171–180 of 183 posts
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Grid Storage is very expensive and right now only has a few hours of capacity. We would need weeks to really replace nuclear.
Incredibly disingenuous for nuclear power proponents to state that grid storage is expensive. Your entire argument centers around the most expensive power generation available and one of the slowest to build.
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Agreed — but we’re talking about a catastrophic missile strike, not longterm operations.
What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?
I can't speak to that. But nearly 50 years ago I did a deep dive into what would likely happen in the event of a nuclear "accident" (a term of art) in a Navy ship's reactor in port. This was when I was doing the Navy's prep course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of sea duty running aircraft-carrier reactors. Current-design civilian reactors are much larger, so the effects of a missile-strike meltdown would be correspondingly worse. If I had to guess, it'd be far worse than even the missile strike you postulate.
Footnote: AFAIK there has never been a nuclear accident aboard a Navy ship, submarine or otherwise. That's something in which nukes take immense pride. It's largely because of the zero-defect, second-checking culture ferociously instilled by Admiral Hyman Rickover during his decades in charge of "The Program."
Back to non-missile dangers: Human error is what I've always worried about for nuclear power plants. From what's been made public, both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl could easily have been averted — had it not been for cascades of operator errors. Can we confidently say that such errors are less likely today? To be sure, many civilian nuclear plants in the U.S. are run by Navy veterans. But my guess is that working in such plants doesn't provide the same motivations and incentives as "the Fleet." (And a flock of suicide drones won't care either way.)
Relatedly: I was just reading an account of Air France Flight 447, which flew itself into the middle of the South Atlantic — killing all aboard — because of cascades of egregious pilot error that defeated all the autopilot systems.
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Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Tr…
>GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against thei…
Even without internet, many of the scientists of Eastern European extraction were able to share secrets to the Soviets. I don't believe any Operation Paperclip scientists were directly implicated as atomic spies (and there may be some reasons the US wouldn't want to bring attention to that), but plenty of other operations occurred, and plenty of other scientists did in fact share secrets with the Soviets.
Now, with the Internet and strong crypto, it's trivial for Chinese professors to send IP back to collaborators in China. That is the basis of the 1000 Talents Plan (1), one of 200 Chinese "talent recruitment" plans.
This is not at all hypothetical. I used to swim with Kang Zhang, who has done amazing work to cure chlamydial blindness, but also took that IP from the US to China (2). Another ophthalmologist would drive all the way from UCLA (the north end of LA) to San Diego to swim with us. I asked him why. He said it was to keep an eye on Kang: he had more macaques in China to run experiments on than anyone in the US could possibly access.
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The wars in Ukraine and irán have also highlighted what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic. The idea that such will never happen is as silly as the idea that there will never be an accident or a tsunami. But passive safety won't stop a missile.
They were designed with that in mind though. They were built to withstand an plane crash or attack. You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to ju…
A collision at 50 km/h is going to have roughly 1% the force of one at 500km/h.
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> The problem is that it's occasionally neither and that doesn't have to happen very often to cause a lot of trouble. The odds of it being neither everywhere (grid) for an extended period of time (storage) is astronomically low. You don't build solar plants and windfarms where prolonged periods of non-production are to be expected. The once in a century black swan event where distributed power production across a con…
> The odds of it being neither everywhere (grid) for an extended period of time (storage) is astronomically low. The problem isn't that production is literally zero, it's that production is non-trivially below average for an extended period of time. Continent-spanning grids mitigate that to a certain extent, but they're also a) expensive (purposely-idle high capacity very long distance transmission lines), and b) are…
That isn't a problem though for precisely the same reason.
> Continent-spanning grids mitigate that to a certain extent, but they're also a) expensive (purposely-idle high capacity very long distance transmission lines), and b) are essentially a scheme to trade frequent localized shortages for less frequent continent-spanning ones.
We already have the grid. And again continent spanning shortages don't happen.
> Prolonged periods of low production happen as a result of weather, e.g. Florida is suitable for solar because it's at a favorable latitude, but it also gets a lot of rain, and sometimes the rain continues for several weeks at a time.
Suitable means satisfies all requirements, not favorable conditions for some of them. If you're building solar in Florida it is with the expectation that there will be some rainy days.
> Moreover, suppose there are places that are expected to experience prolonged periods of non-production from solar and wind. What are they supposed to do for power?
GRID
> Having the same weather system affect most of a continent at the same time isn't really that uncommon. You also get nasty correlations like cloudy and still weather in the heart of the summer, causing simultaneous low generation and high electricity demand for air conditioning over wide areas.
It is extremely uncommon. There's a difference between a low pressure front moving across a few states and "the wind has stopped everywhere." You might get cloudy conditions in summer, Phoenix doesn't.
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It's economical to build a small amount of battery storage, enough for a few hours. For longer term issues, when things are dark and not windy for a long time, I'm not aware of any long-term plan. States like California are handling it by keeping old fossil fuel plants going for longer, and importing power from neighboring states.
Form energy is deploying BESS optimized for ~4 discharge.
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People are building 100 hour (5 day) batteries because they are incredibly cheap, but they're not doing many of them because they're not needed. Don't forget existing hydro, new advanced geothermal, existing nuclear (until they all reach end of life), etc. etc. etc.
"People are building 100 hour (5 day) batteries" Please provide links.
Also, 5 was a typo, it should have been 4 of course! Form energy has been making a major splash for years, having first modeled out the grid case for this type of battery, and ensuring that all materials and battery chemistry allowed a potential route to success. It's iron-air.
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They were designed with that in mind though. They were built to withstand an plane crash or attack. You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to ju…
The containment building of new nuclear power plant has to withstand impact of large, commercial aircraft used for long distance flights, with aviation fuel loading typically used in such flights. § 50.150 Aircraft impact assessment. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/p... Containment buildings for nuclear reactors are the strongest non-military buildings ever build. You need something much st…
Error rather than intentional targetting has to be considered.
Imagine a cruise missile (e.g. tomahawk) or a bunker buster bomb rather than an anti-tank missile.
The premise that such plants will not be targetted may apply to Russia (I doubt it) but may not apply to Israel or the USA.
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They were designed with that in mind though. They were built to withstand an plane crash or attack. You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to ju…
Whoever designed that test forgot that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared . A collision at 50 km/h is going to have roughly 1% the force of one at 500km/h.