> First, it’s actually somewhat unlikely that lithium ion batteries are going to be the cheapest grid storage Then please share what storage mechanism is going to be cheaper. > Second, natural resources almost always get cheaper to extract as demand increases, especially when they’re not actually scarce (there’s tons of Lithium out there). Incorrect, as easily accessible reserves get depleted more and more remote res…
You’d think so but in reality extraction costs just drop as technology improves. For example, lithium..
Yes. Scaling up solar and wind is much easier. Nuclear reactors require very heavy industry (look at what's needed to forge the reactor pressure vessel of a PWR). Nuclear also requires much higher quality manufacturing. A 1% failure rate on PV modules is acceptable. A 1% failure rate on reactor components is not. Installing wind and solar is also much easier than installing NPPs. Solar installation does not require e…
> Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor That's why the number of solar power related deaths (Mainly, falling from roofs) far exceeds the single fatality from nuclear related incidents we had this century.
A solar powered world will mostly use large scale ground mounted solar, which is much cheaper than putting it awkwardly on roofs.
If you don't have renewables for a while, and transmission line availability flags, you import anhydrous ammonia from the tropics. So, you need only minimal over-provisioning and local storage.
But then you presumably need to build these extra power plants that can use that fuel?
A combined cycle powerplant is about 10% of the cost, per unit power output, of a nuclear power plant. So we could completely back up a renewable grid with CC plants and nuclear could still be much more expensive.
> 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 wind/solar/storage. On what basis do you make this assertion? Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never s…
Controversial opinión: we should invest heavily into nuclear and renewables as they seem to synergize quite well
It's not a controversial opinion, it's an incorrect opinion. Nuclear and renewables (except for hydro) synergize poorly in most cases.
True. :) I mean that the other approaches appear to have obvious showstoppers (mostly engineering ones for DT approaches), while Helion has at least a plausible path to practicality. (plausible, adj.: superficially fair, reasonable, or valuable but often specious.)
Did you see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759753 ? One of the projects has a plan to get p-11B closer to working. It didn't seem immediately stupid. It would be great to have a system that doesn't depend on unobtainium. Maybe in 50 years we will be able to take down the wind turbines, or explore the Kuiper Belt at length.
I don't believe any of the p-11B schemes I've seen. Like, no chance at all.
This is a genius idea, especially because it could be done anywhere with a hill, which makes it a lot more geographically accessible (since most places have hills)
It’s actually not a good idea at all. When you do the math ( or rather the physics) gravity batteries need so much mass and height to compete with other technologies that it’s just not worth it. Except if water, pipes and pumps are used, as water is heavy, and pipes and pumps can transport a lot of it very efficiently and cheaply. That’s called pumped hydro storage and is currently the #1 grid scale storage in the wo…
The downside of pumped water, of course, is you need a hydroelectric dam and there are not many sites suitable for that. Those dams also come with significant environmental disruption.
The weight system only requires part of a hillside, has a pretty small environmental footprint, and there are lots and lots of hills.
With Vogtle 3 & 4, the only nuclear plants coming online in the US, the construction costs are now projected to be $30 billion for 2.2 GW. We'd need ~1000 of these size plants to power the US. That's not going to cut it either.
Vogtle will be cancelled before completion. That many $billions for 2GW is nothing short of pathetic. It cannot be cancelled soon enough.
I doubt that. It's too close to completion, sadly for the ratepayers in Georgia.
You said that, that doesn't mean it is true. And it probably isn't true north of 50 degrees of latitute where lots of the people who need energy live. France's nuclear fleet has an all-in cost of 7c/kWh, which is roughly the same as the cost of solar or wind power in France, but without the need for storage or smart grids that doubles the cost of solar/wind. (For all this remember that France has about a third of the…
For all this remember that France has about a third of the insolation of California or Arizona per year, or maybe half at best in some places. I don't think that is correct. This is a table of average insolation for different cities around the world derived from NASA's Surface meteorology and Solar Energy data set: http://stalix.com/isolation.pdf Los Angeles gets 5.4 kWh/m^2/day. San Francisco gets 4.9. Lyon, Paris,…
I dunno if this is what gp meant to say but didn't convey properly, but the average per year is pretty irrelevant once you leave the subtropics. You need enough power for the lowest level of light part of the year, which is also the highest total energy use part of the year (much of that is achieved through individual home heating with burning fuel, but electrification is necessary to have any hope of even stalling climate trends).
"The fundamentals" is doing a lot of work there. It's fundamentally unsafe to move at a high velocity in a meat-based body. Does this mean the risk profile of high speed transportation is invariant across technology? The "fundamentals" you speak of boil down to the first principles analysis, based on physics, of the possible states a nuclear energy production system can get into. This is not invariant with regards to…
All failures of nukes thus far have been direct consequences of inadequately competent and scrupulous administration. Administration and adherence to standards of excellence are not improving.
Good systems engineering can tolerate massive levels of incompetent and scrupulous operators.
All failures of nukes thus far have been direct consequences of inadequately competent and scrupulous administration. Administration and adherence to standards of excellence are not improving.
Good systems engineering can tolerate massive levels of incompetent and scrupulous operators.
So, not good enough engineering, either, then? Bad engineering is also, almost always, management failure.