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0 pointspfdietz3y ago0 comments

Yes, and none of that is demonstrated, in the sense you seem to demand for renewables and storage. Lab exercises are smaller than what would happen in the field by many orders of magnitude and are happening in idealized conditions. The cost estimates are aspirational. This hypocrisy of yours is what I've been pointing out.

Extracting uranium from seawater on the scale needed to fuel burner reactors requires massive engineering. The estimate I've seen is that fueling one 1 GWe burner reactor takes a seafloor uranium absorption field (suspended in a strong ocean current; if you have to pump the seawater yourself it's already too expensive) of 170 square kilometers. The power/area is already much lower than the time-averaged output from PV.

Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.

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Manuel_D3y ago

> Yes, and none of that is demonstrated, in the sense you seem to demand for renewables and storage

All I demand is that people deliver at the specified cost. Not, for example, a prototype with unspecified cost or a pilot program with much higher cost to and promises that it'll get cheaper at scale.

> Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.

I could say the same about you. Nobody is seriously considering pumping seawater to filter uranium. This is a totally bad faith argument.

And you give this estimate of 170 without actually giving a source for it nor specifying details like how far apart the buoys are spaced, or if reprocessing is used (which cuts down fuel use by more than an order of magnitude).