Energy

http://blog.samaltman.com/energy

by jordanmessina • 11 years ago

325 278 11 years ago

blog.samaltman.com

iamcurious• 11 years ago

I find it strange there is no mention about batteries. From what I understand (and it isn't much, I'm way out of my field) getting energy is easy, saving it is hard.

mbca• 11 years ago

Indeed. The essay mentions "predictability" as a problem with solar, but that becomes moot with good enough storage & transmission.

cjbenedikt• 11 years ago

Precisely! The issue is storage. There are many ways to create energy: solar, wind, water, nuclear (thorium!)...but storage is still unsolved. And Lithium is NOT the answer, not at the scale we need.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

If you can generate on demand then you don't need batteries.

nine_k2• 11 years ago

Batteries are great when you need a relatively compact and lightweight source without moving parts and noise. That is, cars, helicopter drones, phones, etc. Batteries still lack the high energy density of fuels like kerosene; you cannot fly a jet plane or rocket on batteries.

Electric power can probably be used to synthesize traditional fuels from carbon dioxide and water, to stay carbon-neutral. Plants can do that but in a quite inefficient manner. A (bio)chemistry breakthrough is badly wanted on this front.

cjensen• 11 years ago

Fusion and Fission systems tend to run 24/7, unlike Wind and Solar. There is far less need to store energy when using the former types of generation.

jarvist3• 11 years ago

Fission: Nuclear power stations have relatively low capacity factors (a measurement of how much of time they're actually connected to the grid and producing power). This is typically 70% over the last few decades for Western countries (i.e. a third of the time, a nuclear power station is not producing anything). As well as unintended maintenance shut down periods, most reactor designs require a multi-month shut down to refuel. In recent years some countries have managed closer to 90%.

Fusion: By '24/7' you mean the 0.5 s sustained burn at JET in the 90s. Humanity has not yet managed to sustain fusion for a full second on the Earth, let alone get any useful power out of it. ITER (the next generation Tokamak test reactor) isn't built yet. The intent is for it to achieve 1000 s of fusion burn time. Its over budget and behind time, and they've just had a management reshuffle to try and deal with this.

* Edited & extended to try and incorporate nbouscal's feedback from below

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nine_k2• 11 years ago

You can either collect and store energy where it's abundant but intermittent (solar, wind), or generate it reasonably close to the consumers.

The problem is that the sources like solar have both power density and availability problems in higher latitudes, and power density required to e.g. power a major factory may be a problem even in a sunny place.

I'm also not sure about price per kW of installed generating power; it looks like solar power is still way behind atomic power in this regard.

In general, everyone would love breakthroughs both in electricity generation, transmission, and accumulation. Looking at the amounts of coal still mined for burning, generation should not be overlooked.

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jonathannorris• 11 years ago

It's great to see you invest your time and money in nuclear power Sam. We already have the nuclear technology to solve our energy emissions problem, we just lack the political will to make the shift away from coal/oil/gas. Great leaps in the efficiency and safety of nuclear power systems will hopefully make the shift politically achievable.

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arenaninja• 11 years ago

I thought the biggest hurdle with nuclear energy was waste management? As in, we've nowhere to put the toxic dump that's produced that will radiate a few tens of thousands of years? Unless that's been solved, in which case consumer education would be a next step

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jerf• 11 years ago

I've been convinced for a while that the reason this problem is not solved is that everybody is sure that the problem is not solved, and therefore nuclear is really hard, and therefore we shouldn't do research on nuclear, and therefore we shouldn't do any engineering on the topic of how to solve our waste issues. In other words, ultimately the reason is circular logic.

It's 2015, and we remain essentially stuck on 1950s B-Movie era stereotypes on how nuclear works, what it is, and how dangerous it is.

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mikeash14• 11 years ago

Much of the waste problem can be solved by using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel. This isn't currently done, but there's no big technical reason it couldn't be.

For what remains after that, well, there's nothing particularly wrong with sticking it in some extremely sturdy armored containers, sticking the containers in a shed, surrounding the shed with a razor-wire fence, and stationing a couple of guards at the gate.

The paranoia over nuclear waste is weird. What if civilization collapses and people in the far future discover the stuff and don't know it's dangerous? It lasts tens of thousands of years, after all! OK, but we leave dangerous stuff all over the place. There are tons of barrels of toxic chemicals, ponds full of poison, and heaps of awful stuff just sitting around, and more being produced all the time. Nuclear waste is bad because it lasts tens of thousands of years? How about arsenic or mercury, which lasts forever? And sure, precautions are taken with those toxins, but not on the "this must be placed in a geologically stable area, packaged to survive the fall of civilization, and signposted so that all future intelligence will know to avoid it" level of precaution.

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codingdave2• 11 years ago

I worked on renewable energy projects a few years back, and while the idea of a large disruptive technology development sounds awesome, the reality is that there are already a plethora of renewable energy turbines and designs that would greatly improve the world... But the engineers and inventors running around with these ideas have no idea how to go from a small scale proof of concept into a fully built out manufacturing and implementation process.

Even if they do figure out how to get engineering and manufacturing in place, then there are regulatory barriers to figure out. There will be politics involved, and legal challenges. And of course, you need to actually operate the sites on an ongoing basis.

All of these challenges can be overcome... but most people who know how to do so already work in the energy industry. What is really needed is a group of people who can bridge those gaps to take an innovate design from an engineers drawing board, and jump through all the hoops to make it a live production site. If such a group were to be built, real change could happen very quickly.

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jacquesm4• 11 years ago

There is also a very large amount of snake oil in the renewable energy field and a ton of ideas that keep being recycled that have long ago been invalidated.

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codingdave2• 11 years ago

There is some of that. There are also very valid projects out there. I am running under the assumption that people can tell the difference.

Frankly, most of the sketchy folk that I ran into during my projects were the investors, not the engineers.

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nosuchthing3• 11 years ago

Surely there's a country hungry for energy somewhere without all the red tape?

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selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/science/an-incubator-for-i...

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jsprogrammer4• 11 years ago

Hmm, major reversals of conflict-of-interest policy? (ie. now chairman of two YC companies and personally investing in them)

Large claims with no hard data comparisons? (eg. atomic power has major cost, density, and predictability advantages)

This(?):

There will only be one cheapest source of energy

Really? There can't be two sources at or near equilibrium?

These systems are not deployed in isolated, designer environments, but instead are deployed in complex environments. Transportation and project logistics will prefer some sources over others.

The lack of any real metric for cost or "cheapness" is a red flag. Is cost being measured in nominal dollars? Will such a thing even exist in the 22nd century?

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benaiah• 11 years ago

The hard data has been around for years, and is fairly easy to find. Not every blog post needs to have an accompanying statistical analysis.

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jsprogrammer4• 11 years ago

So easy to find that it can't even be linked to on the web by two people that claim it exists?

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sgk284• 11 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but going to UPower's site shows nothing but a somewhat sparse wintery forest. Perhaps I've too much sci-fi on the brain, but it made me think of a nuclear winter.

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donttrustatoms11• 11 years ago

Haha, wow. :) Thanks for the comment. It was meant to signify the communities in the far north or arctic that currently are reliant on very expensive and dirty diesel... Our webpage is under construction probably to be put up in about a week. You can definitely feel free to ask any questions and would appreciate your thoughts on the new one.

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kpennell• 11 years ago

cool of you to respond!

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api• 11 years ago

I'm very happy to see independent fusion efforts raising money, given that government R&D has decided to put nearly all its eggs in the tokamak basket.

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washedup• 11 years ago

A huge part of the problem is not investment or technology, but the legislative structure which still favors fossil fuels. The lobbying interests and influence are immense. Once this starts to change there will be a rapid shift towards clean energy.

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Eleutheria• 11 years ago

Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual.

Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc.

Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.

Individual energy independence, even if it will never be possible, that's where our dreams should be.

Then water, then food. That's disruption at seismic level. Post-scarcity world.

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beat9• 11 years ago

Decentralization solves a lot of other problems as well - it's less vulnerable to accidental or intentional failure, it requires much less skill and expense to implement and operate, etc.

Solar has the advantage that it cannot be weaponized even in nonsense theory, greatly relaxing export regulation. This makes it a viable solution for developing countries and remote areas, not just the handful of nations with the wealth and sophistication to manage a reactor.

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thesteamboat• 11 years ago

Decentralization [...] requires much less skill and expense to implement and operate, etc.

This isn't true because decentralization is easier, it's true because technologies which this isn't true of (require large capital expenditures or high degrees of expertise) can't be given to everyone and their mother.

By saying we're doing decentralized X we're moving the problem of requisite operating skill to the designers who must make their systems simple enough for laypeople. Likewise factories and engineers must find economies of scale in production of units which are distinct from the efficiencies we currently realize building relative few, much larger generators.

In short, while decentralization solves some of these problems, it also presupposes the solution of others. It may be a worthy goal, but there are challenges to get there.

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someguy488fu348• 11 years ago

Solar may have been weaponized as early as 214 BCE.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Decentralization to the community level is almost as good and works for people who live in apartments and such. Both ycombinator projects would qualify; Helion's reactor would be 50MW and fit in a shipping container, and produce very little neutron radiation.

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oneiric• 11 years ago

This is close to happening. http://www.rmi.org/electricity_grid_defection

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josu• 11 years ago

Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors.

The decentralization of production usually leads to a greater cost per unit due to economies of scale. This may not be true for solar, but it certainly is for nuclear, hydro, geothermal and probably wind. There are regions in our planet that don't get many hours of sunlight, how should they produce energy there?

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XorNot3• 11 years ago

No it is also a problem for solar. A distributed grid is non-trivial to build.

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antaviana• 11 years ago

Unless you live in Spain, where solar energy generation by individuals is taxed in a way that it is a lot cheaper to just buy energy from the grid. Investment in solar energy generation in Spain is one order of magnitude smaller than 10 years ago.

Your post-scarcity world will surely not include Spain.

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donttrustatoms11• 11 years ago

So true. That's exactly why this is so exciting. With a UPower generator, small communities or neighborhoods could have always on, emission free power for a decade.

and then, as you indicated, with enough clean power, individuals can create desalinated water or even extract water from air. They could cleanly power greenhouses even in the arctic. We could remove carbon from the air.

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cwe• 11 years ago

They could power all of those things on different planets.

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snowwrestler• 11 years ago

True energy independence goes both ways, which very few people are willing to accept.

People will install solar panels and enjoy not writing a check to the utility every month. But if their home battery breaks during a heat wave, they're not going to sit in an un-air-conditioned house and and think, "well at least I'm independent." No, they're going to expect the grid to send them power when they need it.

So while independent generation is a good idea, it's not likely to result in infrastructure savings. In fact the kind of smart grid that would be needed to deal with such widely varying local loads would almost certainly be more expensive than just maintaining what we've got.

It's worth remembering that electric generation started out as a very local and independent thing. Central generation won because it was cheaper and more reliable--despite the seemingly obvious losses and expenses of such a huge network.

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Thiz2• 11 years ago

They'll go to Walmart to buy a replacement the same day just like they would replace any home appliance.

By that time, I bet batteries would sell for less than a thousand, much less.

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ocschwar3• 11 years ago

Use TCP/IP to coordinate consumption and production, and your storage needs go down considerably.

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sskates2• 11 years ago

I always wondered why more energy wasn't generated from nuclear. On paper it seems like a great energy source.

Kudos to Sam for putting not just his money, but his time where his mouth is. If only the rest of the internet could do the same!

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JshWright• 11 years ago

If only the rest of the internet could do the same!

Sam is in a fairly unique position to be able to do that...

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chinathrow10• 11 years ago

On paper it seems like a great energy source.

On paper the waste issue is still not solved. And the risks are still large (yes I know, coal, gas and oil has it's drawbacks too).

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sskates2• 11 years ago

Not sure about waste, can someone else here speak to that? Also deaths per unit energy are incredibly low relative to other sources.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Waste isn't a significant issue for either of the ycombinator projects. One is mostly-aneutronic fusion, the other is a fast reactor. Fast reactors produce about 1% as much waste and it goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.

Fusion has no significant risk. With fission it depends on the design; I don't know much about UPower, but the IFR, another small fast reactor, demonstrated very impressive safety.

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beat9• 11 years ago

I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up.

Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up. Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement. With those incredible advantages, it doesn't need to be cheaper than nuclear - it just needs to be adequately cheap.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors take a long time. Ycombinator is investing in factory-produced reactors that fit in a truck. There are quite a few other companies working on small factory-produced reactors.

Solar with batteries is a lot more expensive than solar alone. Solar is doing well right now with natural gas backup, but a lot of us would like to avoid fossil entirely. Solar with nuclear backup might be a great combination, assuming demand correlates reasonably well with daylight hours.

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JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Confused: if you have nuclear, skip the solar and save money?

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beat9• 11 years ago

So how small a reactor? And what sort of cost, what sort of setup time, what sort of safety constraints (ie, current reactors are generally water-cooled and need access to large bodies of water)? It's possible to trim the cost of reactors from the billions to the millions, maybe, but how many millions?

Certainly, solar with batteries is a lot more expensive - but to my point, startup cost is low. Latency, or bandwidth? The long-term cost/kwh may be higher for solar, but the short-term startup expense will be much lower, unless you can get the factory-built reactors down into the thousands rather than millions of dollars.

If nuclear is cheaper than solar in a decade or two, but costs ten times as much in the short run, there's a tremendous advantage to solar, battery cost or not. Opportunity cost matters tremendously.

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mrbabbage• 11 years ago

nuclear backup

That wouldn't work with current nuclear reactors, whose startup / shutdown sequences take hours. Typically, the grid operator runs nuclear plants at nearly 100% 24/7 (so called "baseload") due to this.

I'd be curious how truck-sized reactors work and whether or not you could operate them as load-followers rather than baseload. That would make them extremely attractive for replacing natural gas peakers, especially as more wind / solar get onto the grid.

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rndmind• 11 years ago

Solar is indirectly fusion power.

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SeoxyS• 11 years ago

So are fossil fuels, and pretty much everything else on earth, including life itself. Carbon-based fossil fuels are simply very old plants which have stored and concentrated solar energy.

The only non-solar non-fusion energy I can think of is that which comes from the earth's core, geothermic. And even that is believed to be powered by nuclear fission.

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jfoutz2• 11 years ago

Rather than batteries, i think pumping water up a hill will be a lot cheaper. use the water to drive a generator. massive daily over production to fill the nightly (or much longer) reserve.

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taf2• 11 years ago

I like this idea a lot the only downside is it expands the land area and possibly increases complexity - but I think for major power planets it's a great option just not for the home installations.

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gumby• 11 years ago

That is the state of the art for energy storage today and basically all the sites are taken. Sure, if energy costs go up a LOT a few more will become viable, but if you look around, for example, Californa, it's hard to find another viable site.

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slyall• 11 years ago

Pumped storage is hard to scale down and has a fairly fixed loss. There are a bunch of other storage technologies that are at the "almost there" stage though. I personally like the Pumped Heat storage from Isentropic as a possible mainstream contender:

http://www.isentropic.co.uk/

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gordon_freeman• 11 years ago

The similar thing I have heard Elon Musk saying in some interview that it's just a myth that people have to think we will never able to generate enough energy out of solar-panels compared to the nuclear reactors. He said that the amount of land one needs to build a massive nuclear plant and then other things to maintain it and considering the 10-50 miles area enveloped to plant where it is dangerous to live. If you use the same amount of land to place solar-panels then the energy produced by solar will overtake that of from nuclear plants.

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jddw16• 11 years ago

This is completely false. First it is not dangerous to live in those zones, second this is a pretty accurate land comparison - http://www.thingsworsethannuclearpower.com/2012/03/using-too.... Maybe Elon should visit a nuclear plant...

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flgb• 11 years ago

I suspect they will continue to trounce fission and fusion for a long time, at least until there is some some technical innovation in transmission and distribution.

Transmission and distributed generation accounts for half the cost of electricity. The question for our electricity future is distributed versus centralized generation, and distributed will probably win.

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jddw16• 11 years ago

So distribute fission and fusion, overcomes much of that. And distributed solar and wind needs backup which is usually fairly centralized. Unless you want to spend 3-5 times as much for your energy to buy batteries.

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ytdht• 11 years ago

where is nuclear in your theory?

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beat9• 11 years ago

In my theory, nuclear is mostly irrelevant. It's not a model for the third world (who can't afford or operate reactors, even if the rich nations would let them have one), it's not a model for low population densities, and it generally costs in the billions and requires the involvement of both local government and international regulatory agencies.

Sure, UPower and others are working on reactors that are small scale, cheaper, safe, and hard to weaponize. But they're still a limited solution to the problems I'm bringing up.

Fusion is a fantasy. Maybe someday it will be real, but betting the world on it is foolish.

Solar is cheap, fine-grained, clean, sustainable, and not weaponizable. It solves all my core problems. Why should I care about difficult, expensive, dangerous nuclear?

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icanhackit3• 11 years ago

think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth [...] reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up

I like this metaphor. I think what you might have implied but didn't explicitly mention was distributed vs centralized when thinking about these systems as well. Solar can be a distributed system whereas fission & fusion systems are centralized.

Even though you can make small fission systems and IIRC Skunkworks is working on a small fusion reactor (small = fits on freight truck...once the damn thing works) you still have issues with waste, heat, faults etc. so they need to remain isolated from living space. Thus they are better utilized in a centralized manner.

Sticking with the computer/internet metaphors, you could consider solar to be like a Solid State Drive while fission is very much the classic HDD, moving parts and all. The elimination of moving parts/complexity to generate electricity makes solar suitable for the home just as NAND is better for portable devices like phones.

Pros: speed vs capacity, Cons: cost vs complexity - pick one from each pile.

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XorNot3• 11 years ago

Faults are not a serious issue with a fusion reactor beyond it breaking down. Neither is waste - an inert reactor is harmless unless you insist on crowbaring into the core to bathe in all those activated inner wall materials.

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jddw16• 11 years ago

Interesting analogy and choice of words since UPower is building a solid state reactor.

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XorNot3• 11 years ago

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ageofwant2• 11 years ago

While I believe/hope you are right there are use cases for gigawatt energy sources that cannot be met even with pervasive PV deployments. We will not be manufacturing aluminium with solar. We won't be pumping gigga tones of C02 out of the atmosphere and seawater with solar. We won't convert the Ort cloud to habitats with solar. For that we need fusion or fission. No way around it.

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rwallace• 11 years ago

Actually, aluminum manufacturing is a perfect use case for solar, because it doesn't mind intermittency. (Or put another way, manufacturing energy intensive stuff is a perfect way to provide the storage that solar needs.)

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donttrustatoms11• 11 years ago

Solar is much cheaper and wind was already cheap, however the question, for both carbon and cost, is what is the price of the renewable intermittents with storage and backup. Batteries and storage in general have not had the step changes in cost and performance that solar has. Backup tends to be fossil plants. Ultimately energy density is a zero sum game for the environment and cost. In more detail:

On storage: Rough calculations show, if there were just enough Powerwalls to backup US peak demand for one hour it would require 10x the global annual mining production of lithium. And that's just one hour. And that doesn't include the electricity production.

On panel material required for production: It's generally estimated that US power, with good transmission, would require enough solar panels to cover the entire state of Massachusetts. Most non solar advocates think it's this square footage that's important. But of course this can largely be put on built land or in deserts so that is a relatively moot point. In fact, I want to get solar panels on my roof. However the real concern is what does this look like in terms of material mining? In immense panel production factories? (which isn't the greenest mfg process ever, likely one of the reasons it is largely done in China)

On mining and transporting material required: Mining is almost entirely powered by fossils, it has to be. And so is most transport. And so is recycling of metals. So the energy density of an energy source really is a zero sum game. If it takes a millionth the material for one source versus the other, that adds up.

On maintenance Then in maintenance, solar farms are truly "farms"- they require a lot of water to wash away dust to operate optimally. A states' worth of water is significant.

On lifetime/end of life First of all the lifetime of a panel is very optimistically 30 years/for a nuclear plant 60-80 years, and for the UPower fuel in particular can be used and recycled repeatedly for about 70+ years.

afterlife/recycling Then in recycling at end of life, and this is why I got so excited about nuclear as a somewhat hippie child growing up around oil companies in Oklahoma, solar is going to require a lot of energy (and fossil fuels or nuclear) to recycle, while nuclear can produce energy in recycling its fuel.

The main import, to me, is: what is the energy density of this energy, and if emitting, how much pollution? Coal is far more energy dense than wind, which is why humans evolved from windmills and wood to coal. But it's so polluting which is why we are all working towards better sources, and the greater energy density (nuclear on order of 2M x any other source) that's roughly 2M less trucks transporting, 2M less mining to do, 2M less recycling, etc. Thats more on the environment than pure cost like you are saying but the costs add up if the full life cycle is taken into account on both sides.

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transfire3• 11 years ago

There are other technologies. Nuclear isomers for example have a lot of potential, but the fossil fuel hegemony really keeps alternatives from flourishing. We can be very thankful that photovoltaics was invented pre-WII, otherwise I doubt we'd be seeing it today either.

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jacquesm4• 11 years ago

That's not really how it works. Technologies are either commercially viable or they are not. The thing that enabled windpower and solar power to take off is economic parity with other means of generating power. Photovoltaics and windpower being 'invented' (as if it isn't blatantly obvious that there is energy in wind and solar and that this energy can be captured in a myriad of ways) before a certain date has nothing to do with whether or not we see them today.

Tons of money and effort has been sunk in attempts to create more sources for energy and some of those have paid off and others are still under review. The 'fossil fuel hegemony' is actually quite a large investor in more than a few projects, their product is energy, not a particular kind of energy.

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jarvist3• 11 years ago

The first practical high efficiency (6%) cell was made in Bell Laboratories in 1954. It was the first PN junction silicon solar cell, the technology that still powers 90% of solar cell modules on the market.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200904/physicshistor...

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selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

Who on earth told you that? Hafnium doesn't work - DOE and DOD moved mountains in the nineties trying to get it to work and a number of people lost their careers and sanity in the process. But you go ahead and tell yourself that it's the "fossil-fuel hegemony"

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

(I'm sure you think muon-catalyzed fusion is right around the corner too)

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andy_ppp6• 11 years ago

Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives...

From Wikipedia:

    Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission
    products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million
    years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years.
    The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life
    two million years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,000 years).[39] Nuclear waste
    requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it
    from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment,
    followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or
    transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.[40] Governments around the
    world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though
    there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management
    solutions.[41]

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_o...

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transfire3• 11 years ago

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-fundi...

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jddw16• 11 years ago

This reactor eats some of the waste, but UPower can eat all of the waste, including this reactor's waste.

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chinathrow10• 11 years ago

Yes, multiple decomissioning projects are showing the true costs these days.

Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant Decomissioned: 1990

Destruction started: 1995

Ongoing as of today....

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tim333• 11 years ago

Yeah, I see from Wikipedia "In France, decommissioning of Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant, a fairly small 70 MW power plant, already cost €480 million (20x the estimate costs) and is still pending after 20 years." Plus it leaked into the lake nearby.

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mikeash14• 11 years ago

The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from "infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get more worried?

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andy_ppp6• 11 years ago

Who says I'm not worried about all the "bad" things(tm)?

To be honest I'm just asking the question that while we can all say "isn't it great how safe nuclear is" we still haven't 100% figured out the waste issue. Fusion... well I'll believe it when it's powering my DeLorean.

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Swizec• 11 years ago

It suddenly becomes a solvable problem.

If something is infinite, meh, it's infinite, what you gonna do. But if it's a few million years ... whoa, we can reason about that!

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rwcarlsen6• 11 years ago

"Infinite half-life" basically means an isotope is stable. Half life is only one piece of the radioactivity story. Knowing how isotopes decay is also important - alpha, beta decay, spontaneous fission, etc - these differences matter a great deal w.r.t. how to safely handle and store spent fuel. And we don't just "chuck it in a landfill" - here is a good place to start to learn a bit more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository.

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mikexstudios3• 11 years ago

Well, the difference between chemical toxic waste is that there are accessible methods for making it non-toxic. It's just a matter of cost. For example, toxic organic and inorganic compounds can be thermally decomposed. For organics, you create elemental carbon. For inorganics (containing metal ions), you can reform the metal and collect it. Acid/base waste can be neutralized. You can't really do that for radioactive material except trying to accelerate the decay. And while chemical waste can often be handled with standard safety measures, radioactive waste is just too dangerous to work with.

I see your point. I think one needs to consider both the danger of the waste and the amount of it generated. Then try to find a good balance.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Nuclear power plants in the U.S. pay a fee for waste disposal. Those fees have accumulated in a fund, currently amounting to over $30 billion. The money was going to go to Yucca Mountain, until that project was shut down.

The long-lived fission products are a very small portion of the total waste, and if we only had fission products to worry about, the total waste would go back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries or so, since most fission products are relatively short-lived. It's pretty easy to contain them for that long.

The great majority of the total waste, and almost all the long-lived waste, is transuranics. Those can also be considered unspent fuel, and fissioned for energy in fast reactors or with neutrons from D-T fusion reactors. The Russians have a couple fast reactors in commercial operation, one of which has provided 560MWe to their power grid since 1980. They're working now on using them to process transuranic waste.

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andy_ppp6• 11 years ago

I really hope it's more than £30bn. No-one seems to know how much it costs to decommission one, but a link above says "range from $280-$612 million." Ouch.

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rwcarlsen6• 11 years ago

Power plants fund their own decommissioning [1]. And they also (in a way) already pay for disposal - a 1 mill per kWh fee on all energy generated payed to the federal govermnent in exchange for the feds taking responsibility for disposal [2]. This fee has been paid for decades - the industry has no problem supporting that level of disposal cost (and could even afford a higher fee if necessary). There has been an enormous amount of research into ways for dealing with the waste all kinds of disposal, treatments, recycling, etc. The only real blocker has been a lack of political/public will to make any decisions and move forward.

[1] http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act

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andy_ppp6• 11 years ago

I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK:

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

Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!

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andy_ppp6• 11 years ago

Also the somewhat wide range is disturbing!

    The NRC estimates costs for decommissioning a nuclear power plant
    range from $280-$612 million.

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the8472• 11 years ago

Power plants fund their own decommissioning

They are supposed to. But here in germany the energy company lobbists basically said - in response to a few new proposed fees levied on coal plants - that anything threatening their revenues would cut into future revenue needed for decommissioning fees. And that's despite being required to have funds set aside for decommissioning.

I suspect some creative accounting going on, moving expected future profits into those funds or whatever.

So if their business models fail - e.g. due to renewables - it might turn out that in practice there never was any money set aside for decommissioning.

There are even talks about splitting off coal and fission plants into some sort of "bad bank" companies.

So I would be very wary of any such promises of things being priced in.

Corporations have again and again proven to be very good at privatizing profits while externalizing costs.

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hackuser2• 11 years ago

Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer?

That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.

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chinathrow10• 11 years ago

Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go.

- grey energy invested

- full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land

- inclusive recycling costs

- inclusive environmental impacts

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donttrustatoms11• 11 years ago

I am one of the UPower founders. There are two big stories here that most people don't know yet: 1) that a fast reactor can be waste-negative, I.e. transform existing waste to energy. 2) a fast reactor destroys the long lived waste- instead of trying to store waste for a hundred thousand years it's on the order of a hundred.

Both of these are critically important for existing waste but also having an emission free energy source with a closed fuel cycle. No other energy source is better than a hundred thousandth as energy dense and no other energy source could produce clean energy for its own recycling.

It's obviously just a cool technology but more than that it's amazing what that could mean for the environment and remote communities. Even for solar and wind materials mining, these remote mines generally have to burn tons and tons of diesel. That's what we are trying to fight.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

UPower is a fast reactor? If so that's pretty encouraging!

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aidenn0• 11 years ago

What about transport of the waste? Isn't (nearly?) all waste in the US stored on-site?

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fscherer• 11 years ago

on twitter, you asked about what people want to see on your website: THIS! especially with more detail and explanations

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TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

I'm surprised people are so worried about nuclear waste. It's literally the best type of waste imaginable - you can easily grab it, put it in barrels and store for possible future use as fuel source, and even if not, left alone this waste turns harmless with time, without reacting with anything.

Compare that to waste generated from burning dead dinosaurs - its storage is not a problem only because it's dumped into the atmosphere to poison everyone. You can say that nuclear plants have one less externality here.

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falsestprophet• 11 years ago

The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy (i.e. terrestrial atomic generation and energy from sun’s fusion).

It's silly to describe solar as atomic energy from sun’s fusion as a distinct category from carbon-based energy, because of course carbon-based energy was formed by capturing solar energy from the sun's fusion.

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GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

How is this anything but useless pedantry?

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drcube• 11 years ago

I think the OP is illustrating the pedantry of "well technically solar energy is atomic energy" by pointing out that, by that standard, so is coal and oil. In other words, I don't think you disagree with the OP.

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crystaln• 11 years ago

Perhaps we should call it all Big Bang energy.

I agree this is silly. Harnessing the radiant energy of the sun is categorically different from converting wind or carbon into usable energy. Trying to group these into one category seems out of touch with the reality of developing the t technlogies.

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vectorjohn• 11 years ago

You could get super pedantic and say it's all gravity based energy, but it stops being a useful way to classify things long before that.

Distinguishing between carbon and atomic is a pretty useful and meaningful distinction, although ultimately not perfectly correct.

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DannoHung• 11 years ago

There's certainly a lot less latency from atomic reaction to harvested energy though :D

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ansible2• 11 years ago

Fine, call it a 'carbon-cycle' energy system. Which may make it more clear that we're doing a great job on the 'burning' part of the cycle, but not so good on the 'capturing' part of the cycle.

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jjtheblunt2• 11 years ago

Not meant to be snarky, but why does Mr Altman assume folks care what he's confident about regarding things outside his expertise in software and startups? I genuinely wonder.

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hyperpallium• 11 years ago

I wonder what environmental impact truly large-scale solar energy will have. In that it is moving energy away from where it would usually fall on the ground/plants, thus reducing heat, less rising air, less photosynthesis etc. Perhaps additionally aid global cooling? Though that energy will mostly end up as heat anyway.

(Of course it's far better for the environment than present coal/petrol/gas/wood, and their energy initially came from the sun anyway, but it will still have some environmental impact.)

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yellowapple• 11 years ago

My impression was that the vast majority of sunlight Earth receives is wasted, and that solar panels just gobble up the waste (so long as they're built in, say, deserts or other places where they're not blocking out a whole lot of flora/fauna).

Wind and hydroelectric, on the other hand, could very well have significant environmental impacts if deployed on a sufficiently-large scale, despite being technically "clean" energy (aside from the non-clean energy and materials used in their construction).

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secstate3• 11 years ago

These are the sorts of deep questions that often go unasked as we humans look for ever greater efficiencies. I had to attend a seminar on geothermal wells presented by a group of ageing hippies. When I asked if any long term studies had been done on the affect of mass-geothermal well drilling and pumping cool water out of the ground and cycling warmer water back in, no one could even parse my question properly.

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Retric3• 11 years ago

As a sanity check, the earth gets ~1366 W/m2 * (6,371 km) ^2 * pi = 1.7e17 watts * 24h/day * 365.2425day/year ~= 1.5e21Wh/year ~= 1,500,000,000 terawatt hours/year. Humans use 155,505 terawatt-hour / year or ~ 1/10,000th of that much energy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption)

Further, it's all (99.99%) going to get released so net impact is going to be very local.

PS: In the end the real change would simply be changing the albino of the planet slightly. But, buildings and roads already cover far more land than solar is expected to anytime soon with minimal impact.

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secstate3• 11 years ago

The problem here is that someone once did some cocktail napkin math with regards to dumping farm waste into the Chesapeake Bay and determined that the ocean is so enormous it was stupid to think some agro-waste would change much about it.

I can't find a source at the moment, my apologies. But suffice to say humans have a knack for considering their needs insignificant when in reality our Spaceship Earth looks ever more fragile the more we learn about it.

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donttrustatoms11• 11 years ago

Hurricanes also produce Terawatts of energy. The question is the way the energy is turned into electricity, and how it's stored or backed up because an economy requires reliable electricity

I'm a supporter of solar, and trying to get it on my house.

But I also did some back of the envelope calculations that showed, just if we had enough Powerwalls to backup US peak demand for one hour it would require 10x the global annual mining production of lithium. And that's just one hour. And that doesn't include the electricity production.

It's generally estimated that US power, with good transmission, would require enough solar panels to cover the entire state of Massachusetts. I think you're right that it isn't the land cover that would have much effect, after all buildings and roads already cover a lot of land. I think it's sheer material production.

Mining is almost entirely powered by fossils, it has to be. And so is most transport. And so is recycling of metals. So the energy density of an energy source really is a zero sum game. If it takes a millionth the material for one source versus the other, that adds up.

Then in maintenance, solar farms are truly "farms"- they require a lot of water to wash away dust to operate optimally. A states' worth of water is significant.

Then in recycling at end of life, and this is why I got so excited about nuclear as a somewhat hippie child growing up around oil companies in Oklahoma, solar is going to require a lot of energy to recycle, while nuclear can produce energy in recycling its fuel.

The main reality check, to me, is: what is the energy density of this energy, and if emitting, how much pollution? Coal is far more energy dense than wind, which is why humans evolved from windmills and wood to coal. But it's so polluting which is why we are all working towards better sources.

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erobbins• 11 years ago

This is fantastic. Nuclear fission suffers from a hindenberg-type PR problem, where incidents from early design mistakes and poor choices color the opinions of people even though modern reactor designs are safe, efficient, and essentially clean other than small amounts of waste.

I would love to work on a project like this.

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beat9• 11 years ago

It's not just a PR problem, though. It's a cost structure problem, and a grid problem. On the cost front, they're tremendously expensive. New tech and manufacturing processes might get the cost from the billions to the millions, but it's still very expensive.

On the grid front, nuclear is good for baseline, but not peak load. Most nuclear reactors can't just be flipped on and off with a switch, or even scale power quickly... they're more or less constant. So you still need a peak load system, which currently consists of gas plants - very expensive, since they're intermittent and offline most of the time.

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hackuser2• 11 years ago

Years ago, the story I understood was that renewables couldn't scale up fast enough to sufficiently mitigate climate change, and nuclear was the only answer. Recently, I've read that renewables have scaled up much faster than expected.

Does anyone know the current story? Can renewables scale up fast enough? Also, does the availability problem (i.e., renewables not being available when the sun/wind are not) prevent them from having a sufficient impact? I could imagine that, even if renewables weren't always available, their use still could reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to mitigate climate change sufficiently.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Renewables still aren't fast enough by themselves, even with the most optimistic projections, according to engineers from Google's big renewables project: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-rea...

Availability is a problem. Right now we're mainly backing up renewables with fossil plants.

Most people really aren't getting what climate scientists are saying these days, which is that we have to cut emissions drastically in the very near future to avoid disaster. If we exceed +2C, or possibly even +1.5C, positive feedbacks will take the planet several degrees further even with no more emissions from us. Right now we're at +0.8C. Every ton of CO2 we emit takes 30 years to have its full effect on the temperature, considering direct effects alone, so we've got another 30 years of warming locked in already.

+4C or so might not sound like much but judging by geological history, the effects would include an enormous reduction in the amount of food we're able to produce.

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donttrustatoms11• 11 years ago

Solar photovoltaic has dropped in cost significantly which is awesome for many applications. The problem for an individual or the grid for renewable intermittents is the consistency: the true cost is the cost not just of generation but generation plus storage (or backup).

Batteries have not had the step change in cost vs deliverable, and the question of effective and not carbon intensive recycling of batteries and most e waste remains. If solar is x cents a kWh, must add cost of storage or fossil backup generation to make sense in both terms of cost as well as carbon.

For instance, the expected cost per kWh of the Powerwall is about 35c/kWh which must be added to cost of generation and the maximum amount of time for delivering that power back at peak discharge is only a few hours. Leaves some development still to do for power in the morning after the night, or even for a cloudy day. Solar thermal has run into similar reliability problems as solar photovoltaic.

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nosuchthing3• 11 years ago

Least we forget: Tidal energy & Geothermal energy...

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dredmorbius4• 11 years ago

Tidal offers little potential at tremendous cost and impacts. Outside a very small number of modest sites, it's not likely to see much application.

Wave power is even worse.

Geothermal from high-flux sites does work and works well, though its limited to a relatively small number of regions worldwide. Many of those have already developed much of the available potential. Iceland, Indinesia, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States most notably. Kenya's Rift Valley is probably the biggest greenfield opportunity with significant impact opportunity (Kenya's existing electrical infrastructure is minuscule). In the US, resources generally exclude both the Yellowstone Caldera and Cascade range.

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sandGorgon• 11 years ago

P.S. I'm not an expert, but this has been in news media in India for a long time.

The reason that China and India are the only countries going after fission is because of a singular element - Thorium. Both India and China have huge reserves of thorium that can be unlocked with molten salt reactors that are unviable anywhere else in the world (including the US, which gave up on this a long time ago[1]). Australia does have large reserves of thorium, but its projected energy needs are dwarfed by India and China's.

China is way ahead than India on this front with more than a billion dollars managed by Jiang Mianheng to conduct research into these new reactors. And which is why India is bending over backwards to sign the India-US Civil Nuclear Energy treaty.

Interestingly, a US company, Thorcon [2], has built a "hackable" MSR - though I dont know if it is any good.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-... [2] http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-to-g...

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Mz• 11 years ago

There is actually a lot we could do in terms of promoting passive solar -- i.e. a lifestyle and design-based approach that uses less energy to get the same results. In a finite world, I really wish passive solar got a lot more attention than it does. There are serious costs involved in burning ever more energy. Passive solar brilliantly sidesteps that inconvenient physics-based fact.

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secstate3• 11 years ago

While I totally agree with you on principal, that's the energy argument equivalent of saying that if there's a coal power plant being built in your backyard you should move rather than complain about it.

There is a huge infrastructure cost involved in upgrading, building new or knocking down and rebuilding non-passive solar structures. Now, giving tax breaks to new construction that is passive would be great, but it wont put a dent in the energy consumption issue.

I say I agree with you, because I think that saying "cheap energy is the future" would have been 100% as valid a statement in 1965 as it is in 2015. Fifty years and a HUGE series of energy improvements later and we're still chasing the cheap energy dream. Guess what? Oil is cheap. And relative to cutting down wood to heat your house with a fireplace (a la most of human history) current solar is absurdly cheap.

What we need, and Musk knows this better than anyone, is better batteries to store energy when we're not using it more efficiently. Batteries will revolutionize the world, and Sam would do well to pay attention to what Musk is doing.

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jjtheblunt2• 11 years ago

The article ignores the elephant in the room: the problems he discusses are all more directly a result of too many humans for the closed system planet. Period.

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soulsurfer• 11 years ago

One important thing that nobody thinks about when discussing nuclear fission/fusion as energy source of the future, is that it is not climate neutral at all. Popular science tends to forget about that. In fact, nearly all of the energy budget on earth comes from the sun. There is natural fission and energy emission on earth, but you can see that as a background constant and the climate system on earth has adapted to it. Fossil energies are just a very large chemical sink for the energy of the sun, and we just burnt it away at once in geological scales. If humanity now starts to deploy nuclear fission or fusion, it will heat the earth even more. Because that energy was basically trapped inside the atomic core, where it didn't play a significant role for the global climate. With more and more atomic energy usage, the energy will finally end as heat somewhere and increase global temperatures even more (not in the way that fossil energies do with emitted greenhouse gases, but still).

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Yes, there will be waste heat and that will add to the Earth's energy budget. But that's a tiny fraction of the heat trapped by excess greenhouse gases.

Deploying a bunch of black solar panels will also increase the Earth's energy budget, by absorbing more sunlight. But that's another insignificant effect.

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dmritard96• 11 years ago

Obnoxiously self important attitude.

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3pt141592• 11 years ago

Probably not. Energy isn't really what is holding the poor back - a lack of stability and security are. If I had to chose one technological improvement to help most people on the planet it would probably be benevolent AI, which could refocus many of our challenges to what is important. Getting people out of poverty and war.

Energy is a tiny component of modern civilization.

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saryant• 11 years ago

Energy is the sole basis of modern civilization.

We are Hydrocarbon Man.

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dredmorbius4• 11 years ago

Por que no los dos?

Yes, abundant energy is behind virtually all past development. What seems to be holding back the next 5 billion, however, is access to what that energy has made available.

Though the question of just how many billions can be provided for ought also be raised.

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3pt141592• 11 years ago

Energy isn't why there are poor people though. The poor have plenty of energy in the form of sun and coal and wind. $50 worth of energy can get you from New York to Toronto. Energy isn't the problem. The problem is security and education.

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sremani• 11 years ago

I am convinced LFTRs are the way to go, they fit in with distributed generation model very well. For what it is worth 21st if it takes Nuclear turn will be clearly fission, actually fission is good enough. But if we were to ascend into space and beyond fusion gives us bigger wings.

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hypertexthero• 11 years ago

Recently watched Cosmos Episode 6 where Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks of photosynthesis and how all our energy problems would be solved if we were able to learn the 'trade secrets' of how plants do it.

This makes a lot of sense.

Can anyone point out current research on this field? I don't seem to hear much about it.

Edit: Just found this after searching #photosynthesis in Twitter: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/20/artificial-photosyn...

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zbravo• 11 years ago

http://solarfuelshub.org/

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shanev• 11 years ago

Janine Benyus talks about this in her TED talk Biomimicry in action: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.

We should look to nature before designing things since it may have already solved the problem for us. Future technology should also be designed to gracefully degrade like nature, otherwise we're just replacing one problem with another.

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jddw16• 11 years ago

There are neat ways to make sunlight into fuel, but it's about what form that energy takes. If it is a fuel that needs to be burned - in the case of sugars from photosynthesis - we already do this by burning wood.

I think Cosmos missed a really important lesson which is that the fuels at our disposal are all a function of time and distance. The longer a fuel source has been building, and the less distance it has to travel to be useful to us, the more valuable it may be. The sun is a result of billions of years of the shape-shifting games between mass and energy, all driven by gravity. The fusion energy produced in the sun then has to travel 93 million miles to us to be useful. The food chain harnesses this energy and accumulates it over time, and after hundreds of millions of years much of that energy has been sequestered into fossil fuels. While there is a tremendous amount of power emanating from the sun, it has to go a long way or accumulate for a long time to be useful to us. Nuclear fuel sources on the other hand bring the billions of years of nucleus building that previous generations of stars did for us to our door step. The parent stars of our sun produced heavy actinides like uranium or thorium, as well as the abundant light elements like deuterium, helium, and boron, and then scattering them across the cosmos along with leftover hydrogen in brilliant novae and supernovae. In our case, many of these elements were in the stardust that formed earth, and are here beneath our feet and above our heads.

Solar, wind, and nuclear will dominate the 22nd century, but we need both, and they do and can play well together. They just need to be treated and respected equally.

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Retric3• 11 years ago

Heavy elements that allow for Fission are products of supernova which are really more a question of minutes than years. With the vast majority being created in under 2 minutes after the reaction starts.

PS: https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

A: Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.

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lutorm2• 11 years ago

Why does it matter how far away the Sun is? It's the amount of energy available to us here that matters. And it doesn't have to accumulate at all, the instantaneous energy flux is plenty high for our needs.

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ocschwar3• 11 years ago

There's a more efficient way to do that.

Use TCP/IP to synchronize the consumption of power with its production. Solar and wind are pretty awesome if you can schedule around them. And most of our power consumption is amenable to it.

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

So turn everything off when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining? That doesn't sound ideal to me.

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abalone5• 11 years ago

terrestrial-based atomic energy... has major advantages when it comes to cost

Are we talking public cost? Because that's all that matters. So far the public cost of nuclear power has been extraordinary, due to accidents and waste.

I understand that some of these startups aim to process existing waste in relatively small distributed reactors but what is the public cost of spreading a bunch of "mini" toxic waste sites around the world that remain hazardous for 100 years, instead of centrally storing it?

Plus I've read that although these mini reactors are not directly producing material that could be used in a dirty bomb, that they could be converted to do so if they fell into the wrong hands. I may be oversimplifying here, but the question again is what is the public risk of distributing atomic fuels and reactors in a manner that makes them much less secure? Would this make them more susceptible to "war hacking" and could this be the mini-reactor equivalent of a nuclear disaster?

Nuclear costs have always been about the long term public costs, not the short term $/kWh.

This is before we even consider the taxpayer cost that's gone into nuclear tech development. I wonder if there will be more public money needed to take this tech to market, even if the test reactors bear fruit.

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mooreds• 11 years ago

Anyone thinking about this needs to watch "Into Eternity", a movie about the Finnish nuclear waste repository: http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/

"In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock - a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous."

It was eye opening.

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ageofwant2• 11 years ago

That's just nonsense. Forth generation breeder reactors burn their own waste to something close to irrelevant. Existing "Waste" should be continually burned and the energy used to sequester C02 from the atmosphere, for example, not uselessly stored in a bunker. There is no reason for that facility to exist.

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abalone5• 11 years ago

On a positive note: While I have major questions/concerns about distributing poorly secured fast reactors and toxic waste sites all over the planet, if this tech really does turn out to be a practical way to reduce the half life of waste...

Why not just turn the waste storage sites into reactor farms?

That would sidestep the problems stemming from decentralization and probably achieve some economies of scale too. Maybe smelt some aluminum with the energy. But even if you essentially threw the energy away, it might be useful as purely a waste cleanup solution.

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snarfy• 11 years ago

You could make the same arguments for the long term public costs of burning fossil fuels.

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abalone5• 11 years ago

Absolutely. But these are questions that must be answered before we can say nuclear has "major advantages when it comes to cost".

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nl4• 11 years ago

I agree with this entirely. I think too many self-declared science-minded people buy into the argument that "nuclear is a good solution" without looking at the numbers or risks. Whilst I understand the costs of fossil fuel use, I think that the distribution of risks associated with nuclear power makes cost estimation a lot more difficult that proponents assume (ie, safe almost always, very rare disasters that cause huge disruption).

However, my understanding is that Thorium-based fission reactors[1] reduce the risks somewhat. I haven't looked into this enough myself to decide either way, but I do have an open mind.

Fusion, OTOH is a totally different story. Maybe, one day we'll get that to work reliably and cheaply. I find it difficult to imagine a more significant change to the world we know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

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gh02t• 11 years ago

To some degree, thorium is snake oil. They have some interesting properties and there are designs proposed that feature passive safety systems, but they remain largely unproven and they aren't the magic that people seem to often claim.

When it comes down to it, power generation is always risky. Reasonable efficiency demands that any power plant tries to maximize energy density, which is fundamentally in conflict with safety. Even solar and wind have risks, though obviously they are smaller than nuclear, coal or natural gas (though wind and solar are a different class of power generation and don't necessarily compete with those).

The main risks in nuclear power are loss of coolant, containment breach or a prompt criticality event. Thorium reactors are vulnerable to all of the above, but of course designs exploit various properties to mitigate the risk. The most famous thorium design is the liquid salt design, which is not as susceptible to loss of coolant flow accidents due to a reactivity feedback mechanism (it's subcritical if the liquid fuel stops being circulated), but it isn't inherently superior to other modern passively safe designs.

The real reason to be interested in thorium is that it has reduced proliferation concern and also thorium is available in places where uranium is rare (India). But it isn't fundamentally safer.

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jddw16• 11 years ago

That's why the reactor can use thorium! There are big benefits. But frankly all advanced reactors are cooled by natural forces so are immune to fuel overheating. The challenge is more that the consequences of accidents are way overestimated. Nobody died from radiation at Fukushima, and no one is going to. The land is not uninhabitable, some bureaucrat who sets limits non-scientifically just says it is. If people actually paid attention to data and not just assume things based on what pop culture or some bureaucrat has falsely led them to believe, people would realize the consequences of catastrophic meltdowns just aren't that bad. They shouldn't happen, but we shouldn't speculate wildly about indirect costs that are generally made up and use that as a basis for their thoughts on nuclear power. Your comments are right on in that people need to investigate nuclear. I find most people who do, find it to be a great option, while it is generally those who are opposed that didn't like it at the onset without knowing much about it and then refused to learn about it. That is why the opponents are the significant minority in the US. So your advice is good, but it's directed at the wrong crowd.

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jddw16• 11 years ago

First, the reactors are consuming the fuel while deployed, but no waste is stored at the sites. It is stored centrally so there are a few centralized sites that hold the waste for a few hundred years. After which you could make things out of the material and use them around your home without issue.

The reactors cannot be deviated for nefarious purposes. And the materials are not less secure. The materials are being consumed by the reactor, and they are not dangerous as they are. In fact these reactors could destroy weapons grade material that is slated to be destroyed for fractions of the cost of programs the US is pursuing. Plus the reactors are secured when deployed. They are also buried and completely cooled by natural forces so they always stay cool. No fuel overheating.

The reactors cannot be hacked, and if a bad actor commandeered one, all they could do is turn it off safely. Even if they tried to make it hotter it would just turn off and cool down. There just isn't enough fuel in the core to do anything else.

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abalone5• 11 years ago

To store it centrally, wouldn't you be transporting nuclear waste that is still toxic for hundreds of years all over the place? What if there's an accident during transportation? More reactors = more transportation = more nuclear waste accidents on the highway. Right?

The reactors cannot be deviated for nefarious purposes.

I'm no nuclear expert but a quick search on Thorium reactors brings up some controversy over its potential for weaponization:

Thorium, when being irradiated for use in reactors, will make uranium-232, which is very dangerous due to the gamma rays it emits. This irradiation process may be able to be altered slightly by removing protactinium-233. The irradiation would then make uranium-233 in lieu of uranium-232, which can be used in nuclear weapons to make thorium into a dual purpose fuel. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Po... which cites http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the... which cites Nature

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chinathrow10• 11 years ago

All your statements seems to good to be true. Can you back them up with some facts?

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sunstone• 11 years ago

Apparently the crust of the earth is floating on huge nuclear energy generator. I guess it's a materials problem to tap into that?

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kolbe2• 11 years ago

By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects.

What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project. What in the world is this tiny startup doing with a $5mm grant that is so easy and cheap that could possibly lead to that kind of breakthrough in fusion energy?

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if_by_whisky• 11 years ago

Probably nothing? But since they're funded anyway, it's pretty cheap to cross our fingers.

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ekianjo2• 11 years ago

at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project.

How is that a measure of doing something meaningful ? Take EADS making the Ariane rocket launchers, they have been spending billions and billions of Euros making rockets for years, yet they have no project like SpaceX and yet they will be rapidly obsolete once SpaceX works as expected.

It's not about the amount you spend, it's about experimenting in new areas not explored yet. Now, about fusion, I have no idea what they plan to do, but in principle there's always new things worth trying (even if they end up failing).

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TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

It's a measure that there's been a lot of effort going on in the past decades, so it's unlikely that a random startup with minuscule budget will suddenly crack it. SpaceX vs. Airbus Group is a bad example because Elon is only dropping costs of what is a proven technology (rockets). We don't have a break-even fusion reactor yet.

But to be honest, I think we need to encourage more effort, so I applaud the project anyway, and keep my fingers crossed.

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rtfeldman• 11 years ago

For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in retrospect after every major breakthrough.

YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism is not the best default.

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kolbe2• 11 years ago

I am literally asking "what?" Because I don't know of any common idea that is even in the realm of this. I'm hoping someone knew something about the process they're pursuing that is not commonly known among cargo cult physicists like myself.

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jeffreyrogers• 11 years ago

The reason those kinds of comments look ridiculous is because no one bothered to look up the thousands of other comments that people posted about similarly ridiculous sounding things that never panned out.

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nl4• 11 years ago

Helion is investigating a different shaped magnetic containment field[0], and $5m is enough to get to them to the next prototype.

They have had previous success[1], and the torus-shaped magnetic containment fields used in most fusion research is known to be a problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversed_field_pinch

[1] http://www.alternative-energy-action-now.com/helion-energy.h... (yes, that domain sounds terrible, but the info seems ok)

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Helion isn't the only small fusion startup. Others include General Fusion, which has investment from Jeff Bezos, and Tri-Alpha, which has over $150 million, including from Paul Allen and Goldman Sachs.

Fusion advanced exponentially from 1970 to 2000, at about the pace of Moore's Law. Then governments decided to put most of their fusion money into a giant, poorly-managed construction project in France. But we're not that far off, and in those seven decades we've learned a lot about plasma physics, gotten much better computers for plasma simulations, and developed all sorts of other enabling technologies.

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erikpukinskis• 11 years ago

You're describing it like its the Yankees vs the Cleveland Indians, but it's not pure competition like that. The $5m startup is building on top of the $100b effort. Lots of science has been published, materials have been developed, dead ends have been discovered. The field of engineers gained much experience in those precious efforts. That doesn't decrease the probability of success, it increases it.

Sometimes it's not the size of the investment that dictates success. Often you need a good reset, with a smaller, better aligned team.

Everything that ever happened spent a long time not happening first. One must be super careful extrapolating inactivity.

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FiatLuxDave• 11 years ago

Former fusion startup founder here (Fiat Lux Research, funded by DFJ 1995-2000).

I couldn't agree more with Sam about the importance of energy for our civilization. Kudos to him for putting his efforts towards important stuff.

I have mixed, but mostly positive feelings about venture capital and energy startups. The fact is, it's a tough space. Large capital requirements, prototyping cycles often measured in years, and a low success rate. Everyone is still waiting for the energy unicorn to put Google, Uber, Yahoo, et al. to shame. And energy startups don't benefit from many of the things in SV that infotech startups do, such as ecosystem synergies and being co-located with all the new cool stuff in your industry. This is especially true with regards to one of SV's great strengths, the freedom to fail.

Where SV shines is in the short times from idea to testing. In most of the nuclear energy industry, going from idea to tested prototype can take decades. I think we all know the importance of short debugging and feedback cycles. Hirsch harped on this a few years back, and it's still a good point. Look at ITER, which were were talking about back in 1995. ITERative, it is not.

Some observations:

1) The teams and funding are a bit larger than they used to be. This is probably a good thing. The design turnaround time is a bit better, but not by much though. It's necessary to tweak a design once you have built it to learn from it and see what its ultimate performance can be. But it's all-too-easy to spend a year or two doing that. Do that a few times and then you're out (of money, time, your mind, what-have-you).

2) Location. There is no advantage to locating an energy company in SV except for proximity to funding (and Stanford, I suppose). We located by the NHMFL in Tallahassee. It's cheaper, and the magnet guys would moonlight for us. However, working with Tim over 3 time-zones had its challenges. I don't think we got the benefit of having a great VC as much as some of his other portfolio companies did (no complaints about him, just the distance). Some things are just hard to explain over the phone. But SV still isn't the right place. I think that there is a big opportunity for VCs to improve how they provide the value-added stuff that they do (beyond providing money) remotely, and energy is the space that needs it most. I don't know the VC job well enough to provide good suggestions, I just know there is an unmet need here.

3) Because the failure rate for startups is so high, it's important to have a decent failure path for the people involved. For software devs, SV jobs often provide a soft landing. Energy guys don't have that easily transferable skill set. So, fusion largely consists of old hands who are willing to spend 20 years ramming a single design through, and a bunch of young redshirts who are sure that they can beat the odds. When every design failure becomes a career failure, people aren't incentived to radically iterate designs quickly. Luckily for me, I learned radiation measurement and protection on-the-job (hey we have neutrons! How many neutrons? Woo hoo! Wait, oh shit!) so that skill transfered over into medical physics quite readily. But imagine what SV would look like if almost every software startup founder who failed once had left the software industry.

I wish good luck to Helion, UPower, and all the other teams fighting the good fight.

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dkirtley• 11 years ago

Thanks FiatLuxDave, I think you are exactly right. Prototype/design cycle time is a huge issue with fusion, fission, and many other energy technologies. No matter how good your idea may be, you have to be able to build, test, iterate, prove, and commercialize it quickly (and ideally, cheaply, but I would argue quickly is even more important). In energy, the physics make everything work better at large scale so it is easy to fall into the "build it bigger" trap.

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TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

The big government projects, like NIF and ITER, unfortunately have the feel of peacetime big government projects.

Not sure what 'sama means by this, but I guess it's what I feel - government projects tend to go slow unless there's an actual, real security reason for them to go faster, in which case - like with Manhattan project - you get crazy amount of productivity and progress.

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gordjw• 11 years ago

A focus on excessive procedure at the expense of real progress, unless there's a pressing need (like war), would be my guess too.

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legulere• 11 years ago

One problem I see with nuclear power is that it goes the very inefficient way over heat. The prices in the building industry are rising so much that it already is unprofitable to build nuclear power in the west today. (When Hinkley Point C will start producing energy it will have a higher feed in tariff than photovoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)

I don't see any future for nuclear if it doesn't fundamentally change the way it harvests the energy and when it solves the nuclear waste problem economically

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DennisP21• 11 years ago

Then you'll like Helion, which produces high-energy charged particles and doesn't use a thermal cycle.

Neither of the ycombinator companies produces long-term waste.

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codeshaman• 11 years ago

A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem.

It's worth pointing out that the problems enumerated above are partly the consequence of energy becoming cheap and available during the last century (coal, oil, etc) not lack of it. But the main reasons are the dominating philosophical and ethical standards of humanity during the energy boom. Cheap energy + wrong philosophy = bad application of energy = problems enumerated above.

So if you want to tackle any of those problems, you have to work on both variables in that equation, just increasing the availability of energy without raising awareness of how to apply it, will lead to unsatisfactory results in the long term.

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sebastianconcpt2• 11 years ago

Indeed. Technology is a multiplier. If we as humans keep repeating some errors we'll shoot our foot (with bigger guns)

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stillsut• 11 years ago

The killer app for these modular reactors is to scale with the same footprint: If you have the infrastructure to house one of these boxcars, for the town's first factory, why not 10 boxcars on the same site once the town grows in population.

That's what you can't do with solar - with solar you already have a big footprint to power that first factory, and your footprint increases proportional to power use. 21 century calls for scaling roughly 20x = 2x (population growth) * 10x (rise in developing worlds livining standards). I don't want 20x solar footprint.

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dharma1• 11 years ago

There already is a very well working fusion reactor - the sun - and it's free. We just need better battery tech.

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MrBunny• 11 years ago

Why are we so focused on having only one solution for energy? I would understand the cost would decrease when you put all your eggs in one basket but can we really find one type of energy source that has no disadvantages? Wouldn't we be better served with diversity of energy production (more than we have now)?

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natch• 11 years ago

I'm sorry I missed this earlier because I wish Sam could see this comment.

Nuclear energy is inherently centralized and difficult to decentralize. This creates all sorts of political and economic dynamics, some of which you (Sam, and YC) may benefit from, but some of which may be damaging to societies in various ways (think corruption, control, monopolies, etc.)

Obviously this isn't necessarily true for all possible as-yet-unimagined implementations of nuclear technology. But it's something to think about when comparing energy technologies.

Solar, on the other hand, while not necessarily inherently decentralized, is extremely decentralizable, leading to very different dynamics.

I'm not saying Nuclear is bad. I'm just saying this stuff should be factored in.

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Helius• 11 years ago

" It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement." Oh, Come on! With similar government subsidies and Mandates, Donkey wheels could deliver a similar power density. With such subsidies and mandates, donkey wheels would double, double and redouble again, and one could therefore project donkey wheels to exceed all power generation.

   Ironically enough, a donkey is 1/3 horsepower, which is 748 watts of power.  A donkey at about 250 watts is therefore is roughly equivalent to a solar panel the same size.  The donkey has the advantage over solar, in that it's dispatchable, while solar is not. 

 I wish we considered donkeys instead of Solar as a replacement for fossil fules, since the shortcomings might be more obvious to the innumerate.

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