81–90 of 182 posts
QUOTE "I took this fusion class when I was at Georgia Tech and I will never forget it. We started studying and I go, "Man, this is really hard." Charged particles don't want to get near each other. Bare nuclei are both charged, positive charged, they want to avoid each other. And my professor had a really great way of putting it. "It's like going to the mini golf." He says, "You know how in mini golf you've got the v…
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I once did my own calculation to answer the question: "How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to meet Toronto's electricity needs". The answer: about 3.5x the size of the city. Covering every square inch of the city is not sufficient, you need a lot more land. You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at yo…
At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter. Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-us…
And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative merits of nuclear.
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Yeah this is something people keep forgetting. The reason fossil fuels have such an impact is because the industry is happening at such a scale. Solar and wind are working at miniscule size ... and ... "no" impact (well, wind clearly has impact already, but ... let's forget that). Well actually, solar does have an impact. In Spain there's a couple large wind farms I visited and ... not that it should surprise anyone…
I think Fission would be great if we had somewhere to put the waste, if it didn't cost $10 billion dollars to set up a plant and people weren't phobic of it. Overall Nuclear makes more sense than coal and arguably more sense than wind and solar. But then there's the risk of the meltdown. No politician, no utility CEO, no corporation commission is going to take the risk of a meltdown when the political cost of pumping…
There was some especially interesting discussion around thorium based nuclear power which has the potential to be much less dangerous.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/a1c7kt/why_do_peop...
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Are there enough lithium mines? No need to - there are 230 billion tonnes of the stuff in seawater. Just one percent of that is enough to create 25,000TWh worth of li-ion batteries - that's roughly the amount of electricity produced by the world annually. Also other chemistries like zinc-air are gaining traction and serve as a good, cheaper alternative.
Can you point to a commercial operation recovering lithium from seawater? Demand for lithium is high and expected to go much higher, so a seawater extraction plant should at least be in development if it's feasible to do that. If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries, then we should be allowed to look at future nuclear technologies as well, some of which are very much in development.
No, because it's exactly like with tar sands: it will happen when it's commercially viable. At this point it's much cheaper to "mine" the brines in Chile.
If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries
Thing is - it isn't.
Here's a company making grid-scale Zinc-Air batteries:
They figured it out in 2015 and they're already sold-out for 2019 and secured funding for a production facility.
And this is just one of many companies doing the same.
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Wow this is an insane view point, I actually thought you were going to suggest the opposite... Frankly the potential capability of nuclear far outweighs anything else. If the gen public were more on board with it, nuclear could be rolled out and be the main source of power in the world in 30-40 years, removing the need for fossil fuels for power generation. Even building them in remote locations and taking the transm…
My big problem with nuclear (fission) is that while on paper it looks like a great solution, in practice our civilizational apparatus does not appear to be up to the task of long-term responsible implementation. Fission power looks like a long game of hot potato, where everyone hopes they won't be the ones on the hook when the eventual equipment failure, natural disaster, or time to decommission eventually arrives. (…
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You're both right- technically, nuclear reactors are on of the fastest-ramping sources available. A reactor in SCRAM can drop down to However, zero reactors are capable of doing so economically. The cost of a nuclear plant is in its construction, upkeep, and staff. Those costs are the same at 110% and 30% output, but revenue isnt. In order to turn a profit a nuclear plant needs to be running at 80%+, 24/7. Ultimately…
> The cost of a nuclear plant is in its construction, upkeep, and staff. Those costs are the same at 110% and 30% output, but revenue isnt. In order to turn a profit a nuclear plant needs to be running at 80%+, 24/7. The same can be said about wind and solar power.
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I once did my own calculation to answer the question: "How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to meet Toronto's electricity needs". The answer: about 3.5x the size of the city. Covering every square inch of the city is not sufficient, you need a lot more land. You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at yo…
No one has ever suggested that renewables = solar. Renewables are always a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and - eventually - wave.
Again, the mount of electricity consumption is public info. The amount of output a wind turbine or solar farm per km^2 is available. Put these together and ask yourself how easy would be to convince people to do this.
Our old nuclear plants are our golden-egg-laying goose. Not only should we not kill it, other places should get their own.
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At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter. Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-us…
Yeah, it's probably a conservative number. But the Toronto area (~20% of Canada's population) would not be much different from Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative mer…
Land is cheap and abundant it's a non-issue for the kind of area we'd need to even power the whole world 100% on solar.
Habit losses would be more than made up for by not continuing to accelerate climate change.
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> If I managed the funds I'd cut nuclear and redirect to wind and solar immediately. To make those a reasonable base you need to add enough storage to keep everything working even when your current weather does not meet the energy demand. I think setting up that storage is currently going to be the biggest cost factor.
Base load power is not a useful feature. To follow the demand curve you generally what to turn massive amounts of production off at specific points in the day, base load is simply what you keep running during those periods. Nuclear power plants for example where known to be hard to throttle which was a significant design issue. Historically, the tradeoff is worth it as the cost per kWh was less, but again not a usefu…
Can anyone in the industry chime in on thermal energy storage in fission plants? Do the economics work out?
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Can you point to a commercial operation recovering lithium from seawater? Demand for lithium is high and expected to go much higher, so a seawater extraction plant should at least be in development if it's feasible to do that. If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries, then we should be allowed to look at future nuclear technologies as well, some of which are very much in development.
Can you point to a commercial operation recovering lithium from seawater No, because it's exactly like with tar sands: it will happen when it's commercially viable. At this point it's much cheaper to "mine" the brines in Chile. If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries Thing is - it isn't. Here's a company making grid-scale Zinc-Air batteries: https://eosenergystorage.com They figured it out in…
Btw uranium extraction from seawater has been demonstrated, and isn't used just because it's 5X more expensive than mining. That's not a showstopper because fuel is a small portion of nuclear energy cost.