Comment by rayiner
3 years ago
Opposing nuclear was the first catastrophic mistake environmentalists made, causing them to be a net negative overall in terms of climate change. Opposing carbon capture will be the next (and possibly last) one.
If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to 2C while accommodating the expected growth in living standards in India, China, and Africa. And any strategy that doesn’t allow people in the developing world to dramatically increase their standard of living is a non-starter that will create billions of enemies for the environmental movement. India recently committed to go carbon neutral by 2070: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/developing-countries-.... That’s too late, and they won’t meet that anyway. The developed world needs to go carbon negative as fast as possible.
This is the most reasonable take. For some reason people in the West tend to ignore that 80% of the world is on the lower part of the exponential slope of progress, income, and demand for fossil fuel derived goods - and they are running up that slope at breakneck speed as a result of technological innovation.
Is the other 20% going to look down from our place of wealth and abundance - built on fossil fuels and countless externalities - and tell them that they have to achieve wealth and abundance through other means? It's ridiculous.
Sorry Sub-Saharan African, we have found that meat consumption is bad and therefore you can't do what we did, even though increased demand is a natural tendency as incomes rise.
All that cheap and dirty energy we used to make our infrastructure and grow GDP? You can't do it that way either. We made a big oopsie and have decided you have to do it through renewables and sustainable practices only.
By the way, are you interested in financing for this solar array? It's ok if you don't have the cash on hand, we'll just hold your highest quality farm-land as collateral.
We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
> We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
This is not the only conclusion from your excellent observation. Another conclusion could be that rich nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries without asking anything in return. I believe this is what the climate relief fund is about—as approved (albeit in a much too small scale) in last COP.
So far however rich nations are not only reluctant to fund infrastructure projects in other countries without anything in return—let alone green infrastructure projects—they are also reluctant to fund green infrastructure projects domestically (see e.g. Green New Deal in the US). The technology for mass carbon sequestration does not exist yet, and if it existed I bet it would follow the same prospects as current prospects of tackling the climate crisis. In short, they will not be built at the scale needed for any meaningful results.
This is often the case when you offer a technical solution to a societal or a political problem.
So the solution isn’t a real solution? You know what’s harder than carbon capture? Re-engineering human nature.
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That case you made about meat consumption is actually very relatable as found in a few reports went viral in China, including this one by . Twenty years ago most rural living Chinese can't afford beef at all. Twenty years later they are able, and there are like 1 billion rural people become urban in 40 years I guess (plz check source), and developed countries are already mad about stuff they predicted to happen. Trust fund solution is one helpful tool for this, yet uprising tension in India/US allies and China/Russia/Middle East/Pakistan make the plan definitely dead. It will soon to be another case of WWII U.N. that is controlled by U.S. and vetoed by U.S.S.R. for a billion times a year and not producing anything remotely close to a deal, or a compromise. Also, solar array is tremendously expensive due to regional difference, just like battery, either rare metal or lithium.
And who exactly are going to be paying for these ruinously expensive nuclear power stations for the poorer countries? Is it you and rayiner? Or perhaps you want your government to fund it through increased taxes on you?
I'm sure you wouldn't want the poor countries to pay for it themselves.
The point is that if everyone in the developed world had built more nuclear in the 1960s like France did, we wouldn’t be in such a dire situation now.
France’s CO2 emissions per capita are right around the world average. That means the rest of the developed world had done the same way as France half a century ago, we would have room to bring the whole developing world up to the same level as France while still being at the same overall CO2 output as today. And we wouldn’t have had all that extra CO2 for 60 years, giving us much more runway for the developed world to go to net zero while the developing world continues to develop.
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Whenever this line of reasoning is brought up, i ask one question - what is the cost of climate change? Who will bear that cost and who will deal with the effects?
A poor country deriving energy from a nuclear power plant means that carbon isn’t being emitted for energy production over the lifetime of that nuclear plant.
Despite all the hype, no renewable technology has been able to supply a growing electrical demand anywhere in the world. Every example is small, isolated or limited in time. Renewables will eventually get there but there are countless other things we must solve before that day comes.
Meanwhile, the argument of cost is trotted out without ever considering the full impacts of climate change on the flip side.
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Both mine and rayiner's commentary wasn't focused only on nuclear, but rather the harebrained and unrealistic doomscape narrative coming out of the West. When did it become so unpopular to point out what is most likely to happen? Because if we're placing bets, I'm gonna put my money on the developing nations not giving a flying F about emissions. Therefore, we need to think like realists and instead of idealists.
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IF we don't choose to build the expensive ones we'll never learn how to make cheaper ones, it is the cycle of every technology. Nuke development in the West has been stymied for generations by pearl clutchers.
> ruinously expensive You just disqualified yourself from any argument there. Nuclear power is the cheapest and most efficient form that we have ever found. Yes, the upfront cost may be huge but loans can help with that
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Reality is geographically, poor global south likely to bear higher brunt of climate change, while many in northern regions will be net benefitiaries. But poverty immediately sucks more than climate change, hope is that development via whatever means will uplift more than a few degrees dooms. How many people in developed north would trade their inhospitable winters in heated homes for being impoverished in more fair weathered country. None, because they learned to live with the cold.
I don’t know if all you wrote about is going to be a problem in the way you see it. The developing world has jumped/skipped some of the development the west/rich nations experienced and just adapted the latest technology.
A good example of this is communication technology. In wealthy nations, there was all of this wired infrastructure put in place since the advent of the telegraph. In developing nations, they just skipped all of that and most people have cellphones. Maybe not iphones or even smartphones, but the banks they used developed robust texting protocols, from what I’ve read and heard about, where people could do banking transactions from something like those old nokia dumbphones.
A lot of these developing countries rely on China, maybe to the wests collective chagrin, and China has invested heavily in rail infrastructure in a lot of these countries, and, Chinese auto manufacturers are already producing tons of electric vehicles. Guess whose car companies are building auto factories in a lot of the developing world? And though they may not meet the safety and quality standards of wealthy countries, people in developing countries are just happy to get places quicker than by foot. I may not have listed everything that emits greenhouse gases and a suitable replacement but normalizing mass transit (I forgot to mention the electric buses I’ve read these developing countries are either ordering from china or building at home in Chinese factories), but these two… industries make up a significant chunk of problematic emissions.
What I think we may see in the west is active resistance to adapting new energy and normalizing greener behavior because of things like American exceptionalism. Also, these technologies are expensive to buy for many people even in the west (right, not most people here on hackernews), and its going to be prohibitively expensive for people in old housing stock to upgrade their property and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. Tax rebates on $35,000 electric cars and heat pumps aren’t going to mean much to people relying on older family members for a roof over their head and can’t find jobs, especially if this whole ai thing takes off. There’s also significant and continual pushback from an people who seem determined to trash electric cars and such, and thats exacerbated by corporations acting bad faith to maximize profit (high efficiency appliances that barely make it through their standard warranty terms and subscription based car features come to mind.
So yeah, I think the developing world might be fine but its the wealthy nations who are going to screw themselves (and because of the US’ voracious consumption if everything), and maybe the rest of the world regardless of what steps the developing world takes.
You can’t really give many more examples than wireless. There is no way to make concrete that uses much less energy. No way to make steel. No way to heat or cool your home without using a lot of energy. No way to move yourself around to more than bicycle distance without expending vast amounts of energy on building infrastructure, vehicles (cars or trains), and powering them.
If the poor billions are to have any chance to live in any kind of comfort resembling what wealthy westerners or Asians do, they need to massively increase their energy consumption. There is no wireless way around it.
Worth looking at in this context is how the USA robbed us of the Kyoto protocol, which very much had the potential to at the very least give us longer time to roll out the needed changes. USA’s excuse back in 1997 was that it was unfair that developing nations were exempt. Looking back on it, I believe this was only an excuse forwarded by government from the fossil fuel industry. If not for US exceptionalism, they would have found another excuse and destroyed our climate anyway.
Carbon capture is cleaning up dog shit in the kitchen with a toothpick instead of training it to go outside.
The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal:
"Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2° or lower by 2100."
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/outreach/IPCC_A...
>The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.
And the dogs (pollution sources) are standing by to provide as many toothpicks as it takes to discourage anyone from bringing in a shovel any time soon.
Especially if the toothpicks cost so much it ends up with shovels remaining out-of-reach.
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Let me play devils advocate though. Right now nuclear provides 10% of the world’s power. Now since it was first deployed in the 70’s there have been at least 3 major accidents I can think of: Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3 mile island. So that’s one every 15 years, roughly.
The naive math behind that suggests that if we were to increase the number of power plants by a factor of 10 to supply all the world’s power, we should expect the rate of accidents to increase proportionally. So that’s a Fukushima somewhere in the world every 1.5 years or 18 months. And a bad one of those accidents could spread radiation across an entire continent.
Changes the risk/reward calculation, doesn’t it?
3 Mile Island: No one died, nothing of any significance happened. Clickbait from an era before clickbait was a thing.
Chernobyl: Irresponsible operation of obsolete, inherently-hazardous Soviet-era design. Not something that can ever happen again if some relatively-simple lessons are followed.
Fukushima: Irresponsible maintenance of plant operating well beyond its intended lifespan, which was irresponsibly constructed in a tsunami-prone seismic zone. This type of accident can and probably will happen again, precisely because of moratoriums on new plant construction.
One risk you didn't list but probably should have is reckless military attacks waged against installations such as Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. It's hard to safeguard a nuclear plant against a barbarian invasion. It may make sense to operate such plants under UN auspices, or otherwise guarantee their safety through multinational treaties with real enforcement behind them.
If Japan can’t do it, responsibly, why should we expect any other country to?
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The odds definitely aren't that straightforward.
Experiments and development in the 1950s. First commercial plant in 58.
Further growth in 60s and 70s. Including deadly accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 in 1961 - protests grew in 60s and 70s too.
Three Mile Island 1979.
Chernobyl 1986.
Fukushima 2011.
That 25-year gap between Chernobyl and Fukushima - and the extraordinary circumstances causing Fukushima vs the previous incidents - suggests that safety improved A LOT over the 60-odd years between 1958 and now.
True, it has. But, the failure rate is not zero. And more plants mean they will happen more often. I’m just pointing out that it’s rational to worry about a small probability high consequence disaster.
Nuclear fission is a reaction with a positive feedback loop, making it naturally unstable, and requires some mechanism to create a negative feedback of greater magnitude to make it stable. And that requires some kind of active machinery to function properly. If that machinery fails, then the feedback loop becomes positive again. Machines can always fail, so I doubt that fission can ever be made completely safe.
Now do the same calculation for passenger aviation.
That's not how disasters work. They aren't independent variables, when they happen, you learn and change the way things work to prevent them from happening again.
I don't know of any environmentalists against the research. Most I've talked with are skeptical that this is viable given current technology and believe that we need to act as if this doesn't exist, but that's different than opposing the research.
If there is some sort of breakthrough, then that's fantastic!
I think there are other geoengineering techniques that environmentalists are against such as seeding with sulphur dioxide or trying to create a shade preventing sun rays from reaching earth, but the argument against carbon capture is only that it doesn't yet exist.
When someone says they're "green" but hard-core antinuclear I just stop listening after that. They have done almost zero research on the topic and have 99% likely just decided because someone told them it was bad. Nuclear is our only viable path if we plan on keeping a dependable power grid. Battery tech is not currently up to par with what we need to make wind and solar 100% solutions. We need at least a 10X increase in storage density and longevity for that. They should absolutely be part of the mix though as they're cheaper than nuclear per kW
I think nuclear, today, is a hardcore bad idea. Nuclear is showing no tangible signs of getting cheaper, and renewable and battery prices continue to fall.
"Carbon capture research" has been an excuse to divert funding away from renewables for 20+ years. It's hardly made a dent in emissions and it's unlikely to change any time soon.
By definition poor countries overtaken by fossil fuels industrialization cannot use nuclear power - the technical knowledge is not there, and even if it were the corruption would result in destruction of the facility.
Power from the sun is the ultimate end goal in the tech tree. We've just skipped over the middle part because it turns out that even the smartest nuclear builds are still stupid and incapable of accounting for natural disasters or human elements.
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There was a recent pro-nuclear article posted here on HN which was authored by a fossil fuel lobbyist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658318). I know you are fishing for the opposite response, but it seems very likely at this point that the fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear propaganda.
I wouldn't put it past them that they want to increase the wedge between nuclear and renewables as much as possible. For them it's easy to be pro nuclear, as it's expensive and slow to build thanks to heavy regulatilon. While we argue nuclear vs. solar and wind, they can sit back and keep profiting from fossile fuels.
Edit: just read the article a bit. It's just as I thought. "Only nuclear can save us" bullshit, whereas a genuine writer would have written "Only a combination of green energy sources can save us". FF industry doing their thing..
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