SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A group of scientists have called for a "moonshot" renewable energy research program called the "Global Apollo":
They say they have generated interest from major nations in their plan for an investment of 0.02% of their GDP [about $150 billion over 10 years, and about the cost of the Apollo program in 2015 dollars] into research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of clean electricity. Their report, launched at London's Royal Society, says on current projections the world will exceed the 2C danger threshold of climate change by 2035.
The academics are led by the UK's former chief scientist Professor Sir David King. He told BBC News: "We have already discovered enough fossil fuels to wreck the climate many times over. There's only one thing that's going to stop us burning it – and that's if renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels. "Under our plan, we are aiming to make that happen globally within a decade." Another of the authors, former Cabinet Secretary Lord O'Donnell, told BBC News: "People never believed we could put a man on the Moon - but we did. People don't believe we can solve climate change - but we have no choice."
It complains that renewable energy has been starved of investment to a shocking degree, with publicly funded RD&D on renewable energy only $6bn a year – under 2% of the total of publicly funded research and development. The authors say this compares poorly with the $101bn spent worldwide on production subsidies for renewables and the $550bn "counter-productive" subsidies for fossil fuel energy.
Solar is the most favoured renewable source as the group says it has greatest potential for technology breakthroughs, and most new energy demand will be in sunny countries. The cost of solar has been plummeting and is already approaching competitive prices in places as different as Germany, California and Chile. But the authors believe next-generation plastic photovoltaics can to keep prices tumbling. They believe battery technology is improving fast – but think batteries and other forms of storage need to be massively developed to store intermittent renewable energy. The authors say much smarter software is needed to enable electricity grids to cope with the new sources of power. Some experts believe that energy technology has developed so fast that it simply needs further price support to keep volumes rising and costs falling. Others will complain that the Apollo group has done little to tackle the immense problem of replacing fossil fuels in heating.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by physicsmajor on Wednesday June 10 2015, @12:39PM
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for research. But we already know the answer. Current fission reactor designs are inherently safe. Put that money toward actually building out base generation capacity.
Yes, fusion would be nice. LFTRs using Th as well. But we don't need either to solve this problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday June 10 2015, @03:40PM
"Inherently safe" is a bit misleading. "Much much much much more fault tolerant" doesn't reassure people as much though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:58PM
Yes, but people are idiots.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 10 2015, @07:27PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:33AM
The reactor might be safe but that's just a tiny part of the nuclear industry. You have the uranium mining which is a huge disaster everywhere it happens. Besides being radioactive, uranium is highly toxic. And then there is the question what to do with the spent fuel. No country has solved it. If we don't somehow treat it it will remain with us forever. And then there is the costs, nuclear is fricking expensive. Hardly a magic bullet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by geb on Thursday June 11 2015, @10:39AM
Nuclear can do safe, nuclear can do reliable, but after it became a mature technology nuclear has never been able to do cheap.
Trying to make a giant, complicated machine work perfectly reliably when nobody can come near it is a bad enough problem, but trying to do that and then dealing with neutron activation slowly turning the machine itself into radioactive waste just makes the entire deal too expensive. Nuclear reactors take far too long to build, then once they reach end of life, they take even longer to decommission.
Economy of scale can make the cost less awful, but the critical size there is pretty big, and economy of scale isn't a unique trait of nuclear power. You might as well take the same economy of scale principles and apply them to something that was cheaper to start with.
If we had followed the nuclear utopia dream path from the 70s onwards, and done loads of research and development over the decades then sure we could have had some quite excellent cheap proven reactors by now, but that's not the world we live in. Again though, "research can fix its problems" is not a unique trait of nuclear power. It's not clear that pumping research money into nuclear is better than, say, researching grid level storage.