Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

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The current problem for renewables is storage for times when solar/wind aren't producing. There's some promising work being done there, but nuclear power is existing tech that can fill that gap. The fastest path off carbon should have both renewable and nuclear investments working in paralll.

Too much NIMBY, too much irrational fear if it, so it's unlikely to happen in the US. The current Russian/Ukraine war makes me wonder if European countries might reconsider their stance on it. It's not too late, for plants scheduled to be shutdown 2+ years from now, to make plans to keep them online. It also gives them motivation to build new ones, which France announced it would do just this past February. Perhaps the biggest challenge for countries that haven't built one in a few decades is experienced engineers. The US for example may have people experienced with operating them, but probably not building them at scale. France's original Messmer Plan shows it's possibly to ramp up relatively quickly though.

Storage just needs to be built out. It takes time to build out.

But nowhere near as much time as it would take to build out nukes.

I'm not aware of good storage options that scale to that level. Lithium batteries might conceivably do it but we can barely make enough to supply the EV market And if the Chevy Bolt is any indicator, we need to be extremely careful when we build massive novel battery storage systems like this. The few sites I'm aware of that are trying this are still only, at maximum charge, able to supply 4-6 hours of power for their location, and they're the largest in the world.

If getting off carbon is an existential threat, there's no reason that nuclear shouldn't be part of the solution in getting us there faster.

Obviously batteries are not right for utility storage. Even mentioning batteries in this context means you are not seriously engaged. If you really think we don't have good storage options that scale, you just haven't been paying attention.

Building nukes does not get us there faster, because it takes many years to even start displacing fossil fuels, and then it costs so much you get only a small fraction of the power renewables would produce--provided it ends up producing any power at all, which they often do not.

Stop with the veiled ad hominem attacks and provide some information if you want to have a discussion. If you're aware of a currently deployable massive scale long-term storage mechanism, I'm fully open to changing my opinion. I understand your point about allocating resources to renewables vs splitting them between nuclear, but storage is the key to that. As for the time nuclear takes, that's a matter of will, just like renewables. We can do it faster if we have a will to do so. France went from 0 to about 70% nuclear in under a decade. We need to be able to guarantee a complete scalable storage solution before new nuclear could come online to discard nuclear. Not with speculative tech, but things we know can work and scale.

As for cost, who cares? It's an existential threat. Spend what we have to do get it done. If it takes a few $Trillion building nuclear to shutdown all the coal plants, great! Money well spent. The US has dispersed about $10Trillion due to COVID. Coincidentally, at $10Billion for a nuclear power plant @1000MW, that's about the amount of money it would take to build enough nuclear power to go 100% nuclear in the US. Horrible as COVID is, the next few decades of climate change will be worse in their human costs. If we had done that 5 years ago we'd be close to bringing that capacity online in the next 2-3 years.

Anyway, what's the storage option I'm missing here? Molten salt, compressed air, some variety of stored kinetic energy? I'm aware of a few, but none that are ready for prime time, and would be extremely happy to be wrong if I've overlooked something obvious.

Pumped hydro is being built out like gangbusters. Mostly on hilltops, so far. But deep underground works too, and combined with hilltop multiplies the energy stored per gallon of water.

My current favorite, demonstrated recently, is a spherical pressure vessel anchored to the ocean bottom. The deeper it is, the more power it stores. At the bottom of the tank a pump drives out the water, leaving water vapor. You let it back in for power. You only need a wire back to shore.

Synthesis of hydrogen and ammonia has a huge, crucial role because those can be shipped to where they are needed. Ammonia is easy to handle liquified at room temperature and low pressure. The low round-trip efficiency turns out not to matter much; you just add more panels to make up the difference. A GW ammonia plant is going up in Norway. We will need hundreds more, in the tropics. The local stockpile only needs to hold out until the next shipment arrives, just like for oil, except you only need it sometimes.

Anytime local tankage is full, you can sell further production, which is massively useful as industrial feedstock. Because each extra panel you install generates revenue, there is no penalty for building out massive overcapacity.

Hydrogen is easy to store underground, e.g. in places where natural gas was pumped out of.

A 100 MW liquified nitrogen plant is going up in Chile. Liquifying air is extremely mature tech, very efficient already.

Compressed air, as noted, is being tried. A big bag anchored to the sea bottom can have air pumped into it, and released for power. Disused mines and salt domes can hold compressed air, too. Compressing hydrogen into them stores two kinds of power at the same time.

The point about cost is that a dollar spent on any technology displaces a certain amount of fossil fuel per unit time. Spend it in the wrong place, and you displace less coal than if you had spent it in a better place. Nukes are so expensive that your dollar fails to displace much coal.

Please share your storage solutions because I've not seen any that work for more than a half hour or so at grid levels of power consumption. No current tech other than say hydro dams can work for an extended time and most geographies don't allow for that.

I have explained at length in other replies here. Read those.

Is storage a problem for a big country like the USA? If you have a connected grid, can’t you be reasonably sure it’s windy and sunny in some places and bring power from there?

I actually don’t know

Yes, wind is always blowing somewhere. Unless you are Texas, and can't bring yourself to tie to the rest of the grid.

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