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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36365 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I caught this exchange after the previous thread had mostly closed, and I'd like to push back on the claim a little.

BinaryHobo:

I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.

Did anything ever come of that?

The_Nybbler:

The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

It's true that hydroelectric power sources, as in dams, have saturated the supply of naturally-occurring American sites. You need a river in a rocky valley, and there are only so many of those to go around, and once they're used up, it's very hard to create more of them.

What haven't been exhausted, and in fact what can be readily found or exploited, are height differentials in general. Hills, mountains, exhausted mines, deep valleys with no water supply, all offer significant height differentials, are naturally occurring, and can be readily built out into large-scale closed-loop pumped-hydro storage, with a closed reservoir at one extreme and a closed reservoir at the other, and a reversible turbine to generate potential energy in times of excess and power in times of deficit. Should those be exhausted, off-shore dropoffs are an enormous resource of the same, at the cost of more difficult installation and operation in every regard. And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea or underground reservoirs on land can be constructed as well.

All of this, of course, is dumb and America should just take the leash off nuclear, as argued here. (I've not read it yet, but I expect it to make the points I would inline here.) That we haven't yet is a shame and a testament to our collective idiocy and Puritan hangover.

I wonder, is there anyone on The Motte who opposes nuclear power? Either because of concerns relating to safety, waste disposal and other "environmentalist" canards, or because it's supposedly uneconomical.

And if everyone here is pro-nuclear, why is that? Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

Like embedding a Tweet? I don't think you can do that. But there's a "Copy link" button under every comment and you can put an @ in front of a username so that it links to their profile and they get notified.

The pragmatic argument against nuclear power is just that no one seems willing to fund R&D or construction of new plants. It may be that everyone is reluctant for stupid reasons, but that's the way things stand. I'm still hopeful that some form of improved, miniaturized reactors will be developed despite these obstacles, and be available if the energy situation ever becomes desperate enough for governments to come to their senses and build them.

The pragmatic argument against nuclear power is just that no one seems willing to fund R&D or construction of new plants.

Because the regulatory barriers are insurmountable.

For literally every rich country? I know that there's some amount of conspiracy regulatory coordination that goes on between different countries, but that seems like a weak argument at the world scale.

For literally every rich country?

China is building new nuclear plants.

China is not a country rich enough to afford environmentalism. (All relevant militaries have nuclear navies for that reason as well.)

That said, China (like Ukraine before them) is also a nation whose culture favors the creation of Dyatlovs; the grand irony is that cultures competent enough to not have their reactors explode in any meaningful way are... also all cultures prosperous enough to afford not building them.

If US citizens were in any position to trust their government like they were coming out of the wartime economy... well, that's why they were able to build out nuclear as rapidly as they did in the first place. Unfortunately, there's no ascendant Germany (or China, for that matter) to salvage that depression in trust this time.

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