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‘We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Go read my other comment. Batteries don't need rare materials for grid scale storage. It's the small ones in phones that need things like Nickel, Cobalt, and Lithium to be as energy dense as possible. Grid storage began phasing out Nickel and Cobalt a while ago and will eventually phase out Lithium as Sodium batteries get better and cheaper.
Current nuclear is a sad joke compared to what we learned we could do even 50 years ago. The initial investment for nuclear is always expensive, but the pay off is cheap energy for like 40 or 50 years. While it does release CO2 to make new reactors there are ways around even that. Using less or no concrete would be a great start. Making iron is kind of hard though, I will give you that. Maybe we will have to switch to aluminum or something.
Consumer electronics are probably the biggest problem we can't solve right now. That's why we need devices made to last and things like the right to repair. Getting rid of individual vehicles would really help too, as trains can accept power straight from the grid without needing huge batteries.
But they haven't phased them out and we have nothing close to the grid storage we would need to switch to renewables. Even then, they will never provide the amount of energy we need to meet current usage.
At our current rate of usage, we will run out of viable uranium sources within 80 years. If we switched the worlds energy to nuclear, it wouldn't last 5.
The only realistic option is for the world to use less.
This is completely absurd as I keep telling you. The vast majority of the uranium in "spent" nuclear fuel is untouched. Current reactors are a joke compared to what even the Soviet Union could come up with in 1980. Imagine leaving over 90% of your meal on the table and calling it spent.
You can declare it to be thus and such all you like. I keel telling you, we will run out of what we know exists now within 80 or 90 years, at current usage.
You just don't like it and that's not the same as it not being true.
I keep telling you, the energy cost of doing it makes it non viable, as any kind of meaningful solution but you keep repeating it all the same.
What do keels have to do with nuclear power? Unless we are talking about submarines?
No it isn't true. For a start you are focusing only on concentrated diposits. There is enough uranium to last humanity in sea water for 100 years, it's just hard to get at. You're also completely ignoring U-238, and Thorium. You haven't even provided a source once. Since apparently sources aren't necessary I might as well tell you that there is enough uranium in you're house to power the entire world for a billion years and that you need to stop hoarding it. See I can make up things too.
What energy cost? Reactors produce energy on average, not remove it. That's as true for the fast breeder reactors I sourced as it is for conventional nuclear reactors. Do you actually have any evidence for any of this bullshit?
Sources aren't necessarily for widely accepted facts. You just don't like what you're hearing and want to sealion it away.
Like I said, getting it and refining it is the problem.
Don't worry, its clear that you've been making things up the whole time. I'm happy to provide sources for serious people, having serious conversations. Not you and your jokes.
You provided one source that fast breeder reactors were built in the former soviet union. Had you been refuting me saying "no other fuel can ever be used" it might have been a useful link. However, I didn't. So, it wasn't useful.
Reactors don't produce or create energy. They release it. Are you trying to tell me that you literally can't understand a scenario where the energy cost of refining and or gathering something could be more than what is eventually released?
If you think I'm going to waste my life researching links to prove, to your personal satisfaction, everything that you just plain don't like then you really are deluded.
It's not a widely accepted fact at all. Ask three different scientists and you will get three different anwsers.
It isn't sealioning when I provide sources and you don't.
Where have I done that? I am the one coming at you with actual sources and reading material. You have no proof. They say every accusation is a confession, and that's exactly what this is.
Actually I did. Twice no less. I gave you the Thorium fuel cycle, where you make your own Uranium from Thorium. I also gave the fuel cycle using U-238, which is a different isotope to the U-235 used by current reactors.
I am out right now but I can point you to more sources and better explanations of fuel cycles than mine feel free to ask. Honestly though I think you would just ignore them anyway. If you want to find them yourself look at the molten salt reactor experiments, progress made on LFTR reactors, or the third shipping port reactor in the USA. Those are all experimental I will admit, which is why I pointed to the Soviet and Russian reactors first that produce and use Plutonium, as those are less experimental.
Note I am not talking about fusion reactor technology, as while that's very promising it isn't even close to being implemented. If that does become viable at some point then all of this becomes irrelevant anyway, as fusion is likely to be the best available power source at that point.
Okay so maybe my wording is a little off I will give you that. You are correct that energy is neither created nor destroyed.
Yeah, I stopped reading at the lazy recycled rhetoric.
As you love sources to much, provide a source showing that our energy consumption can increase perpetually
Or is that not how things work?
You mean like the rhetoric you have been using this entire time?
That's not what I am saying. Go and read up on what fertile and fissile are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_material
You can convert a fertile material to a fissile material, then fission that to produce energy. The energy though was already in the fertile material to begin with plus a little bit from the neutrons you added. Eventually you will run out of fertile material, but that's a long way away. For example's sake you would might start with Th-232 which is fertile, add a neutron to get U-233, then fission U-233 to get energy plus some smaller elements called fission products. All of this is nuclear engineering 101. I am not a nuclear physicist and even I understand this.
You can't call everything you don't understand or don't know about made up. It would actually be funny if it wasn't so depressing. The lack of scientific literacy some people have, and the unwillingness to learn you and others demonstrate is truly sad. It wouldn't even be so bad if you were willing to admit you don't know and just walk away. I can understand and respect not caring about nuclear enough to actually research it so long as you are willing to admit that. Instead you are sat there arguing about basic principles of nuclear physics and engineering, the kind of things I learned in sixth form, and calling me a liar just because I know more than you do.