johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

You have a good point but of course the split is adjusted to that consideration.

I don't believe in profiting from life-saving medication or anything like that, so my intention is to drive rapid growth with my activities in the energy, software, and automotive sectors to fund the less immediately profitable goals.

Make money solving the problems I can first, and later use that money to fund the further-off ones.

Currently this strategy is working well, as my assets are growing at above 2000% annually.

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

> Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist

I think it is extremely foolish to make caricatures of people. Twenty years ago, Elon Musk was a software startup guy who had no idea about anything hardware - but that's only because nobody bothered to consider the full human behind the caricature.

Mike Shellenberger was an anti-nuclear activist for much of his early life and has always been (and is still) an environmentalist. Furthermore, he may be a lobbyist now (I'm not sure if you are right or wrong), but he ran for governor of California a few years ago. He has been very explicit in explaining his reasoning for shifting from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear in multiple talks and articles.

Take a look at the full human, and your justification for scrutiny fades away. Everybody should be scrutinized to an extent, but he is not fundamentally a biased lobbyist with financial incentives.

> Germany has much to do for carbon efficiency, but for total emissions it is somewhere in the middle.

This is the problem, man. Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on renewables and they still have high GHG emissions - all they have to show for their massive spending is a couple thousand extra deaths per year and higher electricity prices.

If you gave my company the same amount of money, we'd have the entire world to net zero emissions within two decades.

Goes to show the inefficiency of government funded programs, and the awful incompatibility of renewable energy with a reliable, affordable consumer electricity market.

> I like to use current numbers, because extrapolating development is often pretty close to lying.

We can use current and past numbers: for its entire existence, nuclear fission has been the (a) safest, (b) highest fuel density, (c) least waste-producing, (d) lowest emissions, (e) most reliable mass energy source humanity has ever had.

The new generation of reactors will only improve this divide between fission and everything else. If you are against extrapolating development and want to rely on established numbers, you must conclude [fission > renewables]

I know I'm biased, but I'm also right about all those superlatives.

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

> I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium.

There are 3 fission fuels occurring in nature: Th232, U235, U238

Actually, our reserves of Uranium are greater (by energy available to generate) than all of our Coal, Oil and Natural Gas reserves combined.

Our Thorium reserves are even greater than those.

In fact, Thorium is extracted as a byproduct of Rare Earth Metal extraction, and so we currently mine enough Th232 per year to replace the entire global energy and fuel industry even though there is no demand for Th232 extraction. Kind of mind blowing.

---

> [fission] it is expensive in deployment

I don't see where this idea comes from - in real life, regions which are powered by more fission have significantly cheaper electricity than those who are powered by less.

---

> the problem with nuclear waste

I genuinely don't think there is a problem with nuclear waste, and that this concern is a myth / misunderstanding based on a mix of fear-mongering via conflation with nuclear weapons and a lack of comparison.

Consider the following: all energy sources have waste products - nothing is 100% efficient.

Fossil fuels pump literally billions of tonnes of toxic gas into the air as their waste product. It moves around, we can't store it, and it is responsible for the deaths of millions of people each year through air pollution.

Renewables production has the same issue (although different gases), and also tends to pollute the water and local environment with other toxic chemicals and metals.

Nuclear fission produces the most dense, least amount of waste of any source, which is solid and easy to manage. We know where quite literally all of it is, and it doesn't hurt anybody or negatively affect the environment in any way as long as you keep it store somewhere.

As far as I'm concerned, nuclear energy does not have a waste problem, it has a waste solution. Global warming is the problem with energy waste, more specifically it is the problem with hydrocarbon waste.

---

> Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities.

Agree with you. Renewables tend to vary in effectiveness based on location - in those locations which are well-suited for them, I think they should be used! Though I'm not sure what you mean by "could open up more possibilities" - we've had hydro power for thousands of years.

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> I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.

Note the following excerpt from Mike Shellenberger on Twitter:

  Germany’s renewables experiment is over. 

  By 2025 it will have spent $580B to make
  electricity nearly 2x more expensive & 10x
  more carbon-intensive than France’s. 

  The reason renewables can’t power modern
  civilization is because they were never
  meant to.

  A major new study of Germany's nuclear
  phase-out finds

  - it imposes "an annual cost of
    roughly $12B/year"

  - "over 70% of the cost is from the 1,100
    excess deaths/year from air pollution
    from coal plants operating in place of
    the shutdown nuclear plants"

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

Yup. That's why we need to exceed the TPES with clean energy. We also need to significantly expand TPES if we are going to eliminate most of the remaining poverty in the world, to improve mean QoL.

I'm hoping fission can scale to about 2 EWh annually in the next several decades. Should be noted this is quite aggressive scaling. 500 PWh is more than enough to reach net-zero emissions.

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

Oooh, this is a great one. You're absolutely right "the sector is ripe for disruption"

Your list of points is great, if you can figure out a way to deliver a service like that it would be incredible.

I think one of the biggest challenges for current publications is the tie to advertising model - advertising business model forces products to decrease in quality over time. Same thing happening to Google and Facebook, but super apparent in news sites. They're fucking awful these days, I can't read a single article without ten huge popups and a paywall.

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

Are you working on Zipline [1] ?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

No I'm John Morrison, it says right there in the username. Usernames never lie ;)

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

I hope to convey this in the least volatile manner, but I must bring it up.

> I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels.

The above is a reasonable statement, however, your website says the following:

> We can’t quit carbon without energy storage. To stop climate change, renewables must replace fossil fuels.

> Without energy storage, renewables will fail to reach even 25% of the energy market by 2040. This will cause global temperatures to rise over 3°C, a level which will cause catastrophic climate damage.

Those are not only misleading but outright lies. Now, I won't hide my bias here: I work on nuclear fission. But here's the reality: there are many possible pathways to net-zero carbon and limiting global temperature rise to well below 3°C (below 1.5°C in fact)

To just list a few:

* Massive adoption of nuclear fission alone

* Development & massive adoption of nuclear fusion alone

* Shift from coal&oil to natural gas, cleaner fossil fuels + scaling carbon capture/sequestration

* Shift from fossil fuels to renewables + storage (probably not alone)

Or any combination of those, in addition to a number of alternative approaches.

---

Edit: Also, it should be noted that the energy sector alone only represents about 1/5 of the emissions problem. In order to get to net-zero GHG and stop anthroprogenic climate change, the clean energy sector needs to expand well past the current global TPES and supply net-zero electricity that allows for the decarbonization of the other main contributors:

Agriculture, steel+cement+plastic, transportation, buildings&appliances, and flora loss leading to lost carbon stores (deforestation etc)

Even if renewables and storage could supply 100% of our electricity or even total power supply, you would still only be 1/5 done solving climate change. There is no unitary solution.

---

Acting as though renewables are necessary, instead of one of multiple options, is denial or malicious. In reality, renewable energy is nowhere near capable of reliably and safely taking on a large portion of our energy supply globally. It is expensive (you can make claims about unit cost, but what really matters is country-scale - look at German electricity prices vs. just about everywhere else), it is dangerous, it takes a lot of land area, and it is the least reliable.

I don't want to spend a lot of time here stomping on renewables, but there is plenty of reason to, and my main point is that I feel it is unjust and immoral for you to claim that renewables "must replace fossil fuels" if we are to stop climate change. It's just not true, and you need to admit that.

The energy industry is arguably one of if not the most important backbone of our modern society, and responsible for the safety and health of billions of people. Whether you're working on the generation or storage side, it is all our responsibility to be honest and make true claims - not to spread biased misinformation when it benefits your particular solution.

I'd like to finish by making it clear I'm very happy you're working on your tech and I hope you succeed in making it the best it can be - renewables are certainly trending to higher adoption and we need reliable, efficient, scalable storage solution in order to avoid dangerous outages and other grid issues.

You bring up valid criticisms of existing solutions, although I do think you should also be fair to those. Most things in life are a trade-off: maybe pumped hydro is a better majority solution for the grid, but lithium ion is an incredibly important, successful and expanding technology that needs to be given credit for its wide range of great applications.

I hope this response has not been inflammatory: I just very much care about maintaining a truthful public discussion around energy. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you can take something useful from this.

johnmorrison

6년 전discuss

A while back, I posted a list of my long term focus problems here [1]

Short list:

* Pollution and the climate

* Privation

* Avoidable death

* Interplanetary settlement

* Liberty and communication

* Transportation

My primary focus is developing and commercializing reliable clean energy, because I believe that is the most effective way to further progress in the majority of the above problems.

To that extent, I've come to terms with an inability to spread my focus across all of them simultaneously and drive great results so instead I've taken an approach of working on a few of them full time myself and investing in efforts that work on others. My intent is to keep ~100% of my net worth invested in these main problems (either in my own or somebody else's projects) in perpetuity.

In my personal life, I've also recently been spending a lot of time thinking about health and purpose: how to build discipline, how people can/should decide what to do with their life, how to stay healthy and built fitness, etc.

Side project: in my free time over the last few weeks I've also been thinking more about how to create lasting models for information and media, and so I'm building a markup language / static site generator in that pursuit [2]

[1]: https://jwmza.com/long

[2]: https://jwmza.com/polymath

johnmorrison

7년 전discuss

I don't see what I did, mind explaining the joke?

johnmorrison

7년 전discuss

I heard levels.io (twitter.com/levelsio) makes like $50,000 per month off of Nomad List, and I'm pretty sure it's a one-person thing.

johnmorrison

7년 전discuss

Thank you so much for linking park.io, you might have just given me a miracle.

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