America is about to fall behind China on one of the most important issues of our time
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W [email protected] shared this topic
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It does have a certain attraction over certain death of fossil fuels.
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why the clickbait title if the original huffpost isn't?
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China is rapidly surpassing the U.S. in nuclear energy, building more reactors at a faster pace and developing advanced technologies like small modular reactors and high-temperature gas-cooled units.
Okay, yes, very broadly-speaking, I agree that US nuclear power generation capability relative to China is something to keep an eye on. There might be a way that China could leverage that in some scenario. However.
At least some of that is tied to population; China has over four times our population. One would expect energy usage per-capita to tend to converge. And for that to happen, China pretty much has to significantly outbuild the US in generation capacity.
If we in the US constrain ourselves to outpace China in expanding generation capacity, then we're constraining ourselves to have multiple times the per-capita energy generation capacity.
Now, okay, yes, there is usage that is decoupled from population size. AI stuff is in the news, and at least in theory -- if maybe not with today's systems, but somewhere along the road to AGI -- I can imagine productivity there becoming decoupled from population size. If you have more generation capacity, you can make effective use of it.
But a lot of it is going to be tied to population. Electrical heating and cooling. EV use. You'd have to have a staggering amount of datacenter or other non-tied-to-population power use to dominate that.
These statistics aren't from the same year, but they have a residential-industrial-commercial breakdown, and then a breakdown for each of those sectors.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php
Commercial use, residential use, and industrial use are, on that chart, each about a third of US electrical power consumption. Of the commercial category, computers and office equipment are 11%. So you're talking maybe 3% of total US power consumption going to the most critical thing that I can think of that represents productive capacity and is decoupled from population.
About half of commercial use of electricity is space cooling. Almost everything else is either cooling, lighting, or ventilation. Those are gonna be tied to population when it comes to productive capacity.
If you look at residential stuff, about half of it is cooling, heating, or lighting, and my bet is that nothing in the residential category is going to massively increase productive capacity. Up until a point, on a per-capita basis, air conditioning increases productivity. Maybe it could provide an advantage in terms of quality of life, ability to attract immigration. But I don't think that if, tomorrow, China had twice our per-capita residential electrical power generation capacity, that it'd provide some enormous advantage. And it definitely seems like it'd all be per-capita stuff.
In industry, you have some big electricity consumers. Machinery, process heating and cooling, electrochemical processes. And with sufficient automation, those can be decoupled from population size. But I think that "American industrial capacity vis-a-vis Chinese industrial capacity" is a whole different story, that it's probably better-examined at a finer-grained level, and I think that there are plenty of eyeballs already on that. Hypothetically, you could constrain residential or other use, pour power capacity dedicated to it into industrial capacity in a national emergency, but I can't think of any immediately-obvious area of industry where that's going to be true. Unless we expect some massively-important form of new heavy industry to emerge that is dependent upon massive use of electricity -- like, throw enough electricity into a machine and you can get unobtanium -- I'm probably not going to lose sleep over that.
If your concern is that there might be ways in which China can leverage its population, then sure, I get that, but again, I think that that's probably better considered in terms of metrics of human capital rather than in terms of just energy generation capability.
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Fossil fuels are killing this planet before your very eyes.
And the only way to save it is nuclear power? Every thread about this topic makes it look this way.
Thing is: Fossil fuels are killing our planet NOW. Spending 10+ years to build a new state-of-the-art nuclear power plant is simply too slow. Just take the money and dump it into technology that's already available at short notice: Solar, wind, geothermal and tons and tons of battery storage. I'm not sure about the situation in other countries, but here in Germany there isn't even a permanent storage site for the nuclear waste we ALREADY produced let alone one for which we'd produce in the future.
Additional factor for not going nuclear in Europe: Do you know which country exports the most fissile material around us? It starts with an R and ends with ussia.
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Chernobyl killed around 4000 people locally and contributed to 16000 deaths on the continent. Normal coal operation has killed half a million people over the last 20 years.
All I'm saying is that accidents are possible, sure, but the laxity of regulations regarding coal has killed way more people than that towards nuclear. And it's not about "one person not having their morning coffee", Chernobyl was dangerous by design, modern reactors simply can't fail that way.
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None of the US based SMRs have been successful, even with billions of funding from the DOE.
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Not sure, maybe from the posts where everybody argues that Nuclear is so much better than coal but totally missing the point that yes, it's better than coal, but so much worse than renewables.
- Huge upfront costs
- Long build time (We need to get CO2 down now!)
- Waste disposal time measured in aeons.
- Risk of contamination (again for aeons)
- Yes, coal kills more people, but
- Scale our usage of nuclear power by 100 and watch the casualties scale as well.
- That's not the frigging point. We want to get rid of coal ANYWAY. The question is which one is better: Fossil nuclear or renewables.
- Yes, coal kills more people, but
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True or false: a nuclear reactor failing, for any number of reasons, can do a lot more damage than a coal plant or any of the processes to gather coal can.
By that same logic, we should dismantle all our cities, since a natural catastrophe can wipe out so much more people if they are clustered up. Or drive instead of flying, because one airplane crashing is worse than one car crashing.
Nuclear reactors failing make for better headlines. You would literally have to build a reactor design that was not safe even back then - they built it to prioritize weapons grade material refinement - and would have to mismanage it systematically for decades in order to get at 5-10% of the death toll coal generation will do 100% in that timeframe.
The big picture is, if every reactor was Chernobyl, was built like Chernobyl, was operated like Chernobyl and would fail like Chernobyl, that would still cause less deaths than the equivalent coal generation. That's the big picture. Fixating on one accident that can provably never happen again is the minutia.
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What can happen? The plant is pretty much working and is the only reliable point of Ukrainian power generation since it can't be targeted. Also, when is the US going to get into a land war on its own soil, and how will smaller nuclear reactors help?
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The question is which one is better: Fossil nuclear or renewables.
Both, whatever we can build faster, whatever makes it easier to reduce coal and oil. It shouldn't be an either-or decision. Also, nuclear is not a fossil fuel, you can debate if it is renewable or not, but nuclear fuel is not made from compressed organic matter.
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It’s clear you’re not willing to engage this in good faith. You’re just going to take the least charitable interpretation of my ideas and twist them into things I am not saying or implying. Have a good one dude
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Both, whatever we can build faster, whatever makes it easier to reduce coal and oil. It shouldn't be an either-or decision.
You are kind of contradicting yourself. Because in both aspects nuclear energy looses to renewables: They are faster and less complex to build. Easier to maintain and dispose of if necessary.
Also, nuclear is not a fossil fuel, you can debate if it is renewable or not, but nuclear fuel is not made from compressed organic matter.
Ok, if you want to split hairs, yes nuclear energy is not fossil but also then there are also no renewables because the energy in the universe is for all we know finite.
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I never said anything about fossil fuels, and do not wish them continued use either.
