This was a really interesting listen. I really enjoy your work on energy and how it all ties together.
In the last few minutes you discussed other deep dives into energy. Full disclosure; I am in favor of dramatic investment and development of nuclear energy. Both SMR and large infrastructure. Nuclear was mentioned as one of the potential topics and I will definitely look out for this one!
The potential of nuclear to lower the cost of both electricity and process heat for chemical and manufacturing industry would be revolutionary, both for the standard of living of a huge segment of the population of the world and for the climate.
The reasons we are not able to do this seem to all be regulatory and based on historic fears that have proven to be unjustified.
You have shied away from nuclear in other discussions, I would really like to hear a thorough discussion of this.
Any discussion about nuclear needs to include discussion about waste. As I understand it, spent fuel rods are currently in cooling ponds, using fossils to power the cooling system. An _unpowered_ safe permanent storage system is a requirement for expansion of nuclear (including thorium), so that future generations are safe even if governments collapse, fuel ceases to be available, war interrupts fuel supply chains, etc.
Full disclosure: I am nuclear agnostic. I could see developing new nuclear capability for critical applications such as hospitals, semiconductor manufacture (requiring 24/7 operation to keep equipment from getting gummed up), water utilities, data centers & internet, satellites, and cargo train transport (especially farm to city, city to landfill). The red light is the complexity of nuclear administration. Definitely not infavor of trying to replicate our 19 (actually now 20) tW global economy.
The spent fuel only spends a few years in the cooling pond. Between 5 and 10 depending on the type of fuel and the reactor. After that it is already much safer and easier to handle.
After that, in America, it is encased in a dry cask. Which is made up of layers of steel, copper, bentonite clay and concrete. After which it can be safely handled and stored in air. The radiation levels measured at the surface of the cask are not different from background. As of now the casks are all cataloged and stored in lots on the site of the reactor, the plan has always been to store them in a deep geological repository, it has just been difficult to get that built.
It is worth mentioning that spent fuel from American reactors is still more than 95% unused fuel. It is just that the fuel is no longer accessible to the reactor because of its solid nature. In France this fuel will be re-processed and the 95% that is still usable will be remade into new fuel rods. This has not been allowed in America purely for political reasons. Although this may also change shortly as congress is now keen to have an American facility to make HALEU and break dependence on Russia. Reprocessing and enrichment are often done in the same facility.
It is also worth mentioning that, even without reprocessing, the entire stockpile of spent fuel from the history of nuclear power in America would fit on one football field stacked 20m high.... it is not that much when you consider how many terrawats of carbon free stable base load electricity that represents.
This is because the energy in a nuclear fission reaction is 10,000 x more than the energy in a hydrogen bond.
Compare this to the pollution from hydrocarbon generation that is literally allowed to be released into the atmosphere. Every ounce of spent nuclear fuel is inventoried, mitigated, safely stored and verified.
Can this be said for hydrocarbon exhaust, or wind turbine blades that reach end of life, or the solar panels that end up in landfill, or the methane released when you build a dam for hydro power?
I would suggest that nuclear is the only energy source that does not have a waste problem.
Sorry, reading that back it sounds like a rant. I truly do not mean it that way. The only way to make progress is to face these issues head on and evaluate the risk and benefits with data, knowledge and understanding.
If you are interested in a walkthrough of the nuclear waste issue this is a great program
I am also in favor of developing thorium and specifically thorium molten salt reactors, as they have huge safety and proliferation benefits over traditional reactors. However, at this stage they seem to be stuck in regulatory bureaucracy with regulators that have not had to do anything new in 2 generations.
This is the biggest problem the nuclear industry faces.
Thanks, Taran. I watched the video. I was impressed with the safety and the potential for enriching and reusing "spent" pellets. As long as a waste operation is managed competently, it sounds safe. I still wonder what happens if civilization collapses, the government falls to a coup, the country surrenders to an invasion, etc. While it sounds like the casks will survive, there will still be newly spent fuel in cooling ponds, and operating plants that have to keep operating.
How dependent are the construction, maintenance, operation, and stock of nuclear power plants on fossil hydrocarbons? How is U-235 mined, processed, shipped, and delivered? You need to convince me that the entire lifecycle is doable with the same technology. You also need to demonstrate a way to scale nuclear before the loss of economically recoverable oil makes it impossible to build the recursive nuclear industry.
I agree that mining toxic minerals like cobalt and cadmium on a large scale is a bad idea. Does a uranium mine have the same environmental problems as a cobalt mine? Now you have convinced me that nuclear power is no worse of an idea, but I need to see the rest of the answers.
You are probably right about the violence that a sudden loss of energy would provoke. However, if we can bend-not-break, a simplification could also increase peace in the world. After all, a lower energy economy would require more workers, which is good for employment. And farming beats going to the gym any day of the week.
Construction of nuclear plants takes steel and concrete, this is the same as all infrastructure we need to build. And the construction machinery itself uses diesel. These are high carbon products. But this is no different than constructing renewable generating plant. The balance comes when you factor in the idea that the making of large amounts of carbon free base load electricity facilitates the cheap production of man made fuels to replace hydrocarbons in the future.
The mining footprint of nuclear fuel is tiny by comparison to cobalt or other minerals we mine. Purely by virtue of the relatively small amounts we need. Your entire life, a western standard of life with electricity and plumbing and taking vacations would only use a baseball sized amount of uranium or thorium. Uranium oxide is water soluble and there is increasing interest in research to economically gather uranium that has been dissolved in the ocean. Thorium is naturally found on literally every continent on earth and is present in concentrations high enough to be economically recovered in the tailings of copper mines, as well as other mines. So you would not need to do any additional mining.
Again, the main factor though is that you do not need much of it! Because it is so power dense. 3 kg of uranium is the same amount of fuel as 9000 ton of coal, or 40000 barrels of oil or 6.8 million m3 of natural gas.
The safety and accountability of the nuclear fuel chain is very robust and has been established for decades. Most of the nuclear fuel used today has been shipped halfway around the world.
And if you want the safest fuel possible, look into the CANDU reactor, a Canadian design that uses natural uranium oxide as fuel, needing no enrichment. Before they go into the reactors the fuel is literally just rods of rock, you can handle it with no protection.
Another important thing to understand is that there is more than one ‘nuclear’. The pressurized water reactors that we use now were first designed 70 years ago. There are lots of other ways to use a fission reaction. Molten salt with uranium or thorium fuels. Liquid Metal reactors. These have the ability to deliver heat for chemical processes as well as electrical generation, and may eventually be able to provide enough heat to make cement! The ability to do that without burning hydrocarbons would be a transformational development for decarbonizing construction.
The high temperature reactors also have the benefit of not operating at high pressure so there is no possibility of steam explosions or ‘melt downs’.
I would love to learn more about nuclear too. I have not yet made up my opinion about nuclear. The episode with Jean-Marc Jancovici triggered my interest in nuclear. I am also reading arguments against nuclear. I would love to have it discussed in a systemic way in the global context of energy, finance, geopolitics and the great simplification.
Such an interesting listen, I then watched much of it on youtube and followed along in the transcript. Everything Art says makes total sense, except for one thing. We will not go back to the standard of living of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s because of (a) a much impoverished world, (b) far worse economic inequality, and (c) forced consumption.
Forced consumption. Less public transit means you have to drive. More cars means it is life threatening to run an errand on a bike, so you have to drive. Planned obsolescence means you have to replace rather than repair, and the thing breaks sooner. It also means that your old computer won't run new software or even browse modern websites. Insurance on more things is now required as well as more expensive. Medical costs are higher. DIY doesn't even save money - fabric to sew your own clothes or yarn to knit your own sweater costs more than the manufactured clothes. You can't just buy one of something small, you have to buy a 12 pack even if that would last the rest of your life. Household maintenance costs are higher. You are excluded from a social life and many other things unless you have a smartphone. With brick and mortar stores closing left and right, you have to either travel farther or order truck delivery. Most of us have to travel farther to get out in nature. All your food is prepackaged, mostly with tons of single use plastic. Food grown with chemicals lacks micro nutrients, leaving us unsatisfied, causing us to eat more and gain weight. You gain weight and then you need new clothes.
According to FRED, real personal consumption per capita is 4x what it was in 1960, but the skyrocketing income of the top 0.01% has left the rest of us behind, with the bottom quintile eating dirt. There is no possibility of a lower standard of living for them. It's just death or charity.
(editing my post at 5am the next morning)
What keeps me up at night is the problem of intermittency. I see no emissions-free, eco-friendly way to address it. Intermittent power is a problem we didn't have in the '60s, and arguably have never had since the taming of fire.
The big picture of the human predicament has to consider both energy and the environment's ability to absorb waste. GHG emissions have already burdened the atmosphere with more carbon than the PETM spike. We don't know where the tipping points are, some appear to be underway, and the risks to all megafauna are inconceivable. The effects on the oceans are similarly catastrophic.
I don't know of any means of producing heat for housing and cooking that does not directly produce emissions other than batteries and nuclear, and I do not know of any way of producing either without both emissions and mining devastation. Biofuels not only emit, they also require acreage. Burning wood leads to deforestation, the condition that led the Brits to start burning coal in the first place. I'd love to see an episode on Passive House design. That can reduce or eliminate direct emissions and energy use, but I do not know to what extent it embodies energy and emissions, mining, materials transport, or other harm. We can also focus more on warming bodies rather than spaces. Low Tech Magazine has articles about this. Long live Jimmy Carter and his sweaters. Warm up bean bags full of pebbles while cooking and insert them into interior pockets in clothes. Could warming-bulges ever become fashionable?
Solar based electricity or even direct solar heating can cook food when the sun shines. How do you feel about being unable to warm up your food or boil water for coffee or tea after dark or before sunrise? What about bathing? If The Future Is Rural (Jason Bradford), and many more of us labor on farms, we will need daylight for outdoor farm labor. Does that mean that some segment of the population, probably women, must return to the kitchen during the day in order to cook the food using solar flows? After a day of farm labor, how is a person supposed to take a bath?
While we are nowhere near these intermittancy scenarios, I am puzzled about what to recommend to my community. I used to be on an energy transition task force for the local government, before it was disbanded due to lack of interest. I may be able to restart it as elected officials turn over. We have a plan to join in an aggregate community solar farm. I pointed out that intermittancy means we have to continue to rely on either natural gas, nuclear, or batteries. Natural gas = GHG emissions. Nuclear is out of our control. Grid-scale batteries not only embody both high energy and mining destruction, but also require far more solar panels to charge them.
My only other idea is smaller private batteries. If a household had a battery-operated bath water heater, for example, household members would quickly learn to take short baths and bathe in used bathwater. I don't know of any such thing being manufactured, or how to make one.
Is anyone else out there grappling with these questions? Internet searches don't yield anything useful.
Worth every minute, but I am geting old old and have the time stuck in a chair because I did my back a while ago. Love the ducks, the dogs, the youngsters, but there is still much to be done and its not a bad idea to look after your health via the chronic behaviours; saves making a claim on the future economy? What do we save for the sake of ... fill in the dots? Literacy, the wider literacy ... the domestic economy ... the moral economy (perhaps that kind of existed in places / times?). There is some metaphysic, some creative conversation out there better suited for coming days? Participatory knowledge, illumination: where thought gets to insight and unpacks itself?
This was a really interesting listen. I really enjoy your work on energy and how it all ties together.
In the last few minutes you discussed other deep dives into energy. Full disclosure; I am in favor of dramatic investment and development of nuclear energy. Both SMR and large infrastructure. Nuclear was mentioned as one of the potential topics and I will definitely look out for this one!
The potential of nuclear to lower the cost of both electricity and process heat for chemical and manufacturing industry would be revolutionary, both for the standard of living of a huge segment of the population of the world and for the climate.
The reasons we are not able to do this seem to all be regulatory and based on historic fears that have proven to be unjustified.
You have shied away from nuclear in other discussions, I would really like to hear a thorough discussion of this.
All the best.
Any discussion about nuclear needs to include discussion about waste. As I understand it, spent fuel rods are currently in cooling ponds, using fossils to power the cooling system. An _unpowered_ safe permanent storage system is a requirement for expansion of nuclear (including thorium), so that future generations are safe even if governments collapse, fuel ceases to be available, war interrupts fuel supply chains, etc.
Full disclosure: I am nuclear agnostic. I could see developing new nuclear capability for critical applications such as hospitals, semiconductor manufacture (requiring 24/7 operation to keep equipment from getting gummed up), water utilities, data centers & internet, satellites, and cargo train transport (especially farm to city, city to landfill). The red light is the complexity of nuclear administration. Definitely not infavor of trying to replicate our 19 (actually now 20) tW global economy.
Hi Robin.
The spent fuel only spends a few years in the cooling pond. Between 5 and 10 depending on the type of fuel and the reactor. After that it is already much safer and easier to handle.
After that, in America, it is encased in a dry cask. Which is made up of layers of steel, copper, bentonite clay and concrete. After which it can be safely handled and stored in air. The radiation levels measured at the surface of the cask are not different from background. As of now the casks are all cataloged and stored in lots on the site of the reactor, the plan has always been to store them in a deep geological repository, it has just been difficult to get that built.
It is worth mentioning that spent fuel from American reactors is still more than 95% unused fuel. It is just that the fuel is no longer accessible to the reactor because of its solid nature. In France this fuel will be re-processed and the 95% that is still usable will be remade into new fuel rods. This has not been allowed in America purely for political reasons. Although this may also change shortly as congress is now keen to have an American facility to make HALEU and break dependence on Russia. Reprocessing and enrichment are often done in the same facility.
It is also worth mentioning that, even without reprocessing, the entire stockpile of spent fuel from the history of nuclear power in America would fit on one football field stacked 20m high.... it is not that much when you consider how many terrawats of carbon free stable base load electricity that represents.
This is because the energy in a nuclear fission reaction is 10,000 x more than the energy in a hydrogen bond.
Compare this to the pollution from hydrocarbon generation that is literally allowed to be released into the atmosphere. Every ounce of spent nuclear fuel is inventoried, mitigated, safely stored and verified.
Can this be said for hydrocarbon exhaust, or wind turbine blades that reach end of life, or the solar panels that end up in landfill, or the methane released when you build a dam for hydro power?
I would suggest that nuclear is the only energy source that does not have a waste problem.
Sorry, reading that back it sounds like a rant. I truly do not mean it that way. The only way to make progress is to face these issues head on and evaluate the risk and benefits with data, knowledge and understanding.
If you are interested in a walkthrough of the nuclear waste issue this is a great program
https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=tioMlsbYDFhTiFq6
I am also in favor of developing thorium and specifically thorium molten salt reactors, as they have huge safety and proliferation benefits over traditional reactors. However, at this stage they seem to be stuck in regulatory bureaucracy with regulators that have not had to do anything new in 2 generations.
This is the biggest problem the nuclear industry faces.
Thanks, Taran. I watched the video. I was impressed with the safety and the potential for enriching and reusing "spent" pellets. As long as a waste operation is managed competently, it sounds safe. I still wonder what happens if civilization collapses, the government falls to a coup, the country surrenders to an invasion, etc. While it sounds like the casks will survive, there will still be newly spent fuel in cooling ponds, and operating plants that have to keep operating.
How dependent are the construction, maintenance, operation, and stock of nuclear power plants on fossil hydrocarbons? How is U-235 mined, processed, shipped, and delivered? You need to convince me that the entire lifecycle is doable with the same technology. You also need to demonstrate a way to scale nuclear before the loss of economically recoverable oil makes it impossible to build the recursive nuclear industry.
I agree that mining toxic minerals like cobalt and cadmium on a large scale is a bad idea. Does a uranium mine have the same environmental problems as a cobalt mine? Now you have convinced me that nuclear power is no worse of an idea, but I need to see the rest of the answers.
You are probably right about the violence that a sudden loss of energy would provoke. However, if we can bend-not-break, a simplification could also increase peace in the world. After all, a lower energy economy would require more workers, which is good for employment. And farming beats going to the gym any day of the week.
Hi Robin.
Construction of nuclear plants takes steel and concrete, this is the same as all infrastructure we need to build. And the construction machinery itself uses diesel. These are high carbon products. But this is no different than constructing renewable generating plant. The balance comes when you factor in the idea that the making of large amounts of carbon free base load electricity facilitates the cheap production of man made fuels to replace hydrocarbons in the future.
The mining footprint of nuclear fuel is tiny by comparison to cobalt or other minerals we mine. Purely by virtue of the relatively small amounts we need. Your entire life, a western standard of life with electricity and plumbing and taking vacations would only use a baseball sized amount of uranium or thorium. Uranium oxide is water soluble and there is increasing interest in research to economically gather uranium that has been dissolved in the ocean. Thorium is naturally found on literally every continent on earth and is present in concentrations high enough to be economically recovered in the tailings of copper mines, as well as other mines. So you would not need to do any additional mining.
Again, the main factor though is that you do not need much of it! Because it is so power dense. 3 kg of uranium is the same amount of fuel as 9000 ton of coal, or 40000 barrels of oil or 6.8 million m3 of natural gas.
The safety and accountability of the nuclear fuel chain is very robust and has been established for decades. Most of the nuclear fuel used today has been shipped halfway around the world.
And if you want the safest fuel possible, look into the CANDU reactor, a Canadian design that uses natural uranium oxide as fuel, needing no enrichment. Before they go into the reactors the fuel is literally just rods of rock, you can handle it with no protection.
Another important thing to understand is that there is more than one ‘nuclear’. The pressurized water reactors that we use now were first designed 70 years ago. There are lots of other ways to use a fission reaction. Molten salt with uranium or thorium fuels. Liquid Metal reactors. These have the ability to deliver heat for chemical processes as well as electrical generation, and may eventually be able to provide enough heat to make cement! The ability to do that without burning hydrocarbons would be a transformational development for decarbonizing construction.
The high temperature reactors also have the benefit of not operating at high pressure so there is no possibility of steam explosions or ‘melt downs’.
I would love to learn more about nuclear too. I have not yet made up my opinion about nuclear. The episode with Jean-Marc Jancovici triggered my interest in nuclear. I am also reading arguments against nuclear. I would love to have it discussed in a systemic way in the global context of energy, finance, geopolitics and the great simplification.
Such an interesting listen, I then watched much of it on youtube and followed along in the transcript. Everything Art says makes total sense, except for one thing. We will not go back to the standard of living of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s because of (a) a much impoverished world, (b) far worse economic inequality, and (c) forced consumption.
Forced consumption. Less public transit means you have to drive. More cars means it is life threatening to run an errand on a bike, so you have to drive. Planned obsolescence means you have to replace rather than repair, and the thing breaks sooner. It also means that your old computer won't run new software or even browse modern websites. Insurance on more things is now required as well as more expensive. Medical costs are higher. DIY doesn't even save money - fabric to sew your own clothes or yarn to knit your own sweater costs more than the manufactured clothes. You can't just buy one of something small, you have to buy a 12 pack even if that would last the rest of your life. Household maintenance costs are higher. You are excluded from a social life and many other things unless you have a smartphone. With brick and mortar stores closing left and right, you have to either travel farther or order truck delivery. Most of us have to travel farther to get out in nature. All your food is prepackaged, mostly with tons of single use plastic. Food grown with chemicals lacks micro nutrients, leaving us unsatisfied, causing us to eat more and gain weight. You gain weight and then you need new clothes.
According to FRED, real personal consumption per capita is 4x what it was in 1960, but the skyrocketing income of the top 0.01% has left the rest of us behind, with the bottom quintile eating dirt. There is no possibility of a lower standard of living for them. It's just death or charity.
(editing my post at 5am the next morning)
What keeps me up at night is the problem of intermittency. I see no emissions-free, eco-friendly way to address it. Intermittent power is a problem we didn't have in the '60s, and arguably have never had since the taming of fire.
The big picture of the human predicament has to consider both energy and the environment's ability to absorb waste. GHG emissions have already burdened the atmosphere with more carbon than the PETM spike. We don't know where the tipping points are, some appear to be underway, and the risks to all megafauna are inconceivable. The effects on the oceans are similarly catastrophic.
I don't know of any means of producing heat for housing and cooking that does not directly produce emissions other than batteries and nuclear, and I do not know of any way of producing either without both emissions and mining devastation. Biofuels not only emit, they also require acreage. Burning wood leads to deforestation, the condition that led the Brits to start burning coal in the first place. I'd love to see an episode on Passive House design. That can reduce or eliminate direct emissions and energy use, but I do not know to what extent it embodies energy and emissions, mining, materials transport, or other harm. We can also focus more on warming bodies rather than spaces. Low Tech Magazine has articles about this. Long live Jimmy Carter and his sweaters. Warm up bean bags full of pebbles while cooking and insert them into interior pockets in clothes. Could warming-bulges ever become fashionable?
Solar based electricity or even direct solar heating can cook food when the sun shines. How do you feel about being unable to warm up your food or boil water for coffee or tea after dark or before sunrise? What about bathing? If The Future Is Rural (Jason Bradford), and many more of us labor on farms, we will need daylight for outdoor farm labor. Does that mean that some segment of the population, probably women, must return to the kitchen during the day in order to cook the food using solar flows? After a day of farm labor, how is a person supposed to take a bath?
While we are nowhere near these intermittancy scenarios, I am puzzled about what to recommend to my community. I used to be on an energy transition task force for the local government, before it was disbanded due to lack of interest. I may be able to restart it as elected officials turn over. We have a plan to join in an aggregate community solar farm. I pointed out that intermittancy means we have to continue to rely on either natural gas, nuclear, or batteries. Natural gas = GHG emissions. Nuclear is out of our control. Grid-scale batteries not only embody both high energy and mining destruction, but also require far more solar panels to charge them.
My only other idea is smaller private batteries. If a household had a battery-operated bath water heater, for example, household members would quickly learn to take short baths and bathe in used bathwater. I don't know of any such thing being manufactured, or how to make one.
Is anyone else out there grappling with these questions? Internet searches don't yield anything useful.
Brilliant as usual my friend!
Worth every minute, but I am geting old old and have the time stuck in a chair because I did my back a while ago. Love the ducks, the dogs, the youngsters, but there is still much to be done and its not a bad idea to look after your health via the chronic behaviours; saves making a claim on the future economy? What do we save for the sake of ... fill in the dots? Literacy, the wider literacy ... the domestic economy ... the moral economy (perhaps that kind of existed in places / times?). There is some metaphysic, some creative conversation out there better suited for coming days? Participatory knowledge, illumination: where thought gets to insight and unpacks itself?