291–300 of 435 posts
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Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off. What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.
We should probably prefer pumped hydro before stored h2.
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Why would these links never work for me? “Can’t find a server with the specified host name”
What DNS provider do you use?
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Although I'm generally pro more nuclear, this argument isn't massively compelling to me. The failed reactors of the past were considered safe when they were built.
The two large scale events involved a) known problematic design with a lot bad process (Chernobyl, the RBMK, and especially the condition into which the overall system was put before start of the event , would have failed a safety inspection under then-current Soviet rules ) b) a plant where owners ignored multiple reports about dangers of tsunami capable of overcoming the defenses, and ultimately failed to contain d…
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If you have gigawatt-sized gaps to fill in non-fossil generation, then it doesn't matter that something doesn't scale down, it's a problem if something doesn't scale up. It doesn't matter how much a single wind turbine costs, it matters how much a gigawatt of wind turbines costs and where you will place all of them.
Exactly. Cheap wind and solar electricity is useless if it isn’t produced on-demand. It still blows my mind that so many have such a hard time grasping such a simple and fundamental concept.
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Only a fraction of the renewable output would have to be routed through hydrogen, though. It turns out this is still cheaper than new nuclear for providing "synthetic baseload" supply, especially if one looks at projections of how much renewables should cost in the time it would take for any new nuclear plant initiated today to come online.
Said "fraction", for moderately modest needs and assuming just 24h window where it provides "baseload" can be as "low" as 1/3rd of total renewable capacity - assuming that renewables do 100% of peak whiel saving the excess.. Or so analysis from people I know in the industry, interested in decarbonising (not fossil lobby related), show.
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We also need to be using up to date data about reactor designs that are safer rather than the older and more dangerous ones (eg FAST, slow wave).
Although I'm generally pro more nuclear, this argument isn't massively compelling to me. The failed reactors of the past were considered safe when they were built.
Honestly, this is a terrible argument. It's like saying 'a few people died from eating bad apples, so we should ban oranges for fear that they are the same'. The technologies being discussed are fundamentally different. Not to mention that we don't apply this 'past performance as an indicator of future performance for different systems' paradigm to any other area of life.
The main difference is that they were not considered fundamentally safe. The newer, safer designs utilize the laws of physics for passive safety. The older ones relied on systems that had to function to prevent failure. It was an engineering design assumption that was wrong (that the systems would always function). That's a huge oversight to not run through emergency scenarios to see what would happen.
If you really want to look at historical data, then we can look the precursor to FAST that was tested for the past 60 years at Los Alamos and the numerous emergency scenario testing of the next gen FAST reactors.
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Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main…
Battery backed solar/wind is cheaper than nuclear these days. It's not been that way for long though. Economic grid scale batteries are here but still relatively new. It makes sense to continue running old nuclear plants but not to build new ones. Much too expensive.
I'll point out using existing natural gas peaking plants to make up for temporary shortfalls of solar and wind power is also a viable stop gap.
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The two large scale events involved a) known problematic design with a lot bad process (Chernobyl, the RBMK, and especially the condition into which the overall system was put before start of the event , would have failed a safety inspection under then-current Soviet rules ) b) a plant where owners ignored multiple reports about dangers of tsunami capable of overcoming the defenses, and ultimately failed to contain d…
That's the problem though isn't it. Reliance on humans.
Several UK domestic energy suppliers are now on the verge of bankruptcy it seems, and seeking emergency loans from the government. At this time of year almost all of their customers will be many hundreds of pounds in credit with them. That money is supposed to be protected, but still it's a bit of a worry.