On HN, there are a lot of nuclear proponents. Any comments from them on this article? Just curiosity from me because I don't know much about this topic.
The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-...
Global storage production is 1TW/h per annum now and will increase to 4TW/h by 2030, while also being cheaper.
There is plenty of land. If the cost of land ever became a serious constraint on renewables, renewables will be so cheap they will have already relegated all other energy sources to museums.
As for future breakthroughs: solar and wind could be rolled out with existing storage, but of course improvements are welcome. But turn this around: investment in nuclear requires believing that such improvements won't occur. If they do, your nuclear investment is totally screwed. It won't even make back operating costs. Do you think betting the improvements won't occur is a reasonable bet? Do you think nuclear is going to get financing from hard nosed business types with that hanging over it?
Maybe you're just suggesting continued investment in nuclear R&D, in case all the renewable and storage technologies suddenly hit a brick wall. R&D has a low bar to justify it, so that's not a hard case to make.
We don’t have storage technology to absorb a 2% year-long grid-wide output decrease [1]. That means overbuilding or, more practically, sticking with natural gas. If we aren’t building nuclear, then continuing to build gas plants is the right move.
A simple cycle gas turbine might be $0.6/W, vs. $10/W for a new nuclear power plant. So we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid.
This is still pie in the sky technology. Particularly given the frequencies, magnitudes and durations we’re considering. At that point SMRs become topical.
> we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid
Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
4% of the hydrogen production in China is by electrolysis now. Electrolysers there are below $300/kW.
You object to this because it's not available, then you point to SMRs, which don't exist now except on slides. And given NuScale's recent disappointments one should not expect the rosy promises of their (or other) SMRs to come true or find much of a market.
> Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
The gas would be hydrogen. Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power.
Right. Long-term large scale hydrogen manufacturing and storage (presumably as ammonia) is not a thing, not to the tune of several percentage points of primary generation. This is speculative, like SMRs.
> Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power
The math doesn’t work with current technology. Not at that scale. (The lithium alone would be orders of magnitude more than what is forecast to be needed for EVs.)
If underground storage is not available (lack of proper geology), the scheme could be synthesis of methanol, with oxyfuel combustion (Allam cycle) using oxygen from electrolysis, and with the CO2 stored for recycling to produce methanol. The CO2 and oxygen would be stored as refrigerated liquids.
> (The lithium alone would be orders of magnitude more than what is forecast to be needed for EVs.)
I don't believe this is true, not even close. The US has more than a quarter of a billion motor vehicles. A Tesla has about 70 kWh of storage and about 10 kg of lithium, so that's 17 TWh of storage. An optimal "synthetic baseload" for the US from wind and solar might use 6 hours of battery storage (and e-fuels). US average power production is about 500 GW, so six hours is about 3 TWh of batteries. Even if you multiply that a bit to assume less transmission and need for peaking storage it's still not "orders of magnitude" more than for EVs.) All this is even assuming Li-ion batteries would be used for stationary storage instead of the Na-ion batteries now coming on the market.
Were you assuming many days or weeks of batteries would be needed? That's the beauty of also using e-fuels; the batteries can be reserved for the short term storage they're truly suited for.
This tempers high-frequency variation. The 2% over a full year lower-frequency variation is the problem.
You’re proposing good ideas. But they’re untested and contain fundamental engineering risk. It’s similar to when pro-nuke folk assume SMRs will happen; hence, the analogy.
Right. And that's where the e-fuels come in. Using batteries for that storage problem is absurd and unnecessary. The argument that renewables can't reach 100% because batteries can't do year-scale leveling is a strawman argument. It's bad engineering to try to use batteries for that use case. And because 2% (say) is such a small fraction of the total demand the low round trip efficiency of using e-fuels for grid storage doesn't hurt much overall.
Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them.
Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
> Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years
might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false
It's just that these people are spread over a wide geographic area and can be blamed on things like smoking and car exhaust.
Over-reacting to early nuclear disasters and failing to accelerate our build out and continuing with coal for the past nearly 80 years post Chernobyl is, in my opinion, one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
https://www.wwf.mg/?272333/Dark%2DCloud
> It reveals that in 2013 their emissions were responsible for over 22,900 premature deaths, ...
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...
> Pollution from Europe’s coal plants responsible for ‘up to 34,000 deaths each year’
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abecff
> The health burden of European [coal power] emission-induced PM2.5, ..., amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain.
Chernobyl's total death toll is estimated somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands: in other words, even assuming the worst number for Chernobyl, in every year or two, coal kills the same number of Europeans as Chernobyl ever did. The number may be as low as a few months.