231–240 of 286 posts
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There are compelling solutions, they just run into the same opposition as the plants themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
There's also the Finnish solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
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Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation c…
I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !
Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months.
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On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed.
Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h.
In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B.
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Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either.
We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.
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"Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people." Well, there was Chernobyl. Then Fukushima. I'm all for Nuclear. But I think humans have shown repeatedly they can't really handle it. So think the trepidation is justified. But, I am hoping with all the technology advances in last 50 years, maybe Nuclear can be made safe. If we do learn from past.
As far as I know though, Chernobyl and Fukushima had completely different reasons and don't really clump together apart from "both were meltdowns" Chernobyl was entirely a product of design compromises due to cost savings, combined by a totalitarian system suppressing the known impact of those design decisions. It was also a much older design. Fukushima also seemed like a design mistake (I remember reading it that th…
Humans.
You mention both Cost Savings and Design Mistakes. Those are common, and will occur in future projects.
Don't think totalitarian Gov has any monopoly on hiding design problems. Every company does it.
Those are both things, drives, that the US has shown to be incapable of administering. All industry is rife with cost cutting. And "safety" is very much cut in the name of profits. It happens today, just not 'obvious'. We don't hear about it until there is a meltdown.
I do hope that new designs are better. But I am absolutely not confident that humans have learned anything and wont subvert any improved designs again for cost savings.
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Coal is being displaced already.
Sorry I forgot to include some data that motivated me to post it. If we are talking about coal, for example this graph [0]. There it seems that coal is actually growing. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...
So it's do-able, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet in China.
The thing is: I am confident that Solar will push out Coal, even in China.
China is building a lot of new factory capacity for PV modules. Factory capacity is proportional to the acceleration of PV power production: It's a second derivative. The more battery capacity gets added, the faster PV capacity will start growing. The more PV capacity grows, the more clean power will be produced, competing with coal.
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You can build wind to compensate some of this. And of course a ton of short term storage. And then you build a bunch of cheap, inefficient gas peaker plants for the two weeks a year where neither are enough. At the moment it looks like that will be a lot cheaper than nuclear. But if nuclear gets cheaper, that’s also a great option!
Good points, all. But you'd still need to overbuild solar by quite a bit in order to make a reasonable amount in winter, in many areas.
In most other places, you can overbuild the PV panels. Which isn't too bad, since you do not have to overbuild inverters or grid connections.
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This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is? In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep hea…
Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmis…
The sad reality is that the humanity probably needs some type of big climate-related event that would act as a wake up call when it comes to the urgency of climate change. We need something that people can relate to with their senses or emotions. Data by itself can only get us so far.
I find it surprising that the 1896 answer of warming estimates closely match modern estimates. Back then: - They didn't have electronics, radio was barely being discovered - They didn't have airplanes, they just discovered the upper atmosphere, with the very first weather balloons - They knew about atoms, the periodic table was 30 years old, but nucleus wasn't discovered yet Climate science is a notoriously difficult…
The 1896 warming estimates that were accurate were not estimating future CO2 emissions. They were of the form: if we emit X tons of CO2 a year, the greenhouse effect will be Y. The greenhouse effect of CO2 can be studied in a literal greenhouse, and the effect can be extrapolated to the earth with methods we teach in high school today. They didn't predict at what year we would be at a tipping point, but at what the e…
And there are other effects, like how CO2 get absorbed in the oceans, clouds, water vapor, etc... That CO2 has an effect on temperature is "easy" to realize, quantifying it is much, much harder. And I am just talking about short term effects, long term effects (including a potential tipping point) is yet another layer of complexity.
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> As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage. What a comparison... The worry with nuclear waste is of course that the shielding doesn't last long enough and waste then contaminates surroundings with much much higher radiation than in coal ash
AFAIK it's pretty well know how long the shielding works, so you can always renew it. Also, with coal the shielding is impossible at all.
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
> As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage. What a comparison... The worry with nuclear waste is of course that the shielding doesn't last long enough and waste then contaminates surroundings with much much higher radiation than in coal ash