181–190 of 818 posts
Stunning how many well-informed people here are still so distrustful of nuclear energy despite all the advancements.
Not surprising. Software development has advanced, yet every day somewhere some piece of software crashes.
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I don't think that's a common use of "unsolved at scale". We know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense right now. I mean, suppose you have hundreds of GW of storage of some form installed. You could just claim it's still not "solved at scale" because the global energy consumption is even higher.
At scale means with mining requirements as well. With current and projected reserves we can manage intra-day requirements for the whole world. This is the we mine it all option. But we need intra-year storage capacity. Nuclear is clearly the easier and only option (and the most environment-friendly to me, considering the mining requirements)
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How does one transmit electricity across an ocean?
Undersea cables. There are plenty between Norway and Germany for example.
That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg
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The problems with Nuclear are simple and straight forward: (1) Economic not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset. Theres a large difference between building new reactors vs running the old ones until the end of life (in terms of economics). Also the modular reactors that are getting a lot of hype right now also still have a nuclear waste d…
> not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset. On the contrary! Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning. For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-op…
Read: problem not resolved.
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French electrical power is 70% nuclear and has an installed capacity of 135 GW of power today. That comes out to 94.5 GW of nuclear power in France alone. Is there any country in the world that can supply hundreds of gigawatts to the grid from batteries today? If not, then the problem of grid power storage is unsolved at scale compared to nuclear.
I don't think that's a common use of "unsolved at scale". We know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense right now. I mean, suppose you have hundreds of GW of storage of some form installed. You could just claim it's still not "solved at scale" because the global energy consumption is even higher.
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Thinking about it makes me mad. For all their renewable production capacity they still average over 300g of CO2 / kwh with all the gas and coal they burn. All of it, credit to the german green movement trying to save the planet from... Not sure. Even assuming the occasional Chernobyl/Fukushima-level disaster, as terrible as those catastrophes are, nuclear plant accidents are localised and will never threaten mankind…
A big percentage of mushrooms and game is still not fit for consumption today in Germany because of Chernobyl. So it's not just local. And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same size as the state of Saarland.
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How many GW of wind, solar, and nuclear can we bring online in the next 28 years?
In 2021, we added this many new gigawatts: 183 PV[0], 100 wind[1], 7.88 nuclear (but 8.6 nuclear was also shut down)[2] 28 times that, ignoring the shutdowns (I don't actually know how long wind lasts, IIRC nuclear is "about 50-70 years" and PV is "about 30 years"), gives a total of: 5124 GW PV, 2800 GW wind, 218 GW nuclear. But that's a lower bound for PV, as that's growing with what looks like an approximately expo…
Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches:
- Wind taking a bigger share of renewables
- Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power.
- Nuclear filling in a little bit
- PV comically overbuilt and routinely throwing away a lot of power midday on most days.
- Still peaking off natural gas, a little bit.
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China mostly: 2021 figures: > China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW. 81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.
I don't dispute the economics of renewable generation on the existing grid. I'm talking about storage as replacement for baseload, which is purely hypothetical at this point. Right now we have very small scale storage as peaker capacity, but not as a baseload replacement.
Did the pumped hydro dams they built alongside nuclear power plants replace the baseload? No, they took the cheap energy that was produced at times when it wasn't needed and provided it back at peak times. They literally increased the base load by propping it up when it would otherwise droop at night (mostly).
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The state of California has built more battery capacity in the last six months than the entire nation has built of fission power plants in the last 25 years. It is extremely easy to build batteries for fixed service, and bulk semiconductor manufacturing is the #1 thing that humans are good at. These problems are absolutely solved, the whole industry thinks so, that's why the whole industry is behind pv+wind+storage,…
As I said, order of magnitude error. > has built But enough? Global battery manufacturers have invested so much that they can take total battery capacity to more than 5,500 GWh by by 2030. US would need something like 3000 Gwh of energy storage to replace the base load. (within days, then few weeks). It would would be insane misuse of resources.
I just finished Bill Gates' "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster". Very good book, and it makes two points (among many others): - To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key. If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other areas. - There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power.
* No paths to nighttime clean energy without nuclear power
