Why Nuclear Power is Important to Solve the Energy Crisis
In this episode, Peter McCormack and Danny Knowles are joined by Doomberg to discuss the roots of the 2022 energy crisis, nuclear power, pragmatic decision-making and more.
Read our notes below to learn more.
About Doomberg
They run a substack and publish 6-8 articles a month.
He is a PhD scientist and spent a couple of decades in the commodity sector in various roles.
They were a small consulting firm that got hit by COVID really hard and decided to reinvent themselves then opened up a line of consulting where they helped content creators, who sold into Wall Street, run their businesses better.
One of their largest clients advised them to start their own.
Energy Crisis in 2022
It really started in 2021.
The energy crisis in Europe that eventually spread to the rest of the world derives from several factors, one of which is a deep opposition to fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Total reliance on intermittent renewable energy.
War in Ukraine added fuel to the fire.
During times of energy abundance, it’s easy to take for granted just how important energy is to the operation of our society and during times of scarcity, things can go haywire.
Coal being more expensive than oil for a good period of time last year is a remarkable thing.
Importance of Nuclear Power
There is no path to decarbonization that does not involve nuclear energy at the heart of it.
There’s always going to be a need for fossil fuels especially in certain applications where electricity and batteries won’t work.
They think natural gas should replace coal, especially in home heating.
A freshly built nuclear power plant today comes with essentially no risk, could last a century, produces carbon-free electricity effectively and indefinitely, technology is completely understood and energy payback period itself is less than 6 weeks.
The proactive shutdown of Europe’s nuclear fleet, especially in Belgium and Germany, is a scandal of epic proportions and the genesis of that movement needs to be investigated.
He thinks there’s a lot of evidence that Russia is behind much of the German opposition to nuclear energy.
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The carbon footprint of the German electricity grid is often above 500 grams of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity.
Ontario has a carbon-free grid that is supplied by nuclear power, hydro electricity and very little natural gas.
California recognized that shutting down Diablo Canyon Nuclear Reactor was maybe a mistake in the middle of rolling blackouts as it produces 10% of California’s electricity and 20% of its base load power.
People die all the time drilling for oil and gas.
Most of the solar in the world comes from slave labor in China.
Nuclear power is so fundamentally better in terms of measuring all of the trade-offs.
In the 50s and 60s, the main fear of environmentalists was the propagation of nuclear power precisely because it delivered plentiful bounties of energy to what they call “unwashed masses”.
Fast tracking nuclear and issues in France
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about how Germany made a floating natural gas LNG import facility in a year when it would typically take 5 years.
In China, they have 50 nuclear reactors under construction and another 100 in design.
There needs to be a regulatory shift, get it done mentality and crisis mentality.
France is an example of mismanaging an asset as opposed to an upkeep of it vs. the underlying technology itself.
France is an example of how you can design an entire grid around nuclear power and they have amongst the lowest carbon footprints in the EU.
The good news is the nuclear reactors are coming back closer to the capacity factors that they’ve been designed to operate at.
The timeline is driven by the speed with which worldwide natural gas markets harmonize which is driven by the speed with which LNG export, import facilities and associated pipelines can be built.
Countries like Qatar and the U.S. are building out massive amounts of LNG export facilities and the pipelines to connect the fields to these exports.
Nuclear Energy Payback
Making a nuclear power plant requires a fixed amount of cement, piping and various controls but the uranium fuel is so energy dense and produces so much electricity for free.
Since nuclear reactors run 24/7 at 90% capacity factor, it takes almost no time at all for these things to pay back their energy.
They demystified the energy pay back period of solar power where to take sand and make an ultra high purity solar grade polysilicon is one of the most energy intensive processes in the industry where it needs around 7 or 8 nines of purity.
The stated capacity vs. the actual capacity factors of solar energy are two worlds apart.
The payback of solar energy is around 1 to 5 years depending on the country it is in.
Energy density is king.
Explaining Energy and Climate change
There are a lot of people who are quietly uneasy about the way in which our energy is unfolding.
When they explain energy to people, they are being thanked because they are first principles based on physics and they have relevant experience and education in the area.
They are not climate alarmists.
The highest standard of living that can be given to the most amount of people divided by carbon emissions is a fine goal but we are capable of handling any potential disruptions to the climate that may or may not arise in the next 50 years.
Renewable Energy
They are more opposed to wind than they are to solar.
Solar is very seductive because we get irradiated with many orders of magnitude more energy than we could possibly ever use on an ongoing basis.
The U.S. needs to reclaim their manufacturing ability because right now, it’s outsourced to China which is using dirty coal and slave labor to produce the panels.
Wind energy is just an atrocity and for people that are supposed to be pro-planet, to be in favor of wind and be against nuclear is just absurd.
Most of the wind energy projects are just tax loss harvesting for the rich people.
An electricity grid is a very fine balancing act between supply and demand.
The cost of being ready for the intermittency is never included in the cost and payback period of wind energy.
Batteries
Battery development is extraordinarily challenging and very incremental percent of improvement a year at best.
The issue with batteries is we don’t have enough materials in places we’re willing to mine to satisfy the projections for electric vehicles let alone electric vehicles plus storage.
Plug-in hybrids are 3.6 times better for displacing fossil fuels than full battery electrics but the governments around the world are prioritizing full BEVs over plug-in hybrids which is an example of a stupid policy that can be changed today.
The equation that should be optimized for batteries is gallons of fossil fuel abated per kilowatt hour.
Cobalt Mine and Forced Labor
70% of the world’s cobalt comes from some of the most horrendous places on Earth as measured by the treatment of labor and child labor.
The word “artisanal” sounds sweet and harmless but that word is a code for slave labor in the Congo.
One of the largest, most heavily invested in research projects in the world is developing Lithium-ion batteries that don’t need cobalt.
Magnesium is absolutely critical to the auto industry.
Magnesium is incredibly dirty to make and tough in the environment.
Views on Bitcoin
There is a need to ensure against debasement of fiat currencies.
Government spending and print is out of control.
They save money by buying real world assets like gold, land and collectibles.
They invest privately where they could affect the outcome with their own skills.
They would never buy crypto because they think all crypto are ponzis.
Bitcoin does have some useful properties.
The solution to our money problem isn’t a new currency, it should be a new government.
When the dust settles, $USDC will be the stablecoin of choice in the digital currency world and it’ll be fully approved by the U.S authorities for that purpose.
He thinks the failure to acknowledge the cancer of Tether is to the detriment of the Bitcoin Community.
China’s reopening will be a literally 180 degree change overnight.
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Navigating the waters of crypto is risky; even the biggest CEXs & stable coins can have huge risks…
Act now, click the link below & become your own bank via self-custody.