[1] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/16/carbon-fees-mystery-unt...

Subsidies for fossile fuels do not make them cheap. They might make some local form competitive to the international market, but their inherent value comes from simple physics. Fossile fuels are simply much more effective than renewables. This does not mean that we cannot change it, but we need a compelling alternative. Slavery, for instance, was the most efficient means of agriculture for thousands of years. We changed it, somewhat ironically, by replacing it with mechanisation, driven by fossile fuels.

Externalities are extremely hard to give a fair price. We could have a limited CO2 Budget, but that limit would be artificial. Think of a CO2 Credit currency: Who would not be tempted to increase the limit ever so slightly to generate the credits for a new school/hospital/anti-terror-drone?

So, no, I do not think markets offer a solution here. They could help, of course, but the real solution is the introduction of effectively free energy with massive-scale photovoltaics. One barrel Crude oil has an energy of around 1.8MWh and costs between $20 and $70 to produce. Thus, to overcome oil, one needs to get the price per kWh solar down between four and one dollar cent. We are about to reach that point rather soon. From there on it is game over for big oil.

Eh? Almost nowhere transitioned directly from slavery to mechanisation. Not serfdom, even. Heavy mechanisation of agriculture was a 20th century thing.

Most of the resistance to the abolition of slavery in most places was social; it was an upheaval in the way things were done. "GDP will drop" was not, as far as I know, a major concern, nor did it generally happen.

But externalities have no inherent or obvious cost to market participants, either because they are so distributed that the cost per participant is ignorably small, or because the costs are distributed in time (and thus do not affect current market participants) (or both).

The cost of externalities has to be determined and that inevitably involves questions about values. As a trivial example: how much do you (or should you) value clean air? What ppm contamination is worth a dollar to you every time you purchase fuel?

This means that a "free market" with prices that include the cost of externalities must inevitably be regulated in some important sense, since the cost of externalities can only be established via the same processes used for regulation in general. And by most definitions of "free market", that is no longer a "free market".

That doesn't mean this isn't the right thing to do. It just needs better terminology to describe it.

I agree. The externalities should be accounted for. Petroleum should be taxed and not subsidized.

> externalities are untaxed.

??

Free markets are utterly and demonstrably unable to solve climate change.

I'm not actually sure if what I just wrote is parody or not. Arguments about "free markets" are always weird like that, since everybody seems to work with a different definition and they don't really seem to exist

I mean obviously the subsidies are bad but removing them isn't going to solve much of anything by itself.

Yea, this just isn't true. Rich people will just pay more for the same thing. Poor people will just have to pay more to even get to their jobs. It's pure laziness to put this on dogma rather than actually come up with decent policy to shape the market.

What alternative is there to a private jet or a yacht? No, you have to get the fear of prison (or worse) in them to get them to act in a socially rational manner.

But to actually answer your question, battery-electric yachts or aviation powered by biofuels.

If all you know about X is the totemic version reverberating through anti-X echo chambers, you probably don't understand X.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2014/10/12/what-wou...

In American political discourse, this is exactly how the "free market" is defined by the political establishment. Taxing externalities is very unpopular among Republican and Libertarian politicians (Gary Johnson flirted with the idea of a carbon tax, but quickly withdrew support) and is relatively popular among Democrats and the Green Party. Which parties are the ones people associate with free markets?

You can hem and haw about appropriate use of the term "free market" all you want, but calling colloquial usage a "straw man" is disingenuous.

There is a party which is anti-regulation because its constituents are business owners who incur the cost of it. But they incur the cost of both inefficient wasteful regulation and any legitimate pricing of externalities, so they oppose both. One is free markets and the other one isn't.

Just because politicians representing oil producers support both "free markets" and subsidies for oil companies doesn't mean subsidies for oil companies are a component of free markets. It just means that politicians are hypocrites.

I also never claimed that subsidies were a component of the free market nor did I claim any politicians think so. I believe that's an actual straw man :)

The term for what you're doing is called weak man. It's finding some idiot or hypocrite in the world who is actually advancing the weak position so you can claim it isn't a straw man, and then knocking that down instead of addressing the stronger version being advanced by someone else.

> I also never claimed that subsidies were a component of the free market nor did I claim any politicians think so. I believe that's an actual straw man :)

That's an argument. If "free market" means what anybody who says they're for free markets says they want, that would imply that "free market" means oil subsidies. Which is clearly absurd, ergo so was your claim.

That doesn't really work when my argument is that it's the colloquial usage--not just a handful of "idiots".

> If "free market" means what anybody who says they're for free markets says they want, that would imply that "free market" means oil subsidies.

That's an absurd reduction, but that is how language works. This clearly isn't a productive conversation. Have a good evening.

There's always thumbs on the scale. Grandparent is proposing to remove some thumbs (fossil fuel subsidies).

Pigovian taxes are fairly popular among people who consider free markets to be valuable. This is because they retain $free = "can discover prices and conduct trade freely", a more valuable property than $free = "utterly free of any and all governance", which, like real communism, has never been tried.

Just look at German electricity prices.

There is however tremendous investments in battery technology. It has yet to be seen whether that could get cost effective enough combined with wind and solar to completely get rid of the need for Nuclear.

It would have been great if we had built enough nuclear plants in the 20th century, but at this point it’s pretty clear that most countries would better off going straight to cheaper renewables.

http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nucle...

This doesn't seem to support your general argument.

Do you have any evidence that renewables are generally cheaper than nuclear when accounting for storage?

How about asking what conditions would be needed in a different country to make new reactors much more feasible than in Ontario?

> The storage report also shows a rapid drop in the costs of batteries, which leads to wind + storage or solar + storage getting increasingly competitive (and putting natural gas peaker plants out of business). [1] [2]

8 minute energy's blended solar and storage costs are roughly $40/MWh, just above existing nuclear generation per MWh costs (that doesn't fully internalize waste disposal costs and other ancillary costs of that power). “The vast majority of our development pipeline are solar-plus-storage projects, with more than 24GWh of energy storage under development,” 8minute Solar Energy’s Sean Kiernan said. [3] Portugal just signed a deal for a 700MW project at 1.3 cents/kwh, a historic low (mentioned to demonstrate the cost decline continues, and can be expected to continue into the future). [4]

If you're looking for storage that discharges for days, that is not necessary with robust transmission infrastructure (which needs to be built anyway due to aging infra in the US) and overbuilding of cheap (and rapidly cheaper) renewables [5].

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-continue-to-get-...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/22/solar-costs-wind-costs-...

[3] https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...

[4] https://www.pv-tech.org/news/52925

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580707 (Hacker News: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills)

Obviously laws of physics do not bar it from scaling, the question is around cost.

UK current electricity demand is 30GW. So the demand for one hour is similar to the entire lithium battery production for a whole year.

How many hours worth of storage would we need to balance the energy grid using only battery storage? Off grid homes usually aim for around 3-7 days worth. Obviously that's excessive for a whole country where weather conditions vary across the country but I'd think several house would be required to account for peak in demand at times of low production.

Realistically distributed storage and load side control I think are more likely to be a bigger part of making it work.

"In 2019, LG Chem had the most lithium battery production capacity at over 50 GWh. LG Chem [is] increasing EV battery production capacity to as much as 110GWh by the end of 2020."

The design of a modern grid with battery storage would change as well - no reason to have singular giant storage plants. A mixture of solar, wind, and hydroelectric with distributed storage doesn't need to self-sustain 30GWh of storage, it needs to be able to smooth distribution and handle peaks. It'd be far more honest to look at seasonal average loads versus peaks, plus a buffer.

[1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103401/predicted-lithiu...

The UKs current installed pumped hydro resources amount to some 28GWh. Clearly we need a multiple of that if that is currently required to balance a grid consisting of largely dispatchable power. Given that, I don't think my estimate of needing several hours worth storage is too far out.

That was the first statistic I found. Even if we say current production is 200GWh of lithium battery storage, that isn't going to go very far if the rest of the world also need to create similar storage infrastructure.

So good luck running the grid on batteries for more than 15 minutes. We'd probably need to cover Alaska with lithium batteries.

At least 40% base load is what is needed and one only gets that from nuclear and geothermal if we discard fossil fuels. Maybe solar thermal with molten salt storage too, dunno.

Point of use energy generation and storage is a much bigger deal than I think people realize. I believe internally Tesla thinks this is many times it’s car business.

We are still struggling store industrial chemicals for mere half dozen years without it causing tragic accidents, while Canada might not be Lebanon today, there is no way to know how well off our future generations will be and whether they can safeguard the waste, both safely and securely from hostile actors without it being an big burden on them .

It will be costly problem at best or a major disaster at worst for all live forms. all this to have some power for 30-40 years.

If the world continues on a high-emissions trajectory, and people do not later pursue active remediation measures to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, it will take hundreds of thousands of years for natural silicate weathering to draw down atmospheric concentrations to preindustrial levels. More than half will be removed by faster processes, within 1000 years, but a significant minority of the excess will go away over the course of ~400,000 years:

https://www.nature.com/articles/climate.2008.122/figures/1

This is actually longer than the time it will take for the majority of fission products and actinides generated in nuclear fuel to decay. The waste CO2 problem is also distributed over the whole globe rather than easily confined to storage casks like spent nuclear fuel is.

Neptuimum-237 has half life of 2.144 Million years and is produced as nuclear fuel waste and one of most mobile nuclides at the Yucca repository. It will take 100's of millions of years for sizeable quantity to go through its decay chain and be safe.

There are safer better options than nuclear to coal. A 1000 year time line of natural restoration is not acceptable and needs to be addressed, but trading it for millions of years is not the right solution.

Where do you imagine billions of tons of CO2 will go? It does not have a half-life like nuclear waste, once you've taken that carbon out of the ground, it is here to stay for tens of millions of years. There will never be enough trees to sequester this carbon. We must expend trillions of dollars to reprocess it back into oil or rock-like formations.

Also in the entire history of nuclear industry there has been no credible case of 'hostile actors' coming close to stealing nuclear waste. That's because doing so doesn't make any sense - it is useless to nations, and if someone like Taliban tried to handle it, they'd probably die in the process.

Nuclear waste is not a liquid that might spill and run away if you aren't careful. When properly handled it is vitrified in solid glass, and it doesn't go anywhere. Sweden is placing it in underground storage in solid rock, in a region that's geologically stable for millions of years - it will never bother anyone again or cost a penny more.

Where do you think the fancy chemicals in the fiberglass turbines or the exotic metals in the solar panels comes from?

>We are still struggling store industrial chemicals for mere half dozen years without it causing tragic accident

Oh boy are you going to love the high tech chemical industry that underpins the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels.

All these things are dirty if you don't clean up after them. Nuclear is pretty clean just by virtue of how little material you need to process per kilowatt. A kilo of uranium gets you a lot more energy than a kilo of turbine or a kilo of solar panel.

They're all better than fossil fuels because they don't crap byproducts into the atmosphere but you need to have so much less underlying industry per energy generated with nuclear that it's just inherently cleaner than anything else. This is assuming that you're cleaning up after whichever one you choose.

Sure plutonium-239 with half life of 24,000 is not particularly radioactive, neptunium-237 has half live of more than 2 million years, both are extremely dangerous to humans for multiples of that time.

Half live is not directly related to the level of damage gamma decay can do to you. Elements are perfectly capable of emitting hazardous amounts of radiation for thousands and millions of years time.

We cannot barely build a phone to last 3 years, The incentive to not create problems for future generations is simply not there. If it was, we would doing a lot more for pollution and plastics and the mass extinction event we are currently causing.

I don't believe our track record as a species warrants any trust on the ability to build containment to last thousands of years.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels generate so much waste per kWh that it's impossible to contain it, so we just spew it over the globe at day one, changing the Earth's climate and driving mass extinction (and killing a million per year), but it's OK, because if stop using fossil fuels today and wait a few hundred years then things will be back to normal. Maybe.

Of all the ideas on nuclear waste disposal including launching on rocket into the sun, this is the most dangerous[1].

Firstly If you are replacing Coal and other methods of energy generation with Uranium the amount of waste is not small anymore ( it already is not small in any sense).

Cooling down the temperature is not the only problem. Neptunium-237 has half life of 2Million years!, plutonium 239 of more than 24,000 years, these materials will be radioactive for a longer time than we as species have been on this planet. Grinding them fine and spreading them everywhere may very well kill all life on this planet for ten of millions of years, it may never come back.

Coal is bad, nobody is saying it is better than nuclear, but replacing coal with nuclear is opening a whole new can of worms, we are not equipped to handle, there are plenty of other safer alternatives .

[1] In in interest of a civil discussion, I will leave it at that.

The energy density of uranium is roughly 80,620,000 MJ/kg [1]. Existing nuclear power plants have thermal efficiency between 30-40%, roughly speaking [2], so let's be pessimistic and choose 30%. That means actual usable energy density of uranium is 24,186,000 MJ/kg, or 6,718,333 kWh/kg.

The world produced 27,644,800 GWh = 27,644,800,000,000 kWh of electricy on 2019 [3]. If we used nuclear to generate all of this, we'd need 4,114,830 kg of uranium, or 4,115 ton per year. Let's round up to 5,000 ton.

Spent nuclear fuel contains about 0.8% plutonium 239 [4], so our 5,000 ton of uranium will generate about 40 ton of plutonium 239, with half-life 24,000 years and radioactivity of 2.3 GBq/g [5]. So our hypothetical nuclear waste will have radioactivity of 2.3 GBq/g * 40 t = 92 PBq. Which is a lot.

...or is it?

Potassium, naturally occurring and essential for life, is naturally radioactive (31 Bq/g), because it contains 0.012% K40 [6]. Seawater is about 0.04% potassium [7], which contributes to a natural radioactivity of 12.4 Bq/kg, or 12.4 kBq/t from potassium alone.

Actually, let's forget the earth. Let's spread the nuclear waste evenly on the Mediterranean - volume 3,750,000 km^3 [8] - who needs Italy anyway?

It contains 3,750,000,000,000,000 ton of seawater, or 46,500,000,000,000,000 kBq of natural radioactivity, which is 46,500 PBq. So our hypothetical dump of plutonium 239 will increase the Mediterranean sea's natural radiation level by about 92/46500 = 0.2% per year [9].

A far cry from extinction of all known life, I have to say.

* By the way, you may want to re-consider before saying stuff like "Pu239 has half-life of 24,000 years - it's not safe!" Coal, for example, contains tons of mercury, which is not radiactive (i.e., it has a half-life of infinity). After 24,000 years, there will be 50% of Pu239, but 100% of mercury left from coal ashes. Which is worse?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#In_nuclear_power...

[5] https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Plutonium_Proper...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Sea

[9] Of course the actual effect will be higher because there will be other isotopes, shorter-lived and more radioactive. That's why I proposed keeping the waste in a fridge for 200 years first. I'm not a monster.

Also, I highly doubt that if humanity makes it even a thousand more years that we'll have trouble finding a productive use for depleted uranium or other spent fissile fuels. They have many interesting properties.

I was not arguing for coal in any way I am merely pointing saying Nuclear is not as clean as pro nuclear people argue.

Yes the NORM released by Coal and other human activities is substantial, However it is not remotely comparable to Fukishma, Chernobyl and bikini atoll . I don't trust any of the world governments to build a safe reactor and I don't share your optimism on that we will find ways to handle the waste. Instead of trusting luck that we will find clean ways to handle, we can start building plants when we do find them, .

It is recency bias to think we will be able to keep technologically innovating at the same pace we have in the last few decades or even few hundred years, most of our history innovation has happened rapidly only under certain conditions, it may be that those conditions will continue to favour, or maybe physical limits such as moore's law slowing down, resource limits stuck on single planet economically or socio political structural problems can slow down innovation substantially, Any of them could be a great filter in the Fermi Paradox sense.

We'd certainly like for those people to keep the mess stored safely, but there are incentives for them to not do so, even assuming they had the ability to.

And you'd better not ignore how much radiation is released by coal.

It is not:

https://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/Nuclear-power-a-false-solu...

However, that's not an innate property of nuclear, and there are relatively unproven designs that may be sufficiently cost effective and safe to be a desirable part of the mix.

I think the free market will solve this problem better than is speculating about it on HN. If its cost effective, it will happen, if it's not, it won't.

There dose not exist to my knowledge (would be happy to be proven wrong) any storage solution that currently operated commercial from buying cheap renewable energy at peak production and regain investment and operational costs by selling it expensive during lows. Not a single one in the world.

At best any comparison between storage and nuclear plants is between two currently non-viable commercial alternatives, both requiring massive government funding to be built. The only commercial viable power source right now is renewable that can compete against fossil fuels when the weather make it viable, and fossil fuels as base load and as a dynamic source that can spin up based on weather conditions and demands.

Also, you're simply unaware of commercially successful energy storage. The most high profile example being perhaps the battery pack Tesla installed in Australia for $90.6M AUD, and generated $13.1M AUD in revenue in just six months[1]. Clearly a very good ROI. Pumped Hydro is used all over the world and is even more cost effective.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18715585/tesla-australia-...

Pumped Hydro like Bath County Pumped Storage Station does exist but do not seem to buy cheap renewable when the price is low and resell it when it is high, but rather operate as a balancer for PJM Interconnection which get almost all its power from fossil fuels.

So do you have a link for a profitable battery that buys energy from renewables when there is an overproduction from renewable sources and then later sold when the prices has risen? That would be a solar / wind and storage combination. Using energy from fossil fuels to pump water is just not the same, even if doing so creates a profit for the company.

Every time I have read about a new storage facility they usually start with first describing capacity, then go on to say that this can enable a future use with renewables, but that right now it operate to balance the grid of existing (mostly fossil fuel based) power plants. I would very much like to be proven wrong and that there exist a viable commercial operation where we can see X amount of green energy produced by wind and solar going into the storage, and X (minus a conversion cost) of that energy going out, with one table showing how much the green energy costed when going in and an other table showing how much they got in profit when it went out.

"Tesla applies for UK power generation licence in [virtual power plant] play. ... The move suggests Tesla may be planning to build large-scale battery storage projects in the UK"[0]

[0] https://theenergyst.com/tesla-applies-for-uk-power-generatio...

In 2019 nuclear produced 4.9% of the gridpower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

This is hardly an "unprecedented scale", which AFAIK lies elsewhere: https://unfccc.int/news/china-and-india-lead-global-renewabl...

Maybe in a different regulatory and economic environment, nuclear could be competitive. I don't know. Even coal is becoming uncompetitive in the US compared with renewables, and it's a lot cheaper and lower risk than nuclear.

I'm sure this is not the case, but there are often environmental and political concerns around hydro. For example, Ethiopia's new dam on the Nile river has caused tension with their neighbours, who're worried about the control it gives Ethiopia over the water supply in the river [0]

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/21/africa/ethiopia-nile-rive...

For example, Seattle is largely hydroelectric powered. The city's public utility even owns the dams, so whatever energy that isn't used in Seattle they sell to California at market rates, which makes energy conservation a profit center for them. Washington also has major mountain ranges plus the Columbia river. Kansas, on the other hand, is short on anywhere to get falling water.

On the other hand, salmon are a crucial species to the ecosystem out here. They're the primary food source of the local orca population. They're a major commercial fishery. They're one of the major sources of nutrients along the rivers going into the interior. Isotope analysis of trees along the rivers out here shows that a large amount of their growth is driven by decaying salmon.

Ross Dam and its kin that Seattle's power comes from are high enough up where we don't think there was historically much salmon run. There's a study going on now rechecking that. We've removed the Elwa River dam on the Olympic Peninsula, though. It was egregious: the requirements for salmon access were already in place when it was built, and they just ignored it and then refused to pay the fines. The Snake River dams up the Columbia are similarly problematic, and need to be removed.

This is different from, say, Switzerland, where their high dams like Grande Dixence don't have a comparable environmental effect.

> “The river was transformed from being a thriving producer of millions of fish such as shad, herring, striped bass, Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and alewives and supporting a wide cornucopia of other species ranging from otters to eagles — into a wastewater drainage system,” Jeff Crane, a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Martin’s University, wrote in a paper published in 2009.

https://therevelator.org/edwards-dam-removal/

These are both demonstrably untrue.

1st, due to methane releases of decaying plant matter in the flood zones depending on what is flooded Hydro can actually produce over double the emissions of the worst coal plants, annually. For example the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, has produced three-and-a-half times more emissions than an equivalent generating plant running on oil.

Based on what was flooded by the WAC Bennett dam in BC, BC likely has more GHG emmissions in their energy mix than Alberta.

And based on the size of the reservoirs(some of the largest in the world) in Quebec & that the flooded mostly boreal forest & peat land, that is also true for Quebec.

2nd, Dams breaking have caused a lot of deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Thanks for the info, I had no idea. Is this a long term effect where reservoirs will continue to emit CO2 into the long term future, or is it just a one-off cost to transforming land into a lake? If it is just a temporary source of CO2, how long does it take for the emissions to peter out and at what point will the hydroelectric dam become even with coal in terms of emissions?

Aside from its environmental concerns, it will be of limited use in decarbonizing the economy because pretty much all of the useful locations have already been developed.

We are very far from the max. But the concentrated opportunities are mostly taken already. What remains is geographically dispersed, and consequently expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

However, nobody told the sun that, so it keeps heating up the seas, evaporating their water, and letting the resulting moisture drift until it gets pushed up into cold air by some land obstruction like a mountain range...

"Pumping" the water uphill in this manner is very inefficient, but like all legacy technologies, we're stuck with it until we can invent a replacement ;-)

You need either nuclear or some heretofore not invented storage technology (or both) to get a reliable grid where wind and solar are a majority of your capacity.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-gross-e...

Why? If you have nuclear, why bother with wind and solar - especially since wind and solar don't play well with nuclear.