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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2845 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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You're not seeing what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the essence of modern man is a commitment to moving forward, to striving for improvement, such that we can solve problems in the future we can't solve now.

I disagree - but this is a really complicated topic that would best deserve a thread to itself and goes very far afield from the original topic of conversation. If you really want to talk about what defines the essence of humanity, that would make for a great philosophical debate, but I will have to simply agree to disagree in the context of this discussion.

We agree on this. I'm not happy about it at all.

At least we can be happy about finding a point of agreement.

I'm not a paleoclimatology expert, but my understanding is that it will never, ever be green, because the limiting factor isn't temperature, it's that it's a high desert where mountains on both sides intercept any humid air.

I think that the world on the other side of climate change is going to be incredibly different - changes in climate and rising sea levels will produce an incredibly difficult to predict set of changes to the environment, especially when potential human interventions are taken into account. Of course, a thousand years is chump change when compared to the actual scale of the problem - some of the products of nuclear waste remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, substantially longer than the entirety of recorded human civilisation and potentially for longer than the existence of anatomically modern humans. I am not certain that we can actually predict exactly how the Nevada desert ends up by the time these byproducts cease being dangerous.

The sense I get is that you are just motivated to believe every negative thing you can find about nuclear power at once, and don't really care whether or not they fit together, and so you're not able to make a strong and focused case against it.

The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable, and the other arguments are simply pre-emptive attacks on the common means of breaking the link between energetic viability and financial viability. Point number 2? The price of uranium being rendered comically low by colonial exploitation is a way of masking the true input costs. That is only relevant in the case of France, but their nuclear power system was the most prominent example of a financially viable nuclear power system (that has since gone into restructuring - c'est la vie). Point number 3? The costs of storage and maintenance being ignored or offloaded onto the rest of society obscures the true expenses of nuclear power generation and can create a temporary illusion of profitability. Avoiding paying those costs simply shifts the burden onto others, and in many cases magnifies them.

Point number 4 does have the least substantial link to my main point, but the relevance of renewables is that they make the opportunity cost of pursuing nuclear power even starker. If we already have power systems which give us a better deal than nuclear, nuclear becomes an even worse idea.

The main focus of my arguments on this topic is simply Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Financial viability is a fairly good proxy for whether or not a given source of energy provides enough of a return to make its exploitation viable.

That's not what I'd call focusing on Energy Returned on Energy Invested, that's focusing on financials, claiming, but never proving, it's a good proxy, and calling it a day. Make the case in KWh, and we might get somewhere.

That's not what I'd call focusing on Energy Returned on Energy Invested, that's focusing on financials, claiming, but never proving, it's a good proxy, and calling it a day.

You're right, I don't actually go and prove that it is a good proxy. But the reason why I believe that is simple - that's the only real way we have to determine if a given power source can function viably in a modern western society, and the points where that connection breaks are fairly easy to identify and take precautions around. Actually measuring KWh is definitely worthwhile and there are analyses you can make with regards to it, but it gets exceedingly complicated in a way that finances avoid. How much energy went into constructing the vehicles which mined and transported that uranium? How reliably was that power generated? Was it limited to specific times (power that can only be generated in off-peak hours and can't be stored isn't as useful)? For the purposes of determining whether or not a given power source can feasibly supply power to a first world economy, finances are one of the best tools we have. But that said, to the best of my knowledge nuclear EROEI as measured in KWh still isn't very good. Mining, transporting and enriching uranium tends to consume enough energy that the return isn't terribly worthwhile.

You're right, I don't actually go and prove that it is a good proxy. But the reason why I believe that is simple - that's the only real way we have to determine if a given power source can function viably in a modern western society, and the points where that connection breaks are fairly easy to identify and take precautions around. Actually measuring KWh is definitely worthwhile and there are analyses you can make with regards to it, but it gets exceedingly complicated in a way that finances avoid.

Well, while it's true that financial profit is the only way to have a power source function in a modern society, but the reasons are completely different than "Energy Returned on Energy Invested" and are subject to rather dramatic changes. Something as simple as an increase of energy prices can completely change the result, and that's without going into all the way by which costs of nuclear power have been artificially increased. By contrast a negative EROEI means you're up against the laws of thermodynamics and there's literally nothing you can do to make that power source work. Yes, it's complicated to calculate it in KWh, but it's really the only way to properly make the argument. A financial analysis does not avoid any of the pitfalls of actually measuring energy requirements, and it introduces many inaccuracies of it's own.

How reliably was that power generated? Was it limited to specific times (power that can only be generated in off-peak hours and can't be stored isn't as useful)? For the purposes of determining whether or not a given power source can feasibly supply power to a first world economy, finances are one of the best tools we have.

I don't think financies measure any of these things at all, which is why I think you should stop claiming it's about EREOI (or actually show the negative energy returns). Finances measure opportunity costs, and not even relative to other energy sources, but relative to all other things in the economy, so it's not really a good tool for this sort of analysis at all.

Mining, transporting and enriching uranium tends to consume enough energy that the return isn't terribly worthwhile.

Transport costs next to nothing in terms of energy. If you want to make the argument that it's because of mining or refining, be my guest, by provide numbers in terms of actual energy.

A financial analysis does not avoid any of the pitfalls of actually measuring energy requirements, and it introduces many inaccuracies of it's own.

You're right, though it is more useful for things like "Is this worth using in the world we actually live in as opposed to the one filled with spherical cows" - hence my preference.

Transport costs next to nothing in terms of energy. If you want to make the argument that it's because of mining or refining, be my guest, by provide numbers in terms of actual energy.

As far as I can tell from the literature I have available to me, nuclear has an EROI ranging from 5-15 when you ignore the studies that give a wildly inflated amount by leaving out key steps of the process (if you judge it solely by how much energy is in a given amount of uranium fuel pellets it blows oil out of the water - but that's not really helpful).

As far as I can tell from the literature I have available to me, nuclear has an EROI ranging from 5-15 when you ignore the studies that give a wildly inflated amount by leaving out key steps of the process

Can you link one of these papers that you're reading? I think it would make a much better argument then pivoting to financials.

Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796

http://theoildrum.com/node/3877

https://www.stormsmith.nl/Resources/ISA_LifeCycle.pdf

Working out EROI for nuclear is actually really annoying and tough - not all uranium ore is created equally, not all uranium is extracted equally, uranium enrichment costs are varied, etc. You can't actually just go "Oh nuclear has an EROEI of x", you have to say "This particular nuclear power plant has an EROEI of y that will decline over time due to the depletion of high quality uranium ore". Talking about the finances of nuclear is actually substantially easier and more useful when it comes to talking about the viability of nuclear as a power source for society.

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