Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I expect something made with iron or sodium to take over. For hydrogen, we have to solve the horrible cycle efficiency of its storage. It's not so bad for use as a fuel (e.g. for airplanes), but as static storage hydrogen is currently a very bad choice.
Cycle efficiency is trivially resolved by feeding in more zero-opex power. But hydrogen efficiency is improving as fast as all renewable tech.
Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
491–500 of 818 posts
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguing that leaked radioactive contamination is less harmful than often assumed does not make habitually leaky nukes seem any more attractive, vs. alternatives that leak nothing hazardous at all, ever.
" the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy" From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... We seem to…
It's like a kid preferring 5 nickels to 2 quarters because 5 is more.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguing that leaked radioactive contamination is less harmful than often assumed does not make habitually leaky nukes seem any more attractive, vs. alternatives that leak nothing hazardous at all, ever.
" the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy" From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... We seem to…
In many places that role is being moved to NG. The immediate hiccup is a short-term setback that will be fixed the way we are doing, building out renewables, later storage.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#494I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not technological but political, and the economic problems with nuclear are there because of political reasons. France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically. If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to…
France is not using their reactors economically. They have been told multiple times by the EU that the reserves that operators have to provide for decommissioning of plants are much too low. So this means that the government/the taxpayers have to foot the bill. And we have not even talk about long term storage cost which are typically never taken into account. So yes it is a political decision, France is willing to h…
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…
'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South…
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#496One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?
The Chernobyl power plant did not have a containment building around the reactors until after the meltdown. Every Western nuclear power plant has a containment building around the reactors. That's the single biggest factor.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#497One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?
Planning nuclear power plants based upon the Chernobyl disaster is kinda like planning road and bridge construction based upon the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) ) Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristic…
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#498Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes. Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of w…
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
As has been explained to you numerous times, intermittency is a trivial technical matter that cannot justify diverting capital to nuke construction or operation. Repeating your falsehoods here does not make them true.
I'm not familiar with this area. Can you explain why it's a trivial technical matter, and what the solution(s) are?
There is, thus far, little use for storage, because there is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be stupid.) By the time we need much of it, it will be very, very cheap. In the meantime, building generating capacity and factories is the right use of capital.
Although people insisting there is a problem love to talk about expense of batteries, only a tiny fraction of utility-scale storage will ever be batteries. The cheapest storage is gravity, exemplified by pumped hydro, which represents today almost all utility storage. But there are many variations that all work.
The only uncertainty is which ones will be cheapest. Each is a different mix of build cost, maintenance cost, storage cost, charging cost, and discharging cost, with capex and opex for each. Different users will favor different places on those axes. Best for most uses are those that cost only capex, and store as much energy as you care to, cheaply.
Synthetic ammonia and hydrogen are attractive storage media, despite some higher costs, because they may be sold, and burned in gas turbines.
Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature tech and, like the synthetic fuels, valuable in its own right. Power is extracted by boiling in ambient air to drive a turbine.
Compressing air underground, adiabatically, is another mature method. Compressing to a sea-floor bladder through a hose from a compressor onshore, likewise. Turbines, again.
Buoyancy, drawing a float down toward a pulley on the sea floor, using a winch onshore; and raising a very, very heavy weight up a disused mine shaft are other, very similar examples of gravity storage. Both have startup time of seconds, and are useful for stabilizing grids. Energy is released by running the winch out, driving a generator.
There are various battery chemistries, for cases where batteries are useful at all. All under consideration are much cheaper than lithium. Farthest along may be iron-air, molten-metal, and sodium-bromide, none of which are prone to fires.
Storage costs of all kinds are falling much faster than solar generating capacity. Utilities will build whatever is cheapest when they finally need any. As prices change, the mix will change. There is no value in picking just one, and plentiful value in using the right one for immediate circumstances.
Nobody needs very much storage, because you can always import and burn fuel. The cheapest fuel will be surplus ammonia and hydrogen, although burning aluminum powder for direct process heat has been used in production at local scales. Scrap aluminum is very cheap.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South…
> the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant. Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance…
But you need to add that Renewable solution only last 20 years vs 60 for nuclear. That can be seen like triple the cost you factored in already.
And also, your renewable energy source won’t work 100% of time and not at 100% of the capacity. Which also implies that you need to build multiple time what you planned to really get that planned capacity.