I could never take climate change seriously when nuclear wasn't on the table. If climate change were really a concern, you'd consider a power source that's safer than coal, but has negligible CO2 emissions (mining). I'm glad to see people are taking it seriously.
Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
191–200 of 818 posts
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects in the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects. Your article links to capacity not effective production when customer needs it . The issue with electricity production resides in being able to reliably produce electricity when customer needs it, not when planet aligns for [insert preferred…
Please explain said "basic physics". I'll wait. California is building battery storage at a rate of ~2500MW/year. There are ZERO physics problems standing in the way of this. And there is considerable innovation in fixed batteries like iron-air flow batteries, ones that exist and aren't just VC scams like most of the nuclear stuff. https://www.energy-storage.news/california-utility-pge-propo...
Basic physics 101.
The US produced 4 10^9 MWh in 2017 [1]
That's roughly 11 10^6 MWh / day or 11 10^12 Wh /day
So to power 50% of the US for half a day, we need : 11 10^12 Wh /day * 0.5 day * 0.5 = 2.75 10^12 Wh = 275 10^10 Wh
The energy storage of a Lithium Ion battery is roughly 270 Wh / kg [2], let's round this up to 275, I am feeling nice here.
This means we need : 275 10^10 Wh / 275 Wh / kg = 1 * 10^10 kg of Lithium Ion batteries. That's 10 million tons of batteries
The total reserve of lithium for the whole world are roughly 20 million tons [3]
[1] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1253739/lithium-reserves...
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why would you need 100% storage supply. Also note if France would go 100% nuclear they would need either significant overprovisioning or storage as well. Nuclear is not an load following source. Even less so if you want to operate economically.
> Why would you need 100% storage supply.
So you don't have power outages on windless nights.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either but we managed to do it.
Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak. Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.
They do in fact leak a bit.
Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#195Earlier 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…
Your final comparison there is an excellent example of hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is something that advocates of renewables regularly want to dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one. Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a…
Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more. Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become (this is happening already for economic reasons in Europe) the less this is an issue.
Also why do you only mention solar and not wind? Maybe because eit would make your argument less convincing? The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.
Why are the same simplistic arguments being brought forward again and again. They have all been debunked.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#196I could never take climate change seriously when nuclear wasn't on the table. If climate change were really a concern, you'd consider a power source that's safer than coal, but has negligible CO2 emissions (mining). I'm glad to see people are taking it seriously.
No. When it is a choice between spending 5x plus buying coal for another decade, or spending 1x and displacing carbon immediately, the correct choice is dead obvious, and getting moreso with each passing day as the 5x shades toward 6x and beyond, relentlessly.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#197One 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 solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors. The design was bad to begin with and it really didn't have any sort of containment or bunker or anything like that to speak of.
This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up.
I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators.
Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
France has nuclear plants because in the 1970s it decided it didnt want to be dependent on middle eastern oil. It was very very expensive. It was also nothing to do with global warming. Those plants are fully paid off but nearly all close to death. Replacing them will still be very very expensive. Extending their lives will be dangerous. France isnt quite sure what to do. If there's unlimited money and patience for y…
> France isnt quite sure what to do. Yes it is ( big nuclear buildout to replace most of the current fleet, while also doing lots of renewables and experimenting with small modular reactors): https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220210-announcing-new-r...
So they're reducing nuclear power production in the long term?
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#199One 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?
If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak electricity for less money.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s just scale. Those batteries and pumped hydro stories seem big. Relative to your house, they are. Relative to the grid as a whole, they are small.
That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?
Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce).
We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have to be mined.