221–230 of 231 posts
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Peak load is aligned with sunlight. Depending on where you live, many of the on-demand power generators like gas and solar farms are idle.
Not if you go to Scandinavia.
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The classic answer is to bury extremely long lived waste in a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench. A "subduction zone" is where two tectonic plates collide and fold into the depth of the planet. So anything you bury there would naturally travel deeper into the planet over the eons. I haven't heard any serious arguments against this, but I suspect it's impossible because people think…
I dont think it is so easy. Subduction zones have what are called accretionary prisms, which are basically sediment that is sloughed off the top of the subducting plate. Thus, if you want the nuclear waste to be subducted, you have to bury it deep enough, though I can't say quite how far - given the scale of the crust, I'd say you're looking at something on the order of miles at least. Which is extra challenging cons…
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On the contrary, current efficiency of even cheap-and-dumb electrolysis is 70% {1}, which means that cheap solar like the 2.155¢/kWh plant from 6 montgs ago {2} can easily provide baseline load. This is pretty much entirely because PV keep getting cheaper faster than everyone expected — even as recently as five years ago, pessimism like yours wouldn’t have been unreasonable, and yet the problem is now essentially sol…
Of course they can't and of course it doesn't get cheaper unless you decide to frame it in a way that not at all realistic. Solar is less then 1% and that's with 300% increase it's not even close to being able to deliver baseline anything regardless of how cheap it gets. It's a dream that's not even close to be realistic and frankly highly naive. Again 47w per m2 vs. 1000w per m2 and with solar panels needing contino…
I have no idea what you’re referring to with “47w per m2”, can you elaborate?
Ditto “needing continuous replairs“. There’s a rover on Mars that’s been running for about 15 years continuously on solar with no human maintenance.
From an engineering point of view (though not political), you don’t even need to worry about night time, because the earth is round and even planet sized grids don’t lose enough power to raise my example of 2.155¢/kWh to even as high as coal. And that’s if you refuse to use the fuel cell tech that already exists.
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One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced… 1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person. World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per…
I never claimed its impossible with solar, its just not very smart. Your calculation also leaves out a lot of issues with solar and intermittency. But even those things could be overcome. However, how is that better? Uranium mining is tiny and a non issue. Thorium is even more plentiful, literally a waste product. We have enough of that stuff for 1000s of years. We have the technology to use it on mass scale and it h…
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So by that argument if wind and solar where so great it wouldn't only be supplying around 1.5% of our energy and growing much more rapidly than it does. You can't both have your cake and eat it. The difference is that we KNOW that nuclear can deliver way more energy per m2 than wind and solar can. We know how to get it to work and we know that the primary cost of nuclear is political NOT technical completely opposite…
What? No, that argument is nothing like the claim you are trying to make in that first paragraph. Please stick to actual working logic. Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn'…
The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
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I never claimed its impossible with solar, its just not very smart. Your calculation also leaves out a lot of issues with solar and intermittency. But even those things could be overcome. However, how is that better? Uranium mining is tiny and a non issue. Thorium is even more plentiful, literally a waste product. We have enough of that stuff for 1000s of years. We have the technology to use it on mass scale and it h…
Is there a reason other than weapons lobby that blocks humanity from adopting thorium reactors?
Uranium would most likely be picked for an industrial scale nuclear weapons program for a couple reasons but thorium does not eliminate these problems.
Furthermore many of the benefits people talk about when talking about Thorium is really about the reactor. Many of the same benefits could also be achieved with Uranium.
Thorium really shines for some specific reactor types.
Whats holding reactors back in general is regulation in all parts of the supply chain, from research to operational licenses, and a wide popular anti-nuclear feeling.
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What? No, that argument is nothing like the claim you are trying to make in that first paragraph. Please stick to actual working logic. Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn'…
Of course it is. You are claiming that the lack of success of nuclear shows that it doesn't work financially. The same can be said about the effectiveness of solar. If it was so effective and could support most of our energy needs why haven't it? The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
This year PV alone is forecast to reach half a terrawatt. I’m not sure if that’s peak or average but at 30% per year growth, it doesn’t really matter. World electric use is only 2.7 TW, after that point we want to start electrolysing hydrogen out of water even if only to replace jet fuel.
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What? No, that argument is nothing like the claim you are trying to make in that first paragraph. Please stick to actual working logic. Yes, nuclear can deliver more energy per m2. But this is irrelevant, since we have no shortage of m2. What we have limits on is $$$. On the metric of energy/$, nuclear fails. And no, we do not know that the problem with nuclear is political. You can keep repeating that, but it doesn'…
Of course it is. You are claiming that the lack of success of nuclear shows that it doesn't work financially. The same can be said about the effectiveness of solar. If it was so effective and could support most of our energy needs why haven't it? The reason nuclear is expensive is because of the regulations around it NOT because of the technical issues of building a nuclear power plant.
Solar and wind have shown impressive and sustained improvement along so-called "experience curves". The cost of each has declined as a power law in cumulative installed capacity. This decline has been sustained while they've declined in cost by orders of magnitude (PV has improved in cost by more than a factor of 200 since the 1970s.)
Nuclear, in contrast, has been largely free of such sustained improvement. If anything, costs have increased with experience -- negative learning. The complexity and scale of nuclear appears to be such that learning effects are cancelled out.
And no, regulations are NOT the reason. That's the increasingly lame excuse nuclear fans confabulate to deal with the cognitive dissonance of their precious technology not actually living up to their fantasies about it. And as I've said elsewhere, if your complaint is that government doesn't let reactors meltdown enough, you might as well hang it up and go home. You are not going to win that one.
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The point is that climat change is real and it’s coming fast. So from a purely pragmatic standpoint it seems more reasonable to deploy solutions as soon as possible with available technologies than to wait for a plausible technology improvements. Otherwise you risk being almost as inactive in the required efforts than an average climat change denier.
Hum... Do you have any actual solution? One that does solve carbon emissions, can be deployed in reasonable time, and does not involve people getting poorer? The most pragmatic thing to do is to improve solar generation and all kinds of storage. Those can actually solve the problem. Nuclear can't be here on time (nor on budget), and everything else just won't happen. We could have avoided a lot of problems on the las…
Say’s who?
Because laws of physics say it’s the more efficient solution yet (not the cleanest thought) to tackle climat change problem. You have to put serious study out to counter that, not hearsay’s by coal lobby or anti-nuclear activists.
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From your link, solar doesn't rely on the grid, and in fact it acts independently of it on some islands.
For the network effects and efficencies, solar absolutly needs a grid. If not a grid, you need local storage, another inefficiency.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/01/03/as-utilities-fight-di...