Cynical me thinks that if NASA tried to get funding for a project that could detect large scale methane plumes which might be used against the oil and gas industry they might just not be able to get that funding.
Cynical me is always impressed in how much funding goes to find emitters outside the develop world:
> "...emit methane at high rates span central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States. By finding these sites from space, the satellite is bringing an important perspective to climate accountability,"
USA could close all of its coal mines with the same money spent in emergency Covid vaccines
> USA could close all of its coal mines with the same money spent in emergency Covid vaccines
Have we not recently been reminded that the true cost of reducing domestic energy production is much higher than the mere bottom line estimate of shuttering the production facilities?
Germany and France might like a word. With Ukraine slowly shaking their heads in the background.
The way that the USA would "close all of its coal mines" would involve replacing that production with different domestic energy production; not by becoming reliant on foreign energy markets.
All the more so for switching to wind and solar (and reducing usage). Nobody is saying cancel energy. Just that switching away from coal is probably a good idea.
Speaking as a non-American who doesn't fully understand the factors at play: why can't you guys just get your military-industrial complex to build you some nationalized nuclear plants on federal land in the middle of nowhere, where there aren't any NIMBYs to get in the way? (You could even just reuse the 'federal land in the middle of nowhere' that all your since-decommissioned nuclear-weapons testing facilities are sitting on!)
We can’t even agree on a place to store our waste in the middle of nowhere. Billions of dollars have been spent since the 1980’s on Yucca Mountain and that still hasn’t happened.
We should. I would be a single issue voter for almost any candidate who proposed this. We should fill the state of Nevada with nuclear plants and export the energy as far as possible.
> build you some nationalized nuclear plants on federal land in the middle of nowhere, where there aren't any NIMBYs to get in the way?
I'm not in the US, but I guess for the same reason why Sahara desert is not yet became world largest solar power plant. You can't just build power plants in the middle of nowhere since energy transportation infrastructure isn't free and there some laws of physics involved.
Also I pretty certain that US government and especially military are well aware that centralization of power production is not good for resilience of the grid and national security. One huge centralised nuclear facility would be much easier target than hundreds and thousands of smaller power plants.
Who said anything about (geographic) centralization / "one huge facility"? Federal land is everywhere in the US (see the diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands). There's lots and lots of "middle of nowheres" owned by the federal government, in pretty much every state, dispersed enough that each one is not too far from easy grid connection.
If you've ever seen what is done to wire up a hydroelectric dam in a "middle of nowhere" river valley to the grid, this wouldn't be all too different: clearcut a narrow straight-line path through a few hundred miles of wilderness, up and over and mountains/rivers/etc, and run some ultra-high-voltage transmission lines over them. Here's what that looks like in the abstract (https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...), and in practice (https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/powerlines-across-mountains-...)
(It especially wouldn't be all too different, because most Federal land is in the Rockies, so these nuclear plants would likely be mostly built in almost exactly the same terrain as hydroelectric dams are built in, and so dealing with basically the same grid-routing challenges.)
And while all those middle-of-nowheres would provide room enough for hundreds/thousands of those https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm..., if you like, you really don't need to go against efficiencies of scale; 20% of power in the US is already covered by just 54 plants, and those only in 28 states. Presuming some real "this land has no land value" places where you could build as big as you like, you wouldn't need to more than double that number to cover 80% (because you could do quite a few reactors per site.)
Why would this be okay? Well, remember, nuclear is base load generation; meaning that it doesn't compete with (most) renewables, only with other base-load generation — mainly oil/coal and hydro-power. All that distributed solar/wind/etc infrastructure that's good for grid fault-tolerance would still be there if China lobbed some missiles at the big plants.
Natural Uranium required to start a 1GW nuclear reactor: 7500t
New Net Renewable generation in US: 5GW (this is hilariously low. Compare 75GW in china)
Cost per GW of nuclear: $10bn -- maybe half that without NIMBYS if we assume how much the military industrial complex charges for stuff is the sameas tye juclear industry.
Us military budget: $750bn
Proportion of US military budget to match China's current renewable growth: 50-100%
Proportion of World Uranium production to match US renewable growth: 80%
Proportion of World Uranium production to match China's current renewable growth: 1200%
Proportion of world Uranium reserves to match China's current renewable growth for 1 year: 7%
I mean, building nuclear reactors you never turn on is a better use of money than what they normally do, but they can hardly be out bringing democracy to Niger, Namibia, and Kazakhstan to get free fuel if they're busy building something useful.
It would still massively reduce emissions though, simply by virtue of the fact that they wouldn't be burning millions of tonnes of oil for normal operations.
Still better to build wind if you want electricity. If you've figured out how to make electricity teleport, then renewables can do it with almost no storage.
I think your key assumption here is wrong: uranium isn't fundamentally expensive. It's expensive because there isn't enough current demand for it to bring more uranium mines and enrichment facilities online. Uranium used to be cheaper (adjusted for inflation) per gram than it is now, because there used to be more of those facilities online than there are now. With increased demand, it would be cheaper again.
> Uranium used to be cheaper (adjusted for inflation) per gram than it is now, because there used to be more of those facilities online than there are now.
This is both false and entirely irrelevant. The costs are driven by capital (and require supply chains that don't exist) not fuel. Minerals get more expensive to extract after you extract the easy stuff. Building out 100s of GW of new nuclear would require extracting the stuff that costs several times more than present -- to the point where fuel costs would be equal to the LCOE of solar.
What is relevant is the entirety of world reserves are not enough to provide even US electricity + transport energy in PWRs. Loading 800GW of reactors uses almost all of it. Reprocessed MOX and what's left might buy you 20 years of operation. Mines take quite some time to come online so the pace of production of new nuclear would be small compared to even the torpid rate of US renewable production.
The PWR industry is nowhere near the scale of renewables, and it's impossible for it to get there.
If you want to blow a trillion more dollars on trying to make it happen, put it into liquid sodium FNR research. At least that kinda-sorta works. You'll be quite disappointed when you finally get a design that is safe and scalable and see the price tag though. And even if you do go all in it will take decades to breed enough fissile material to make a dent.
Stanford's Mark Z. Jacobson started writing papers a decade ago [0] that answers that question yes. The GDP will be immaterial if we continue to ignore the obvious.
I think there's a great deal of hysteria about Russian gas cutoffs. German bills are projected to be lower than UK energy bills over the winter[0][1], even though the UK has basically no dependence on Russian gas.
A war is an unusual and extreme event, and when it's started by your major gas supplier, it's unsurprising that prices go up. It is, however, obviously not enough to write off the whole european energy policy just because when you stress test it, there are higher bills.
It's no use if your 'sensible' energy policy results in 3 degrees of global warming: that will be far worse than a high energy bill, or a war for that matter.
Not really? Germany is a mid-range, slow-moving sort of country, and they get about 40% of their energy from renewables. They still get 30% of their energy from coal, but it's being fairly steadily phased out.
Energy sources are fungible. Solar power is cheaper than coal in a lot of places, as is wind, and the US has a ton of natural gas to make up for the intermittency problem.
I think you're mistaking a political problem for a technical one.
Sure, politcal problems are hard problems. However, your original post asserted that the current energy demand of the US cannot be met without coal. You did not say they will not, because of political pathology.
It is, however, patently obvious that they can - many countries in Europe are doing that right now, and not all of them depend on Russian natural gas.
Further, the only reason why EU states in the east depend on Russian natural gas is because Russia is close. The US is a gas exporter. They would need no such overseas supply.
We are switching over slowly. That's literally the status quo. The argument of "we could end coal for X dollars" is what introduces the idea of a discrete value into this discussion.
How can you know what we will spend unless you specify a time interval? Clearly we won't be burning coal in 100 years. Maybe not even 50. Or 30.
I left out a variable that you hinted at so let me redefine what I meant.
We need to move to green energy and not count sources of energy from unstable situations. Meaning Germany shouldn't have shut its coal plants relying on gas from Russia as replacement.
The cold war ended in 1989 and first invaded Ukraine in 2014, with obvious hints at being authoritarian prior to that. Russia is not a friendly country and shouldn't have been considered one this quickly.
They said "could" not "should." It was, for me, context, a reference point. Such statements help push back against what is often misguided conventional wisdom. They shine light on our priorities, or the lack thereof.
