way to offset it.

In her eyes, higher petrol prices would be good - unpleasant but good - because she could then be guilt-free about her carbon-spewing lifestyle.

This to me is the true beauty of a carbon tax.

Sounds like I need to read about that.

Also, shit. There goes one of my last hopes. Really hope Project Vesta pans out, because I don't see much else.

Anyway, that's about what I see happening if you try to tax carbon. There is no legibility into what causes pollution from the outside - you can't look at the good itself, you must know the history of all inputs down to the raw goods and then some! If you just tax the creation of carbon domestically, you will encourage offshoring everything that necessarily pollutes to places that will pollute way more. If you just tax big players, businesses will split off divisions to be under the limit. If you just tax certain industries, you will send them offshore (apart from air travel). The righter solution would be to implement a carbon VAT, so that you align the incentives of producers and consumers. Now, you are in the business of taxing grain from peasants! How much pollution goes into foreign steel? Who knows? Are their carbon offsets real? Do we just put a tariff on foreign steel which feels sorta right? That will violate trade deals and will doubtlessly punish the honest players the most, once again encouraging more pollution.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

https://clcouncil.org/

It’s a revenue neutral tax increase on carbon, returned to the people who are now paying more for just about everything.

Poor people who don't use much carbon will net benefit. The rich who are now paying a bit more to re-fuel their private jets will pay a bit more.

I would make a bit of of a change, though--make the carbon tax refundable. Lets say you tax CO2 emissions at $100/ton. You then pay $100/ton to anybody who effectively sequesters CO2.

In fact, I would pretty much scrap the emissions rules and replace them with taxes of this sort. There should be no acceptable level followed by fines, there should be a cost from the first gram.

In this fine-based policy, the price is set by policy and quantity by the market.

That would have been the plan 30 years ago.

Right now, we can either turn it up to 11 when the scheme starts, or face horrible consequences.

Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving them to nuclear, would be the best case.

We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate enough. By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear reactors.

But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve nuclear.

A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former head of the NRC. The reactor people had one complaint: that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. It cost several hundred million dollars to get to that point, then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business, and if yes then you still just had a paper reactor.

That's a really difficult environment for investors. They said it would be a huge help just to have a multi-stage process. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and brushed off climate change arguments.

Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving a bit.

What's to prevent cutting massive corners after the original half plan was approved?

https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is a review of "Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" by Jack Devanney.

Based on the review, the short version is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT), and a regulatory model which effectively requires nuclear to be unprofitable (ALARA).

The review describes briefly what needs to be changed.

LNT stands for Linear No Threshold: cancer risk is directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative over time (rate doesn‘t matter), and that there is no threshold or safe dose. This contradicts studies that we have about people who received enough CUMULATIVE doses of radiation that they would be dead if it was at the same time.

ALARA: Radiation should be As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice this means that any cost reduction simply means freed money that you're now required to spend on safety.

Nuclear fans like to complain about the LNT, but I don't think they're really thinking this through.

In a nuclear accident, most of the population exposure will be a minor increase spread across a vast population. At those doses, we basically cannot check whether LNT is true or not -- the small cancer incidence it predicts is statistically invisible against all the other causes of cancer.

So foes of LNT want to say "we can't show LNT is correct", which is fine, but then they say "so we must assume the actual effect is smaller, perhaps zero", which is not fine. The evidence doesn't support that second step, and this is not a court of criminal law where radiation must be presumed innocent unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. One might very well argue that one should take a precautionary approach, which is to assume that low level radiation has the worst effect it could have that is not ruled out by evidence. This would imply even larger threat than under LNT.

This would suggest that the risk should be linear with radiation dose. But cells have DNA repair mechanisms. If a person receives a very large dose in a short amount of time, it makes sense that the repair systems might be too overwhelmed to fix all the damage that has occurred. Of course, the repair system isn't perfect, and some small fraction of damage will be permanent. This suggests that LNT should be true for small doses, but the harmfulness of radiation per particle should increase at larger doses.

A few consequences if that's true:

Depending on how the constant coefficient is determined, a fully linear health risk model will tend to overestimate risk at low dose rates, but underestimate at high dose rates.

This also suggests that radiation concentrated in a particular spot on the body is particularly dangerous. The cells in that location will be bearing the brunt of the radiation dose, so their repair systems are more likely to fail. So inhaling a bit of plutonium dust means you're in for a worse time than absorbing an equivalent dose spread out over your body.

Of course, whatever health risk model we choose, it should also be applied to the regulation of coal plants, since they put radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere as a part of their regular operation.

Isn't it true that the proportionality coefficient for LNT was calculated using cancer rates for atomic bomb survivors? The dose for them would be very rapid, and there would be little time for enzymes to be produced. This would explain why such a valley didn't show up in that particular set of data.

Setting a firm limit on radiation release ahead of time, rather than one based on economics like ALARA just seems like it would be far safer. The other examples also seem like they are bad regulations that don't help safety or construction either. Would be great to see if they could result in more efficient construction.

When regulations prevent deploying something 10x safer than the currently deployed alternatives, they're not making us safer.

Because the commission is biased towards safety above all else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a realistic threat model.

The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly customized. French style reactor designs are good for this reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The reactor? Hope you like black.

All of the problems with nuclear reactors have happened to plants which were designed and constructed in the 1950->1970s. As it turns out, we've learned a ton about safely operating nuclear plants. The problem is upgrading these old plants rarely happens and getting newer plants to replace them is equally daunting.

There are 3 examples of major nuclear plant problems. That doesn't seem like too many.

In contrast, there are hundreds of operating plants. The newer ones are particularly safe because they require positive input to keep the nuclear reaction going. Any sort of earthquake, tsunami, mudslide, etc that causes the plant systems to fail will cause the nuclear reaction to be halted.

Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and fukushima are all impossible in plants built in the last 25 years. (Gen III or newer)

I support research and trials of the SMRs, but you might want to consider the possibility that it really is hard at the full-system level. The human mind does not readily understand invisible, exponential process like radiation.

A statistic that only works because epidemiological studies into the long term effects of radiation exposure are extremely difficult, complex and time consuming.

Something made even more difficult by the fact that we blasted uranium fallout in the atmosphere that's hanging around to this day, so getting a non-affected control group has become pretty much impossible.

Ain't helping that any research attempting to investigate the problem will very quickly be labeled as highly controversial by pro-nuclear lobbies [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2696975/

By comparison, atmospheric nuclear tests added 0.11 mSv at their peak in 1963, declining to 0.005 mSv/year today. Chernobyl added 0.04 mSv in 1986, declining to 0.002 today. The nuclear fuel cycle adds 0.0002 to the global average, and is required to be less than 1 mSv for all members of the public.

The highest natural background radiation is in Ramsar, Iran, with 6.0 mSv/year. Studies are ongoing but the evidence so far shows no negative health effects.

Note that Sieverts are normalized to the health effects on the human body. Any concerns about different types of radioactivity are already accounted for in this measurement.

Chernobyl and Fukushima of course caused larger exposures to nearby inhabitants, and these exposures are accounted for in the statistics I mentioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert

Is nuclear really safer than solar?

This[1] has some data and estimations for death rates measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour (TWh), which suggests nuclear has 0.07 deaths per TWh, which is marginally higher than wind (0.04), hydro (0.02), and solar (0.02).

So, it's very close!

1. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

The NRC uses a value of $9M for the value of a statistical life. That is, it is worth spending $9M if that will save one expected life.

Nuclear, solar and wind have deaths/energy somewhere in the ballpark of 1 life per 10^10 kWh. So, at $9M/life this cost is roughly $0.001/kWh. This is very small, which says that even minor differences in the cost of energy from various sources will be more important than the direct number of lives lost.

(This would not be true of fossil fuels, though.)

TLDR: it's more important to reduce the cost of energy from these non-fossil sources, and to choose the sources with lowest cost, than it is to make them safer. For nuclear, inherent safety could be useful if it would enable cost to be reduced, but not because nuclear needs to be safer.

The larger deployment of utility-scale solar does seem to have reduced it's death rate. (Many of the solar deaths are from falling off the roof during installation or maintenance. Utility-scale solar is normally on the ground and with better safety measures.)

I think this is fair. /All/ deaths from nuclear and renewable power are due to accidents and bad decisions. Accidents and bad decisions aren't going to go away. It takes a monumentally boneheaded decision to make a nuclear power plant dangerous, but apparently the rate of monumentally boneheaded decisions is one per thirty years at our current level of nuclear power usage.

That rate is very likely to increase as time goes on and reactors become older and thus more prone to failure/some freak low probability incident happening.

This one is particularly interesting considering Fukushima wasn't the first time something like that happened. On the other side of Japan is the Kahiwazaki-Kariwa plant [0], the largest of its kind on the planet.

In 2007 that plant was already hit by an earthquake, shaking the plant beyond design basis, it was shut down for 21 months after that.

And even tho it wasn't affected by the 2011 earthquake that blew Fukushima up, it still was shut down to implement safety improvements, it remains shut down to this day with no date for resuming operations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...

Also with new concepts like micro reactors or reviving long abandoned technology like liquid thorium reactors that would burn what we stupidly label “waste” and if the active systems are interrupted coast to a stop on their own instead of running away like our fast breeder water based designs a lot of the existing regulations and requirements are suddenly moot.

Most importantly Nuclear is the only “clean” technology that is predictable and controllable. Until you have a way to reliably meet base load requirements, fossil fuel generation is going to continue.

So if you really do think that climate change represents impending doom, resisting nuclear power is pretty dumb. It’s not perfect - but there isn’t any technology that is perfect or without some risk. Pretending nuclear is the only energy technology with serious issues is also dumb. 50 years of people painting nuclear as the boogie man hasn’t helped either. If you strongest arguments are emotionally based those aren’t very good arguments at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348520

If we started mass producing plants, there would be stronger push for uniformity in design and that would translate into significant cost savings. But no one is going to start mass producing plants because it's so difficult to get just one plant online.

To the more general question though: subsidies are to incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear power production.

Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.

Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.

But how much does a nuclear plant actually cost?

https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...

> but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to exist

Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources to keep on going.

> Batteries? Won't scale

This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can be deployed in homes, at distribution substations, underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs... Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid application

Current global production capacity for the lithium ion types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up.

We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight against climate change.

Hydrogen would still be hard to beat for seasonal storage, though.

[1] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Crane/

Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to go boom.

Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be. First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239 you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.) Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with it.

Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as possible. That means very highly enriched uranium. Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to be treated with extreme security.

Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed (and let’s be honest, contractors and other commercial entities are never held accountable when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with Superfund sites).

The military doesn't have a great track record on Superfund sites i.e:

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

However, I agree that at least the military has the culture that will follow orders if asked, and more importantly, it's the only government program that the US population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money towards.

As Reagan said: "trust, but verify".

Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US tax payers about $50 billion.

Kill two birds with one stone and all that…

How do you compare the deaths from a distributed reactor network to the deaths from additional global warming?

And there are far more easily obtainable things than uranium if you want to construct a dirty bomb. Another fantastic anti-nuke red herring.

Or since they are modular if significant long term loads shift geographically, you can easily move them around to where needed too.

I agree the concepts of massive plants aren’t desireable - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past the emotional arguments and actually discuss things rationally.

So far everyone who's pursued this small modular reactors built by factories approach has failed in the ambition. Doesn't mean it's impossible but just maybe we should be a bit more bearish than bullish on the idea of this sparking a revolution in the capital costs and time scales of nuclear power.

With technological advancement, a little change in regulations could go a long way.

My dad actually left his role when he was stuck in a pipe shaft in 120 degree heat. A pipe fitter went up and the person who helped him out of the pipe and was fired for not following protocol.

The regulation came in when they started codifying the union rules. There was also an incident where Westinghouse and GE were faking inspections. I don't have specifics on hand.

Generally though, it seems corrupt. At least at the time, the unions essentially controlled construction and wanted to line their pockets, the politicians also lined their pockets. Eventually, the cost was too high to build.

It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino juice.

2014 was a long time ago. It’s possible both technologies have improved since then. I wonder why we don’t hear about this comparison more.

Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells - is not a reliable base load provider.

No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store electrical power that’s far more reliable and cost effective than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but we aren’t there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost effective that never get discussed because everyone emotionally freaks out as soon as the word “nuclear” is uttered :p

It’s conparable in place to nuclear if I’m not mistaken, and it’s fault scenarios are less severe.

Especially in US, with vast amounts of deserts, it seems like a no-brainer.

(having said that, climate change is so urgent that I’d say do whatever it takes to get to zero emmissions - be it nuclear or solar)

We do nuclear at scale today. The vast majority of blockers from doing more nuclear at scale today are political; not technical.

That’s the other facet of this that always seems to get overlooked.

Or is your argument just "We're not doing it yet, therefore it can never be done"?

You don’t need one huge plant to manage the baseload when we’re talking about renewables.

You can just as well have the same wattage distributed across multiple places in the country, removing a single point of failure and lowering transmission costs (although requiring a redesign of the energy grid).