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Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says

(arstechnica.com)
425 points nixass | 22 comments | 02 Apr 21 18:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.042s | source | bottom
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philipkglass ◴[02 Apr 21 18:07 UTC] No.26674051[source]▶
I hope that the federal government can provide incentives to keep reactors running that would otherwise close prematurely.

5.1 gigawatts of American reactors are expected to retire this year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46436

It's a shame that the US is retiring working reactors while still burning fossil fuels for electricity. Reactors are far safer and cleaner than fossil electric generation. It's mostly the low price of natural gas that is driving these early retirements. Low gas prices have also retired a lot of coal usage -- which is good! -- but we'd make more climate progress if those low prices didn't also threaten nuclear generation.

Some states like New York already provided incentives to keep reactors running for climate reasons:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41534

Federal policy could be more comprehensive.

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DennisAleynikov ◴[02 Apr 21 18:20 UTC] No.26674195[source]▶
if we are to come out the other side of this climate emergency we must keep our reactors online. the purity testing of what do we do with the waste is not helpful critique when we are still reliant on coal
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snuxoll ◴[02 Apr 21 18:28 UTC] No.26674304[source]▶
The ignorance of the externalities of fossil fuels and a bipolar hyper focus on those of nuclear energy is mind boggling at this point.

I’m all for developing renewables, but we cannot abandon the one good technology we have for generating massive amounts of energy our base loads demand without polluting our air.

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SCHiM ◴[02 Apr 21 18:47 UTC] No.26674563[source]▶
Indeed that is the strangest thing. By _any_ metric coal is far worse. Even the metric "amount of radioactive material that ended up in the atmosphere per watt of energy." (Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive material, that gets spread when burned).

The fact of the matter is, that we can dump all our waste on a couple of football fields worth of space. Or even better: store it in a cave somewhere deep and dark and away from rivers.

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Multicomp ◴[02 Apr 21 19:01 UTC] No.26674746[source]▶
This is probably one of those hacker news comments where it sounds good for 1 second then when you stop to think about it it falls apart, bu here goes.

throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart with new rocket.

financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000 years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.

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1. yellowapple ◴[02 Apr 21 19:17 UTC] No.26674925[source]▶
Another crazy idea would be to put nuclear reactors themselves in orbit, and then beam the energy down to the surface. Space is already pretty thoroughly radioactive, so a meltdown goes from "ZOMG WE'RE GONNA GROW EXTRA ARMS AND DIE OF CANCER" to "meh, just another Tuesday".
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2. cpeterso ◴[02 Apr 21 19:46 UTC] No.26675218[source]▶
But then you have nuclear-powered space lasers, which will scare people.
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3. ed25519FUUU ◴[02 Apr 21 19:52 UTC] No.26675261[source]▶
How does one efficiency “beam down” gigawatts of energy? Or at all?
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4. DennisP ◴[02 Apr 21 19:52 UTC] No.26675262[source]▶
I support nuclear but if you're beaming power from space, it might as well be from solar panels. In geostationary orbit you have power 24/7, with 5X more sunlight per day than panels on the ground. The only time your satellite goes into shadow is for a few minutes per day around the equinoxes, half an hour max. Capacity factor is still over 99%.
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5. cthalupa ◴[02 Apr 21 19:59 UTC] No.26675314[source]▶
Light. Focusing mirrors or lasers.

But as others have pointed out, why would you bother with building space based nuclear plants and then converting that energy to light when you could just use the sun?

6. Keyframe ◴[02 Apr 21 19:59 UTC] No.26675322[source]▶
We already have that nuclear reactor beaming energy down for us to collect.
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7. 8note ◴[02 Apr 21 20:02 UTC] No.26675346[source]▶
With geostationary? Don't they track a location on the earth? Is the satellite not in the earth's shadow at night?
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8. bserge ◴[02 Apr 21 20:06 UTC] No.26675390[source]▶
Interesting idea, but my next thought was "how are you going to cool that thing?!" :D
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9. bserge ◴[02 Apr 21 20:07 UTC] No.26675400[source]▶
Basically Gundam 00 haha. I was young when it aired, but it left a long lasting impression of what the future of space exploration might be like. Space elevators and massive solar arrays around the planet.
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10. mikepurvis ◴[02 Apr 21 20:09 UTC] No.26675413{3}[source]▶
Geostationary is super far out— you're effectively in constant sun:

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

Except, as the parent noted, very briefly during the equinoxes.

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11. stjohnswarts ◴[02 Apr 21 20:15 UTC] No.26675463[source]▶
It's too easy for space junk to destroy it, also a single point of failure or attack. It's a terrible solution as long as we remain a warlike species.
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12. kelnos ◴[02 Apr 21 20:24 UTC] No.26675570[source]▶
Not sure in which direction you're joking, but heat dissipation can actually be a difficult problem in space, at least as close to the sun as Earth is, while outside Earth's atmosphere. For example: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a...
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13. bserge ◴[02 Apr 21 20:29 UTC] No.26675621{3}[source]▶
That's exactly what I meant. Running a nuclear fission reactor (along with the high power beams to Earth) in vacuum might prove... problematic.
14. DennisP ◴[02 Apr 21 20:36 UTC] No.26675708[source]▶
Microwaves. Ground station has to be several square kilometers, but it's cheap and birds can fly through the beam without harm.

For economic reasons you pretty much have to use phased array transmitters, with a reference signal from the ground to make it coherent, so if the beam gets repointed it gets a lot more diffuse than that.

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15. DennisP ◴[02 Apr 21 20:37 UTC] No.26675713[source]▶
It's just too bad the planet keeps getting in the way.
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16. yellowapple ◴[02 Apr 21 20:42 UTC] No.26675764[source]▶
Yeah, but if people don't like it, what are they gonna do? Complain? That'll just draw the attention of the nuclear-powered space lasers :)
17. DennisP ◴[02 Apr 21 20:55 UTC] No.26675888{3}[source]▶
I hate to break it to you but most of our power stations are vulnerable to attack already. Certainly anything near the coast could be taken out by our major adversaries, even with conventional attack.

For a lot of plants, an anonymous cyberattack could probably do it. That'd be way worse than an attack to geostationary, which very few actors could manage, and probably nobody could pull off anonymously.

Space junk seems a more serious problem:

https://physicsworld.com/a/space-debris-threat-to-geosynchro...

I've seen various proposals to clean it up but it'd take some work.

18. panzagl ◴[02 Apr 21 20:58 UTC] No.26675923[source]▶
Or it could blow away the Van Allen belts and fry everything else in orbit, then drop plutonium somewhere.
19. zdragnar ◴[02 Apr 21 21:07 UTC] No.26676008{3}[source]▶
I've seen how this plays out in SimCity. No thank you!
20. yellowapple ◴[02 Apr 21 21:54 UTC] No.26676371{4}[source]▶
And even that seems "easy" to circumvent by having redundant satellites, such that during the equinoxes (equinoxen?) only a fraction of said satellites are shadowed out at once. Alternately, a massive battery or capacitor bank could give the receiver enough buffer to hold out through an equinox-induced shadowing.
21. yellowapple ◴[02 Apr 21 21:54 UTC] No.26676373{3}[source]▶
And sometimes the moon.
22. snuxoll ◴[03 Apr 21 20:29 UTC] No.26684446{3}[source]▶
It’s not the worst idea, but we kind of need to get the whole orbital elevator but done first before the massive planet-spanning solar array.

Truth though: I think Gundam 00 showed a shockingly plausible future (sans mechas, most likely) for our planet if we do not get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Global conflict on a scale that makes WW2 look like child’s play is an inevitability if we cannot mitigate the environmental impact and eventual depletion of fossil fuels, and that includes support to help less developed nations move away from them.