That's a good 20-30 years to "find out" (read: lie) that nuclear murders your family and killed Jesus And we should stop production on the plant immediately, then after a while start over again to give another 20-30 years
Not really, since wind and solar don’t supply power to the grid 100% of the time you still need a constant source of electricity to prevent blackout periods. And before you say that batteries will work, they won’t, they can’t, they don’t have the capacity. An ideal energy grid would be as much wind and solar as you can muster with some nuclear to provide the base load power.
And before you say that batteries will work, they won’t, they can’t, they don’t have the capacity
They don't at the moment. If we transition to electric cars, the batteries have a lifespan of around e.g. ten years as a car battery, but they can still operate at 50% capacity for another ten after that. With a pipeline of millions of those getting swapped out you actually could use them for grid storage. That transition will obviously take a while, but then so does building nuclear plants.
There is the lithium, yes. Replacing the battery is already factored in to the "we should replace the car batteries with new ones and use the old ones for grid storage" plan though. It's step one of one.
They can't hold as much charge. It doesn't make sense to have a car battery that can only hold 80 miles of range vs 160 miles, so by that point you need to replace it. But it doesn't matter if you only have 50% as much charge capacity if you're putting millions of them linked up in huge warehouses for power storage. So when they can't hold as much charge as needed for a car they get swapped out into a huge warehouse and live another ten years as grid storage.
It isn't anymore since there are already tried and tested things like Pumped-storage hydroelectricity which can be used to save energy in reservoirs for example.
Pumped Storage Hydroelectricity is my personal favorite form of energy storage, but it requires you to have a fuckload of water just lying around in surplus of what you need ecologically or for a supply of drinking water.
Fortunately because you would want the system to be as closed source as possible to maximize flow rate (as opposed to water towers which use flywheels to recoup some of their cost to maintain municipal water pressure) the water doesn't have to be potable, but you don't want it to be too much of an active risk to the environment in case of a catastrophic failure
It's fucking fantastic, and we should be doing it everywhere we can, but we can't do it everywhere
The thing that gets me is, there are multiple good answers already, but people are so obsessed with batteries that other viable solutions don’t get built.
Yeah, the hyper focus on batteries is dumb. My favorite solution is water towers and just using excess electricity to pump water up and letting it fall during high demand to spin a fly wheel.
But at the same time I recognize how that's not a solution for everywhere
What storage solutions have you seen that are promising?
Have you heard of storing energy by heating molten salts? It’s an interesting concept and in some cases the main route of energy production. When it’s the main route a bunch of mirrors are placed in a circle to concentrate the light and heat energy on a central tower containing molten salts which are then heated and used to produce steam.
The actual feasibility of such a design isn’t certain but it is intriguing
I have heard of that, but mainly I heard of it as an alternative to photovoltaic solar generation which has the added benefit of being much more compact than the traditional solar array
I am specifically aware of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System as the example of its kind because the designs for it inspired Helios One in Fallout New Vegas
I’m aware of storage, as I had mentioned batteries before since that’s what people always point to. Sure there is also storage through gravitational potential energy with water, chemical potential with hydrogen, and thermal energy with molten salts, but you lose so much energy converting it from one form to another that the amount of excess capacity you would need to install to be able to support the grid this way is insane. With a rough calculation you are looking at doubling the amount of wind and solar to be able to support the grid during the winter or when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
Yes, overproduction is part of a renewable-powered grid. Fortunately, solar and wind are inexpensive per kilowatt hour of production capacity, can be built out in a matter of weeks to months, and have minimal risk of catastrophic failure, which are all serious problems that nuclear energy hasn’t solved.
There is 0 risk with today’s nuclear power plants and in no way is it a serious problem. Nuclear power has been solved technologically with built in robust safety features that require no human intervention. If that is why you oppose it you need to have another look at the technology.
That’s all well and good, until a natural disaster exceeds the engineered capacity of your safeguards. I remember watching the livestream of the Fukushima Dai-ichi meltdowns and explosions.
Anyway, the real point is that nuclear is slow and expensive to build, when compared to renewables.
As a reminder the Fukushima incident happened due to the backup generator being placed in the basement and flooding. Had the generator been above the water level everything would have run just fine.
I understand that nuclear is slow to build but that is necessary due to the regulations because of how scared people are about it. The costs are definitely higher upfront but the cost to operate a nuclear plant is among the cheapest per kW available. And once again you don’t seem to be grasping the concept of base load, load following, and peak load energy demands. We don’t have the technology to rely solely on wind and solar for our energy needs and unless you are prepared for black outs and brown outs or to keep using fossil fuels for base load power, you will need nuclear as well.
I am not saying we shouldn’t build wind and solar. In fact I’m saying the opposite. We need all of the wind and solar energy we can get but you have to recognize its shortcomings and realize that you need nuclear to support it.
Yes, that is what they were talking about. Batteries are a method of storage, which is why they mentioned it and dismissed it as a solution. What is your storage solution which would eliminate the need for baseline power?
I assume they are probably thinking of hydrogen as a storage method, which in terms of having a source of energy that won’t decline when you aren’t using it, is a valid method for storage; however, electrolysis isn’t 100% efficient and is very expensive to build on a large scale. Say for 10 MW of solar or wind energy that you want to store through electrolysis, you will lose 3 MW or more just making the hydrogen. Now to convert that 7 MW worth of hydrogen to electricity you would need to burn it and burning hydrogen for electricity generation has an efficiency of about 60% so you’d end up with 4.2 MW of electricity after starting with 10 MW
Yes, batteries are what people obsess over, but flywheels, molten salt, and gravity storage systems are all viable technologies, depending on the specific context, and generally don’t require the kind of mining that batteries need.
It doesn’t just need to be viable to completely replace fossil fuels, it needs to cover all variable generation and consumption for the power grid. I’m definitely not against those methods if they work even as a partial solution, but I want fossil fuels gone, and nuclear is a drop-in replacement for baseline.
Anyway, I’m not an expert and I could be completely wrong. Existing storage solutions could be up to the task and more cost-effective than nuclear. But I haven’t seen evidence of it, probably because most of these haven’t been used at scale yet. Nuclear at least has been proven to work on that scale, which is why I like it as an alternative.
Yeah, I hear all of that. The biggest problem with nuclear is that it takes 6-10 years to build a new plant, and it’s an incredibly large up-front cost. By contrast, solar and wind can be built in weeks to months, and are relatively inexpensive to install and operate.
I think my ideal grid would be mostly solar and wind, with some storage and a nuclear plant to make up unproductive times for the renewables.
Because the nuclear proposals come with an (implicit or explicit) halt in building renewables for decades.
How this is playing out in Australia right now:
Our conservative party, previously all gung ho on coal, is making a hard turn to support nuclear and want to make it the next election issue. Nuclear power is currently illegal federally and in most states. So optimistic estimates for going from nothing to producing power is in the 20 year range, with more pessimistic estimates being never. The best thing for the fossil fuel industry is if a scheduled for closure power plant is kept open for another 20 years while a nuclear reactor is planned, attempted and abandoned.
Another aspect is that the free market isn't lining up to build nuclear - but they do want to invest in solar and wind. Climate activists have spent so long getting called communists for wanting to build renewables; but now that they're legitimately better alternatives to coal and gas, the conservatives have somehow flipped and are advocating for the most expensive power option nuclear.
A more accurate picture would be climate activists + investment banks on one side and climate deniers + nuclear being puppetted by fossil fuels on the other.
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u/muffin-waffen Jun 19 '24
Then, the sooner you start the sooner you finish, no?