Egregoros

Was a reply to fluffy, who seems to think nuclear energy just has no future, first principles be damned.

I can't imagine a future 100 years from now where nuclear energy isn't cheap and ubiquitous - unless it's some post-apocalyptic dystopia, or else some world government tyranny where everyone is forbidden from touching the magic rocks.

IMO once the US empire finally collapses and the IAEA is defanged, sketchy Alibaba reactors will start popping up all over the world - and THEN finally we'll start to see some progress on safer cheaper designs.

> I rather hope a collapse isn't necessary

Picrel doesn't continue forever. It always ends the same way, as in Athens and in Rome, the same in the US.

> armed to the teeth with hydrogen bombs

Will be like the USSR collapse, highly unlikely anything serious happens b/c oligarchs who control the bombs have families too, and they plan on living past the end of the empire. If you go Rambo on the world - you might have a lot of fun, but when you're done, you're gonna be hunted down and exterminated.

> humanity overcome scarcity

🎵 IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE, LIVING LIFE IN PEACE... 🎶

It'd be nice if countries didn't have a fixed lifespan, but they don't because they deteriorate.

From the time of its founding, a country only ever gets more laws, more taxes, more subsidies, more corruption, and more debt until eventually it's so stupid and broken that it cannot support it's own weight - and then it collapses.

It's always been like that, and if you can figure out how to prevent it, then you've made the greatest discovery of at least the past 2 millennia.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook @p
>you're saying safety of nuclear power is intractable
caleb i am not making such an assertion. in my post, in the brief part where i did mention safety issues, that was mentioned to illustrate the straw man nanook (unknowningly?) constructed.

i wrote that the safety of nuclear power is contested, this is a very weak assertion, we need only find some nontrivial contest. but even if you ill like this, i wrote that part ("which, as far... contested?") as dramatic flair anyway, the post as written loses nothing if you omit that sentence.


ultimately the issue with nuclear power is that it several order of magnitude more expensive to construct, unless you are sitting on huge piles of cash you will be financing it, this means you will raise power costs to pay off the loan, the prices per watt hour then end up flat or higher, it is just a wealth transfer from the state to bankers.

if you have a lot of cash, you could build them and it would be a good idea, at least compared to just letting the cash sit around, but nation states are not apple or mihoyo, come to think of it didn't mihoyo build a fusion reactor? that was quite entertaining, i wonder about the details there.

@cjd @p @fluffy @bajax @tard The big expense of nuclear plants today resolves around things like the need for a containment building, not required for a molten salt reactor, plumbing has to withstand 200-300 atmosphere, emergency water dump systems for when the plumbing fails and all the water flashes to steam, emergency backup generators that have to keep cooling going if commercial AC fails.

Molten salt reactors by contrast don't require containment domes because they have no explosive failure modes, don't require active cooling in the event of a failure because first off they are self-limiting because the salt expands as it heats and reduces reaction rates, and that by itself is generally enough, but if it gets too hot anyway, a freeze plug melts and drains the molten fuel into a much larger tank that spreads it out too much for the reaction to continue and because fission products are continuously removed, there is no residual heat from fission products.

There is no water so no hydrogen explosions.

The only real failure mode is get a leak in the plumbing, and the liquid fuel/salt mixture leaks out and solidifies on the floor. And because fission products are continuously removed it is not so hot that it can't be handled so is scooped up thrown back in the reactor, plumbing fixed and life goes on.

These inherent safety features make the insane active features necessary in boiling water reactors unnecessary and with them their expense.

As I said, there are engineering problems which, if solved, will push the cost even lower.

You can't get that much cheaper than coal without running into things like "turbines and generator heads cost money".

But India is building $1700/KW nuclear plants already, even with dumb PWR, so that's very encouraging. If China commodifies molten salt, they might get it under 1000/KW, which is really good.

But even now, nuclear fuel costs are so low that if you just built one nuclear plant per year, eventually power would <1 cent per KWh.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook @p
those indian numbers are certainly surprising, i will make a note to check what is going on. there certainly exists a possibility that india of all places has innovated and thrown out the paradigm. it deserves a closer look.

>Building nuclear plants is not that expensive, $2000 per KW is competitive with coal plants.
when you write 2000 per kw, this is neither the cost[1] , nor is this competitive with coal [2].

>engineering problems
indeed, i hope that things do change, it would be great for everyone to have cheap power.

1. on your own chart, ending in 1990, the most recent number is ~8000.
2. coal is ~800 per kw

@cjd @bajax @nanook @p @tard
i will also remark, since i made a coffee and thought about it, that the 800 is in modern dollars, that chart is in 2010 dollars, this 800 for coal should be about 500 in 2010 dollars, meanwhile the chart goes from about 1000 to 8000 in 25 years, it has been 35 years since 1990, so plotting a linear trend in the chart, we would (naively) expect the cost to be about 18000. this is about 35x coal,

of course this is just the most naive way to compare it, but i felt that it was necessary to at least make a naive comparison

Yesterday I went to ChatGPT to try to get down to the first-principles cost of a reactor, and as a result I've moderated my opinion somewhat.

My original position was that nuclear is *cheap* because getting rocks to get hot is easy, if you're permitted to buy said rocks. And the only reason it's not ubiquitous is regulation and bullshit.

GPT's claim is that there are two true first principles problems:
1. Neutron economy as cores are scaled down.
2. Moving heat away from the core as cores are scaled up.

This makes enough sense to me, and I will reform my position the the following: "Nuclear should be relatively cheap, but there are engineering problems to solve, and they are not solved because of regulation and bullshit".

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> 800 for coal

Okay I'll take your number, 2000 was GPT's estimate and it sounds like you know this for a fact.

> meanwhile the chart goes from about 1000 to 8000 in 25 years

The point is that nothing's supposed to get MORE expensive with time, so it means the US got lost in the weeds of over-regulation and loss of will.

There's another chart I can't find with reactors from different countries, and you see that China today is pushing the bottom of those 1970s numbers. Picrel is the same story.

Now if $1700 is the cost of a PWR, and China has a molten salt thorium breeder (they have an experimental one and plans to build a 100MW small production unit), then we should expect that getting rid of the whole pressure vessel and all of the crap that comes with it will at least halve the cost, if not quarter it. So there should come a time when coal becomes uncompetitive - and then at that point, economies of scale will drive the cost down probably another 50% again and coal will be very dead.

@cjd @bajax @tard @nanook @p
>The point is that nothing's supposed to get MORE expensive with time, so it means the US got lost in the weeds of over-regulation and loss of will.
i am not sure this is a true statement. plenty of things get more expensive in time. furthermore, putting that aside, this alone would not conclude over-regulation. in fact it is neither necessary nor sufficient to conclude it.

>"Nuclear should be relatively cheap, but there are engineering problems to solve, and they are not solved
certainly nobody could disagree. that was the original promise of nuclear power. cheap, ubiquitous, reliable. the basic thesis is solid, but the details are muddled. actually, long term, my hypothesis is that this sort of atomic power will dominate: we just need to innovate.
>they are not solved because of regulation and bullshit".
do you have a "smoking gun" for this?

>China today is pushing the bottom of those 1970s numbers
can you pro-rate that to us construction costs? that is, take the cost of an identical building in china and usa, and look at the ratio. whatever is easily available, airport, high rise, whatever, just the same building. i think that chinese construction in general is cheaper, but tis way we can estimate its equivalent, i am interested in this pro-rated cost.

> my hypothesis is that this sort of atomic power will dominate

My original point was that power prices will come down by an order of magnitude (i.e. 10-20 cents -> 1-2 cents), and then after this, petroleum will be more uncompetitive vs. electric transportation.

If nuclear power dominates in the future as you say, and power demand (datacenters) continues on it's current trajectory, then I don't think this is unrealistic at all.

Nuclear is really interesting because its ongoing operating cost is so low that over time, it can eventually push prices into a whole other dimension. But demand growth is key because without it, you can't build supply or else you get a glut and then you're unable to pay for any of your reactors.

> i think that chinese construction in general is cheaper

It's an interesting question. I suspect some things are reasonably competitive (e.g. a car factory in Alabama) but some things are essentially impossible to do in the US - the California high speed rail project comes to mind. But that's kind of my point: If the US can't build nuclear reactors, this doesn't mean nuclear reactors are actually that expensive.

I don't think carbon capture will *ever* be efficient.

Agriculture and trucking are actually not the worst application for batteries, because nobody cares how heavy their tractor gets, it's just the cost.

AFAIK a big combine holds about 1000 liters of fuel and that lasts a day (unless it's a long day). 10Kw/liter, 30% accessible, so basically you need 3MWh of storage. So storage cost needs to get to like $10/Kwh to be realistic.

IMO it's possible we get there, possible we don't.

Bigger issue is aviation because in the sky, you need the energy storage to be lightweight too.

But oil isn't going away, it's just not going to be competitive for a ton of applications.

@shironeko @cjd @bajax @tard @p @fluffy You do not understand the issue at all.

We depend upon modern agriculture that involves a lot of large machines burning a lot of diesel to grow enough food to sustain a world population of 8 billion.

Subsistence farming with oxen and plow simply will not yield enough product from the land to sustain this population.

We depend upon diesel fuel to transport that food by truck, and in the US also by train.

The nature of extractive technology is to start with the most readily available and higher quality ores, use them, and then work towards the lesser quality harder to get at ores.

At some point the amount of energy in exceeds the amount of energy returned and at that point economic viability is zero. As we approach that point fuel, and thus food, becomes increasingly expensive and as it does people start to start from low economic strata on up.

We are at the point where we have exhausted all surface reservoirs and most deep reservoirs, we are now largely dependent upon tar sands and shale oil. Neither of these is rich in the distillates that are necessary to run our farm equipment and both are not far from exhaustion.

When they exhaust there is really nothing left to fall back on except nuclear energy and syn fuels, wood gas won't run your tractor.

Up to the pre-credit-roll, that was a very good video. The only thing I think I'd disagree with is the part about Starlink being inefficient.

The last part he seems to imply that the partisan political situation has an easy answer "Just Vote Democrat". You don't generally get *angry* at a problem that's really hard to solve, you get angry at an easy problem that doesn't get solved anyway. The problem is that stealing from the public treasury is a bipartisan activity, so it's actually a hard problem.

And a lot of these really good ideas to build infrastructure that everyone will benefit from forever, are not really possible because all of the capital gets stolen before the project can be completed.

@bajax @tard @p @fluffy I think solid state batteries have much promise but there is the issue of adequate ion mobility in a solid material. That said what I've read about these batteries is more rumor than actual test data so I haven't a lot of concrete data upon which to base an opinion but I will note that most commercial solid state batteries aren't completely solid and are some sort of hybrid designs because of the ion mobility in solids issue. That said, I am hoping something positive develops, I personally would love an electric car as a primary city driver since the majority of my trips are under 100 miles in a day, but lithium fires dissuades me. But as grid storage I don't think conventional batteries will ever scale sufficiently. Redox flow batteries I believe are about the only chemical battery technology with enough scalability to be useful at grid levels, but thus far they rely on vanadium and vanadium although about as abundant in the Earth's crust as copper, rarely exists in concentrated form and thus is expensive to extract and most comes from China, Russia, South Africa.