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CellBioGuy comments on Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's also argued that, fossil fuels being literally the most energy-dense per unit-of-infrastructure-applied energy source in the solar system, our societal complexity is likely to decrease in the future as the hard-to-get ones are themselves drawn down and there becomes no way to keep drawing upon the sheer levels of energy per capita we have become accustomed to over the last 200 years in the wealthier nations.
I recommend Tom Murphy's "do the math" blog for a frank discussion of energy densities and quantities and the inability of growth or likely even stasis in energy use to continue.
Huh? At which level of technology? And WTF is a "unit of infrastructure"?
At any level of technology. Where else in the solar system do you have that much highly reduced matter next to so much highly oxidized gas with a thin layer of rock between them, and something as simple as a drill and a furnace needed to extract the coal energy and a little fractional distillation to get at the oil? Everything else is more difficult.
"Unit of infrastructure" ~= amount of energy and effort and capital needed to get at it.
I am not going to believe that. Both because at the caveman level the fossil fuels are pretty much useless and because your imagination with respect to future technology seems severely limited.
This entirely depends on the technology level. And how are you applying concepts like "energy-dense" to, say, sunlight or geothermal?
Energy density refers only to fuels and energy storage media and doesn't have much to do with grid-scale investment, although it's important for things like transport where you have to move your power source along with you. (Short version: hydrocarbons beat everything else, although batteries are getting better.)
The usual framework for comparing things like solar or geothermal energy to fossil fuels, from a development or policy standpoint, is energy return on investment. (Short version: coal beats everything but hydroelectric, but nuclear and renewables are competitive with oil and gas. Also, ethanol and biodiesel suck.)
Does the argument take nuclear energy into account?
Yes. No nuclear power has ever been built without massive subsidies and insurance-guarantees, it only works right now because we externalize the costs of dealing with its waste to the future rather than actually paying the costs, and nuclear power is fantastically more complicated and prone to drastically expensive failures than simply burning things. Concentrating the fuel to the point that it is useful is an incredible chore as well.
Are you claiming nuclear energy has higher cost in $ per joule than burning fossil fuels? If so, can you back it up? If true, how do you know it's going to remain true in the future? What happens when we reach a level of technology in which energy production is completely automatic? What about nuclear fusion?
The only reason the costs per joule in dollars are near each other (true factor of about 1.5-3x the cost in dollars between nuclear and the coal everyone knows and loves, according tothe EIA ) is that a lot of the true costs of nuclear power plants are not borne in dollars and are instead externalized. Fifty years of waste have been for the most part completely un-dealt-with in the hopes that something will come along, nuclear power plants are almost literally uninsurable to sufficient levels in the market such that governments have to guarantee them substandard insurance by legal fiat (this is also true of very large hydroelectric dams which are probably also a very bad idea), and power plants that were supposed to be retired long ago have had their lifetimes extended threefold by regulators who don't want to incur the cost of their planned replacements and refurbishments. And the whole thing was rushed forwards in the mid 20th century as a byproduct of the national desire for nuclear weapons, and remarkably little growth has occurred since that driver decreased.
How do you know it won't? More to the point, it's not a question of technology. It's a question of how much you have to concentrate rare radionuclides in expensive gas centrifuge equipment and how heavily you have to contain the reaction and how long you have to isolate the resultant stuff. Technology does not trump thermodynamics and complexity and fragility.
What does this mean and why is it relevant?
Near as I can tell, all the research on it so far has shown that it is indeed possible without star-style gravitational confinement, very difficult, and completely uneconomic. We have all the materials you need to fuse readily available, if it were easy to do it economically we would've after fifty years of work. It should be noted that the average energy output of the sun itself is about 1/3 of a watt per cubic meter - fusion is trying to produce conditions and reactions of the sort you don't even see in the largest stars in the universe. (And don't start talking about helium three on the moon, I point to a throwawy line in http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/stranded-resources/ regarding that pipe dream.)
Is it possible I'm wrong? Yes. But literally any future other than a future of rather less (But not zero!) concentrated energy available to humanity requires some deus ex machina to swoop down upon us. Should we really bank on that?
That an quite unfair comparison. The way we deal with coal waste kills ten of thousands or even hundreds of thousands per year. The way we deal with coal waste might cost more money but doesn't kill as many people. Simply dumping all nuclear waste in the ocean would probably a more safe way of disposing of waste than the way we deal with coal.
Even tunnel that were created in coal mining can collapse and do damage.
Coal isn't a picnic either and I have my own rants about it too. But dealing with coal waste (safely or unsafely) is a question of trucking it, not running complicated chemical and isotopic purification or locking it up so thoroughly.
The obvious explanation of the timing is Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Do you believe that Japan and Germany built nuclear plants for the purpose of eventually building weapons?
Japan and Germany are interesting cases, both for the same reason: rich nations with little or declining fossil fuels. Germany's buildout of nuclear power corresponds to the timing of the beginning of the decline in the production of high-quality coal in that country, and Japan has no fossil fuels of its own so nuclear was far more competitive. With plentiful fossil fuels around nobody does nuclear since it's harder, though even the nations which use nuclear invariably have quite a lot of fossil fuel use which I would wager 'subsidizes' it.
What do you mean by "competitive"? Shipping coal adds very little to its cost, so the economic calculation is hardly different for countries that have it and countries that don't. Perhaps national governments view domestic industries very differently than economists, but you haven't said how to take this into account. I think Japan explicitly invoked "self-sufficiency" in its decision, perhaps meaning concerns about wartime.
What do you mean by "un-dealt-with"? What cost do you think it will incur in the future?
Interesting point. However the correct cost of insurance has to take into account probability of various failures and I see no such probability assessment in the article. Also, what about Thorium power?
Are you sure the problem is with lack of desire for nuclear weapons rather than with anti-nuclear paranoia?
But the ratio between the physical requisites and dollars (i.e. labor) depends on technology very strongly.
At some point we are likely to have sufficient automation so that little human labor is required for most things, including energy production. In these condition, energy (and most other things) will cost much less than today, with fossil fuels or without them.
Obviously it's not easy, but it doesn't mean it's impossible. We have ITER.
So what? We already can create temperatures lower than anywhere in the universe and nuclear species that don't exist anywhere in the universe, why not better fusion conditions?
I don't think scientific and technological progress is "deus ex machina". Given historical record and known physical limits, it is expected there is a lot of progress still waiting to happen. Imagine the energy per capita available to a civilization that builds Dyson spheres.
Mostly sitting around full of transuranic elements with half-lives in the tens of thousands of years in facilities that were meant to be quite temporary, without much in the way of functional or economically competitive breeder reactors even where they have been tried. They will eventually incur one of three costs: reprocessing, geological storage, or release.
Near as I can tell it's a way to boost the amount of fertile fuel for breeder reactors by about a factor of five. The technology is similar, with advantages and disadvantages. No matter what you have to run refined material through very complicated and capital-intensive and energy-intensive things, keep things contained, and dispose of waste.
These fuel cycles do work and they do produce energy, and if done right some technologies of the suite promoted for the purpose might reduce the waste quite a bit. My gripe is the fact that they work well (not to mention safely) in stable civilizations with lots of capital and concentrated wealth to put towards it that isn't being applied to more basic infrastructure. Given the vagaries of history moving wealth and power around and the massive cheap energy and wealth subsidy that comes from fossil fuels that will go away, I'm not convinced that they can be run for long periods of time at a level that can compensate for the torrents of cheap wealth you get from burning the black rocks. I wouldn't be terrilbly surprised at some nuclear power plants being around in a few thousand years, but I would be surprised at them providing anything like as much per capita as fossil fuels do now due to the complexity and wealth concentration issues.
I don't understand how automation changes the energy, material, or complexity costs (think supply chains or fuel flows) associated with a technology.
Yes, and fusion research is fascinating. But the fact that while understanding of nuclear physics has been pretty well constant for decades more and more money goes into more and more expensive facilities, when looking back at the history of fission power (which does work, I'm not disputing that, just the cornucopian claims about it) pretty much as soon as it was understood it was taken advantage of, suggests to me that the sheer difficulty of it is such that the sort of technology that makes it possible is likely to be completely uneconomic. Technology is not an all-powerful force, it just is an accumulation of knowledge about how to make things that are possible happen. Some things will turn out to not be possible, or require too much effort to be worthwhile.
Except that when we look out into the universe we don't see Dyson spheres, or evidence of replicators from elsewhere having passed our way, and we would be able to see Dyson spheres from quite a distance. It doesn't happen. I've never understood why so few people look at the Fermi paradox and consider the possibility that it doesn't mean we are a special snowflake or that we are doomed, but instead that intelligent life just doesn't have a grand destiny among the stars and never has.
How much does it cost to maintain the current facilities? By what factor does it make nuclear energy more expensive?
The most important component of economic cost is human labor. We have plenty of energy and materials in the universe left. "complexity" is not a limited resource so I don't understand what "complexity cost" is.
Yes, but I think that current technology is very far from the limits of the possible.
Sure, because we are the only intelligent life the universe. What's so surprising about that?
Solar energy used to halve in price every 7 years. in the last 7 it more than halved. Battery performance also has a nice exponential improvement curve.
Various forms of solar are probably one of our better bets, though I'm not convinced that large chunks of the recent gains don't come from massive effective subsidy from China and eventually the cost of the materials themselves could become insignificant compared to complexity and maintenance and end-of-life-recycling cost which are not likely to decrease much. Though battery performance... I haven't seen anything about it that even looks vaguely exponential.
I get the impression that most of the "recent gains" consist of forcing the utilities to take it and either subsidizing the price difference or passing the cost on to the customer. At least, the parties involved act like they believe this while attempting to deny it.
See http://qr.ae/rbMLh for the batteries.
To spell out a few things: the price of lithium batteries is decreasing. Since they are the most energy-dense batteries, this is great for the cost of electric cars, and maybe for the introduction of new portable devices, but it isn't relevant to much else. In particular, performance is not improving. Moreover, there is no reason to expect them to ever be cheaper than existing less dense batteries. In particular, there is no reason to expect that the cost of storing electricity in batteries will ever be cheaper than the cost of the electricity, so they are worthless for smoothing out erratic sources of power, like wind.
But even if some of the cost is subsidies and the real speed is only halving in price every 7 years that's still good enough.
I don't see why there shouldn't be any way to optimise end of life costs and maintenance.