Someone smarter than me would need to run the numbers on actual electricity consumption but a while back someone took the world’s total energy consumption, which is kinda uncharitable but also kinda representative of how nuclear isn’t a solution tbh, and we would need to be constructing like 1 nuclear power plant of the scale of one of the largest nuclear power plants that exists on a weekly basis for over a decade to meet the demands and constraints (including the need to decommission and replace the current nuclear power plants at the end of their lifecycle).
I can only imagine that the world’s energy consumption has increased since that point and, given the very late hour of climate change we are in, even if it was only building one nuclear power plant of the capacity of the largest ever built per month (which is exceedingly conservative an estimate) we’re still looking at something that is unfeasible for a variety of reasons.
Add to that the fact that nuclear reserves might only realistically last us in the order of a decade, give or take a few years, at that rate of consumption, and you’re looking at something unfeasible from another perspective.
I’m pretty much an irredeemable doomer by this point but if we rule out the hail Mary of fusion then we’re looking at investing heavily into what is essentially a dead-end technology due to resource limitations or investing heavily into renewables which have much greater promise of being a long-term solution.
I think we’ve already blown it but whatever.
MSRs are not the solution they’ve been made out to be and it’s still going to take years before we could reasonably expect to see us going all-in on them, at which point we probably would need to start building one or more per week. And thorium, while relatively abundant, is not nearly as viable on the scale we would need it for thorium reactors; there’s also a lot of gold in the ocean but even that isn’t enough to motivate us to start extracting it at an industrial scale.
I agree with this, wholeheartedly. Nuclear is okay from a surface level thinking, but comes with so many caveats, limited resource and slow build times that it’s just not viable this late in the game, especially when compared to renewables which are quicker to pump out and modern options range between equal-to-cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear probably was the right interim choice to start building, 60 years ago. But it is no longer 60 years ago.
Uranium will last us 10 years tops. And anyone arguing “but the technology will be able to do X in X years” may as well just sit back and wait for techbros to invent the magical climate changer fixer. We have the long-lasting, cheaper, easier-to-deploy technological solution now, already. Its only ‘downside’ is that it’s so decentralised that oil barons are struggling to make a profit from them, so the bourgeoisie aren’t interested.
I’d argue it’s just silly to be considering other options than renewables and storage, at this point. Yes your magic rocks may have lots of power in them, but the sky is being bombarded by orders of magnitude more energy every second, will actually last longer than a fraction of a lifetime.
We have the cheap, easy, sustainable solution, now, in our hands. Considering other ‘interim’ options on a major scale, especially under capitalism, is a waste of time at best.
Yeah, I agree that 60 years ago was the time to build nuclear and that this window has basically closed on us.
I think this is probably what gets lost on a lot of people who hear from the most unhinged or the most anti-science anti-nuclear positions; I’m not opposed to nuclear power. I think there is very likely to be niche applications for it that we will see long into the future (beyond just nuclear subs or nuclear space travel too), provided we last that long. I just don’t see it as a magic bullet and from the standpoint of environmental concerns I’m about as enthusiastic with regards to nuclear power as I am with EV cars - like I guess it’s something? But it mostly represents a huge waste of resources that would be better dedicated to something else and it’s really just a bandaid measure when the patient has already haemorrhaged out and is going to flat line at any moment. And at the same time I’m far more concerned about the bourgeoisie having private jets and yachts that are so massive they have smaller yachts docked inside of them than I am about whatever EV car I come across.
I just wish we’d go all-in on renewables but moreso sustainability in the long-term, like radically reorganising society so that we work two shifts instead of a 9-5, thus making things like public transport, urban footprint, and load on the energy grid reduced in a huge way.
Just imagine the environmental impact if every office job suddenly required roughly half the amount of office space and IT equipment - in your city alone that would have a major impact.
I know this is going to be a bit vague and vibes-based but so many ways that we engage in consumption and we have waste scales in a non-linear fashion; adding one extra car on the road doesn’t simply contribute +1 to traffic or demand on road infrastructure. If the demand for parking spaces is roughly halved, if the need for childcare is reduced by 1/3, if there are half as many people in the UK all turning their electric kettles on at approximately the same time, if peak hour isn’t two hour-long periods in the day but it’s distributed across four of them then the need to spool up production and supply of services is reduced in a huge way and it’s likely that there would be a lot of efficiency built into that equation. If you only need roughly half the amount of trains and buses for the peak hours and during the overlapping shift-change peak hour you have public transport running near full capacity as it’s both inbound and outbound, rather than only being at capacity half of the journey, then it would make for more efficient public transport.
It kinda breaks my heart to really grapple with how absurdly wasteful society is. And I’m not just talking about the most obvious examples of things like piles of fruit left to rot because of the anarchy of the market but there are so many other deeper aspects to it that go mostly overlooked.
I think this is what a new socialist revolution would need to undertake in order to get out from under capitalist encirclement - we have the modelling and we have the data, it would be reasonably easy to just outstrip the prevailing capitalist mode of living at every turn by opting for things that are vastly more efficient but which would never be permitted under capitalism. One example would be having Venezuelan-style colectivos but well-equipped and operating things like a tool library - suddenly there isn’t any great need for everyone to have a battery-operated cordless drill sitting in their garage that goes unused for 99.9% of its existence. Or for everyone to have a lawn mower. And so on. With the added benefit of the internet and communication tech, the ability to optimise a tool loan scheme would be greatly increased.
I imagine this is what countries like Cuba and the DPRK have had to resort to in some measure but I still think there’s so many overlooked opportunities for optimising society to be as efficient and low-footprint as possible that don’t get considered mostly due to deferring to the conventional way of doing things. It would be funny to see a high-tech socialist utopia where it is so thoroughly optimised that the “GDP” wildly outstrips similar capitalist countries on half the “budget” with regards to consumption and infrastructure etc.
Someone smarter than me would need to run the numbers on actual electricity consumption but a while back someone took the world’s total energy consumption, which is kinda uncharitable but also kinda representative of how nuclear isn’t a solution tbh, and we would need to be constructing like 1 nuclear power plant of the scale of one of the largest nuclear power plants that exists on a weekly basis for over a decade to meet the demands and constraints (including the need to decommission and replace the current nuclear power plants at the end of their lifecycle).
I can only imagine that the world’s energy consumption has increased since that point and, given the very late hour of climate change we are in, even if it was only building one nuclear power plant of the capacity of the largest ever built per month (which is exceedingly conservative an estimate) we’re still looking at something that is unfeasible for a variety of reasons.
Add to that the fact that nuclear reserves might only realistically last us in the order of a decade, give or take a few years, at that rate of consumption, and you’re looking at something unfeasible from another perspective.
I’m pretty much an irredeemable doomer by this point but if we rule out the hail Mary of fusion then we’re looking at investing heavily into what is essentially a dead-end technology due to resource limitations or investing heavily into renewables which have much greater promise of being a long-term solution.
I think we’ve already blown it but whatever.
MSRs are not the solution they’ve been made out to be and it’s still going to take years before we could reasonably expect to see us going all-in on them, at which point we probably would need to start building one or more per week. And thorium, while relatively abundant, is not nearly as viable on the scale we would need it for thorium reactors; there’s also a lot of gold in the ocean but even that isn’t enough to motivate us to start extracting it at an industrial scale.
I agree with this, wholeheartedly. Nuclear is okay from a surface level thinking, but comes with so many caveats, limited resource and slow build times that it’s just not viable this late in the game, especially when compared to renewables which are quicker to pump out and modern options range between equal-to-cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear probably was the right interim choice to start building, 60 years ago. But it is no longer 60 years ago.
Uranium will last us 10 years tops. And anyone arguing “but the technology will be able to do X in X years” may as well just sit back and wait for techbros to invent the magical climate changer fixer. We have the long-lasting, cheaper, easier-to-deploy technological solution now, already. Its only ‘downside’ is that it’s so decentralised that oil barons are struggling to make a profit from them, so the bourgeoisie aren’t interested.
I’d argue it’s just silly to be considering other options than renewables and storage, at this point. Yes your magic rocks may have lots of power in them, but the sky is being bombarded by orders of magnitude more energy every second, will actually last longer than a fraction of a lifetime.
We have the cheap, easy, sustainable solution, now, in our hands. Considering other ‘interim’ options on a major scale, especially under capitalism, is a waste of time at best.
Yeah, I agree that 60 years ago was the time to build nuclear and that this window has basically closed on us.
I think this is probably what gets lost on a lot of people who hear from the most unhinged or the most anti-science anti-nuclear positions; I’m not opposed to nuclear power. I think there is very likely to be niche applications for it that we will see long into the future (beyond just nuclear subs or nuclear space travel too), provided we last that long. I just don’t see it as a magic bullet and from the standpoint of environmental concerns I’m about as enthusiastic with regards to nuclear power as I am with EV cars - like I guess it’s something? But it mostly represents a huge waste of resources that would be better dedicated to something else and it’s really just a bandaid measure when the patient has already haemorrhaged out and is going to flat line at any moment. And at the same time I’m far more concerned about the bourgeoisie having private jets and yachts that are so massive they have smaller yachts docked inside of them than I am about whatever EV car I come across.
I just wish we’d go all-in on renewables but moreso sustainability in the long-term, like radically reorganising society so that we work two shifts instead of a 9-5, thus making things like public transport, urban footprint, and load on the energy grid reduced in a huge way.
Just imagine the environmental impact if every office job suddenly required roughly half the amount of office space and IT equipment - in your city alone that would have a major impact.
I know this is going to be a bit vague and vibes-based but so many ways that we engage in consumption and we have waste scales in a non-linear fashion; adding one extra car on the road doesn’t simply contribute +1 to traffic or demand on road infrastructure. If the demand for parking spaces is roughly halved, if the need for childcare is reduced by 1/3, if there are half as many people in the UK all turning their electric kettles on at approximately the same time, if peak hour isn’t two hour-long periods in the day but it’s distributed across four of them then the need to spool up production and supply of services is reduced in a huge way and it’s likely that there would be a lot of efficiency built into that equation. If you only need roughly half the amount of trains and buses for the peak hours and during the overlapping shift-change peak hour you have public transport running near full capacity as it’s both inbound and outbound, rather than only being at capacity half of the journey, then it would make for more efficient public transport.
It kinda breaks my heart to really grapple with how absurdly wasteful society is. And I’m not just talking about the most obvious examples of things like piles of fruit left to rot because of the anarchy of the market but there are so many other deeper aspects to it that go mostly overlooked.
I think this is what a new socialist revolution would need to undertake in order to get out from under capitalist encirclement - we have the modelling and we have the data, it would be reasonably easy to just outstrip the prevailing capitalist mode of living at every turn by opting for things that are vastly more efficient but which would never be permitted under capitalism. One example would be having Venezuelan-style colectivos but well-equipped and operating things like a tool library - suddenly there isn’t any great need for everyone to have a battery-operated cordless drill sitting in their garage that goes unused for 99.9% of its existence. Or for everyone to have a lawn mower. And so on. With the added benefit of the internet and communication tech, the ability to optimise a tool loan scheme would be greatly increased.
I imagine this is what countries like Cuba and the DPRK have had to resort to in some measure but I still think there’s so many overlooked opportunities for optimising society to be as efficient and low-footprint as possible that don’t get considered mostly due to deferring to the conventional way of doing things. It would be funny to see a high-tech socialist utopia where it is so thoroughly optimised that the “GDP” wildly outstrips similar capitalist countries on half the “budget” with regards to consumption and infrastructure etc.
It’s what could have been, I guess. Oh well.