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DOE Announces $2.7 Billion From President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda to Boost Domestic Nuclear Fuel Supply Chain

Wow, some industry lobbyists got government funding, amazing. Global fossil fuel subsidies are at $7 trillion, so I guess those are really relevant to our future as well!

I don’t want developing countries to waste their money on nuclear power when they can get much more cost effective renewables.

No industry has quite so much vaporware technology as nuclear power. Any idiot can promise and never deliver. Look at Elon Musk.

There is so much uranium in the world. Even if we completely switched over to nuclear power and without improvements in Nuclear tech, our sun would have fizzled out and we still would have uranium left.

TL;DR: If we switched over to nuclear, we’d burn through the world’s reserves of accessible uranium ore in less than twenty years. Hopefully the sun will last a bit longer than that.

According to 2022 Red Book, there are around 8 million tonnes of Uranium which we could extract for $260 or less, per kg. The current price for uranium is around half that, FYI, so nuclear fuel prices would have at least doubled by the point we’re extracting that last million tonne.

Nuclear power plants use around 20 tonnes of uranium per TWh, according to the world nuclear association, and world energy consumption is around 25,000 TWh per year, according to the IEA. That would be half a million tonnes of uranium consumed per year. Meaning we would burn through the world’s reserve of reasonably accessible uranium in just sixteen years.

In hot countries, thermal solar is a great opportunity - Imagine big mirrors that concentrate the sunlight on one particular spot.

But Photovoltaic is used just fine - one of the largest solar farms is near Dubai, and Saudi are planning on being a massive provider of solar power in the future - Saudi Arabia launches world’s largest solar-power plant

So, no, sorry, nuclear power isn’t relevant anymore. I know it’s tempting to cling to outdated technologies sometimes, I enjoy using a typewriter for example, but when it comes to solving climate change, I think we should use the best tools available, which nuclear is definitely not. It’s just too expensive and slow to provision.

Yeah, are you going vegan, though?

Except when we have 100% renewable low emission electricity and transition away from CFC refrigerants, they’ll essentially drop to zero emissions. There’s nothing particularly bad about air conditioning. It is more and more becoming a necessity for survival due to climate change. If you don’t like that, your target is the fossil fuel industry, not the working class people who use air conditioning to avoid suffering.

Meanwhile, animal agriculture will always be extremely harmful to the environment due to methane, nitrous oxide, and various other issues. I’m happy for you to criticise people for using air conditioning if you’ll commit to going vegan.

Are you vegan?

My point is that the anti air conditioner stuff is just greenwashing, that’s all. The facts are that air conditioning isn’t a particularly bad technology in any way.

Sure, of course, air conditioners have environmental impacts, that’s obvious - but so does building solar panels or electric cars.

Inverter heat pumps are one of the obvious solutions to mitigate climate change because they’re much, much more efficient than other forms of heating and cooling, we should be pushing for them to become common in Europe, not jumping on some bandwagon we don’t really understand because traditionally Europe hasn’t been hot enough to need it.

I’m not sure what you think is happening here, but energy is just being moved around. Air conditioners aren’t just belching out extra heat. If air conditioners were 100% efficient then they’d break even on heating, but in reality they’re much better than that, pretty much all air conditioners are at least 200% but most are more than that. This is achieved by using the same effect that your refrigerator uses - the radiator behind the freezer isn’t mega hot, right? You could look into vapor-compression refrigeration to learn more.

This is a bit like complaining that electric heaters are a big problem because they use a lot of energy and may contain greenhouse gas products inside them.

There are entire industries belching thick black smoke into the atmosphere because it’s slightly cheaper than the clean alternative. That’s where climate change efforts should be focused, not on the small creature comforts provided for humans so that they don’t suffer in the heat.