Our Special Guest, Tom Nelson, a Movie Producer, Podcast Host, and Substack Author, is stops to talk about why we're not shocked that Americans are not afraid of climate change.
Exxon spent about 15 years on a biofuel from plankton program and gave up relatively recently.
No surprise. The energy density was always going to be poor. The amount of water that would have to be processed to collect a usable amount of plankton is always going to be self defeating.
Long before Elon saved Twitter and Free speech, he was already nutty about solar power. Remember the HyperLoop transportation tubes and pods? He planned to solar power it? So it doesn't run at night?
The only way to settle Mars is with nuclear power. You can import all the Methane in the world from Triton, but you'd have no oxygen to burn it with. Want to get oxygen from iron oxide on Mars? Oh wait, that requires energy. That oxygen is already "burnt".
SMRs have some potential advantages, but so far, the vast majority of SMRs are paper reactors, with nothing built. Also, unit cost of electricity from SMRs is predicted to be much higher than unit cost of electricity from large traditional reactors.
Large traditional reactors are already at several 9s of reliability and safety, so I think claiming that new designs are "vastly" safer is a bit of hyperbole. How much do the new reactors shave off of the .000001 of risk?
Any progress on nuclear is wonderful, but I think the hype behind mostly paper Small Modular Reactors is getting in the way of us dedicating ourselves to building hundreds of large traditional reactors which will actually provide affordable electricity in the quantifies we need.
Exxon spent about 15 years on a biofuel from plankton program and gave up relatively recently.
No surprise. The energy density was always going to be poor. The amount of water that would have to be processed to collect a usable amount of plankton is always going to be self defeating.
Long before Elon saved Twitter and Free speech, he was already nutty about solar power. Remember the HyperLoop transportation tubes and pods? He planned to solar power it? So it doesn't run at night?
The only way to settle Mars is with nuclear power. You can import all the Methane in the world from Triton, but you'd have no oxygen to burn it with. Want to get oxygen from iron oxide on Mars? Oh wait, that requires energy. That oxygen is already "burnt".
SMRs have some potential advantages, but so far, the vast majority of SMRs are paper reactors, with nothing built. Also, unit cost of electricity from SMRs is predicted to be much higher than unit cost of electricity from large traditional reactors.
Large traditional reactors are already at several 9s of reliability and safety, so I think claiming that new designs are "vastly" safer is a bit of hyperbole. How much do the new reactors shave off of the .000001 of risk?
Any progress on nuclear is wonderful, but I think the hype behind mostly paper Small Modular Reactors is getting in the way of us dedicating ourselves to building hundreds of large traditional reactors which will actually provide affordable electricity in the quantifies we need.
Another great discussion