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Comment by beauzero | Hacker News Reader

Interesting side note. There is a new reactor coming online in the next year or two close to Savannah, GA (Plant Vogtle)...which has resulted in the air quality of Carroll County, GA getting much cleaner. Yates and Wansley have burned through coal stockpiles, one is now moth balled, the other is on nat gas and will be fully decommissioned when Vogtle 3? comes on line. Vogtle 3-4 https://www.georgiapower.com/company/plant-vogtle.html

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At ~$14B for ~2GW, that is very expensive power. It will soon be markedly uncompetitive as solar/wind/storage come online, and the reactors will end up shut down early, never having made back their (outrageous) capital cost.

The biggest battery in the world is about 400MWh. That's the output of the Diablo Canyon power plant for 10 minutes.

What is this mysterious storage that you speak of?

Do I need to look up for you how much pumped-hydro storage is already online? Or list a dozen other technologies also under large-scale construction? You could look that up yourself, if you cared.

Which valley are you going to drown? Hydro being pretty much at capacity...

Hydro storage is a completely different animal than native hydro generation.

A reservoir for the latter requires a river collecting water from a large area watershed, and a dam lower down backing water up the river course.

Hydro storage requires only an elevated basin, and a pipe (penstock) leading up to it from a ready source of water -- even groundwater -- no watershed needed. Such basins are legion, and filling them typically discomfits no one.

Given the capacity needed (TWhs), such basins are going to be massive, and will drown valleys.

No valleys, no drownding.

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