5 ms·

I find it very likely to be wrong when statements say xxx is the "only" way to do something. Particularly with nuclear which has strong evidence in the US, Fran

by dv_dt 7y ago

I find it very likely to be wrong when statements say xxx is the "only" way to do something. Particularly with nuclear which has strong evidence in the US, France and China that plants can't be built in sufficient time to make a difference at this point, while it's pretty clear that renewables and storage are not only feasible, but more cost effective and faster to rollout, as well as to advance technologically vs nuclear.

Robotbeat 7y ago
I agree that nuclear isn’t technically the only option, but statements like “Can’t be built fast enough to make a difference” is also not true, particularly if you use historical examples YES in France. We’re going to need deep decarbonization, and actually the most likely scenario is it will take decades, so there’s actually substantial time for nuclear to make a difference. It doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to build a nuclear power plant. I’m firmly in the “every zero carbon option now, as fast as possible.” And nuclear is definitely part of that. I’ve become worried about the stalling solar power deployment rate in the US (and other places). It hasn’t stopped, but it no longer appears to be on the same exponential growth curve we needed it to be on. We’re going to need everything we can get.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  France itself is saying it shouldn't build a new round of of nuclear power plants and instead should invest in renewables & storage (and would save money and risk) going that route. If you look at the timeline and frequent schedule overruns of nuclear plants we can't build them fast enough in the US to make a critical difference at this point. If you look at China without many of the supposed anti-nuclear legal deterrents, their projects were getting more and more overrun vs estimates and they halted all new plants except for a couple plants of their own design. (and those obviously have self-development motivations). They're trying to finish their initial round of plants right now and likely have come to a similar conclusion of too slow, too expensive vs renewables.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    France is not immune to the social forces impacting the rest of the world.
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      I assert is more of a financial & time to carbon reduction question: France calculates it would save $45B by going to renewable energy instead of replacing aging nuclear power plants with new ones. https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energy-france https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
- imtringued 7y ago
  The statistics tell me a different story. Seasonal differences in the renewable share are almost nonexistent. Maybe somewhere around +-20%. Sure we will need storage that lets us bridge weeks and if it is economic even up to a whole month but anything beyond that is not about trying to compensate energy shortages, it's about capturing the overproduced energy to sequester carbon. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=monthly https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Also I recommend you to take a look at the daily variance. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=daily https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Anything below the average of 40% is awful. The longest interval below 40% I have found was from 19.03 to 29.03. A month of storage is more than we would ever need. two weeks would be the sweet spot, one or zero weeks is doable if we use gas plants. Really the only amount energy storage that I would consider absolutely mandatory is 24 hours because we still want to use solar energy at night and wind power that is mostly generated at night during the day.
  - petre 7y ago
    You still need 60% from somewhere. This is why France's new policy of replacing 20…25% nuclear out of 70…75% with renewables is good. Germany is just obliviously burning almost 50% coal instead.
belorn 7y ago
Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. It would be great if Germany replaced all their natural gas power plants in favor of storage. It is the perfect solution and it would end the nuclear power discussion rather quickly if nations would actually start to use it rather then building more gas based power plants. I am in the political camp that says we should ban all burning of fossil fuels today. Doing so would create all the incentives needed to answer the question of storage vs nuclear in a very short time.
- mimixco 7y ago
  Banning fossil fuels would also set society back 100 years. They're literally the basis of all of modern life. I don't think you'll get many takers for that argument.
  - newswriter99 7y ago
    This is the short version of my argument.
- cesarb 7y ago
  > Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. Wikipedia says otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
  - belorn 7y ago
    Thanks for the link. Compared to salt reactors which only holds a few experimental 100MW generators in the world, it seems that storage in comparison is clearly ahead in development with the largest producing around 3GW at peak. In order to replace fossil fuels in the US they would need to build about a million new ones of the current biggest version, through 11hrs capacity sounds low in regard to seasonal changes. They also need to build a matching number of renewable power plants to fill the storage, plus some overhead since storage use more energy that they produce. It is definitively plausible solution which I have nothing against. Looking at the US grid I interpret it to mean that storage is currently responsible for less than 0.1%.
gwbas1c 7y ago
As a huge renewable energy fan, I need to point out that your viewpoint is factually incorrect. For example: I built a very low carbon home a year ago, with giant solar panels sized to charge two electric cars, and to heat the house with heat pumps. I live in the Northeast US, where it gets cold in the winter. The reason why it gets cold in the winter is because the days are very short. Because the days are shorter in the winter, the solar panels do not generate enough electricity to heat the house, so I end up using a lot of grid electricity in December and January. And, what really stinks is that April was unusually cloudy this year. So, when I should have generated excess, I ended up pulling from the grid. In contrast, I have a lot of excess power in the summer when the days are long. (Air conditioning doesn't use as much electricity as heating.) Now, comes the facts: We don't have technology that can store the energy that I generate in the summer for use in the winter. Batteries are great for short term storage: Charge at noon when the panels generate the most power, discharge at night. Even worse, my very expensive Powerwall can't run my heat pump, nor could it hold enough charge to heat my home overnight. Even if I doubled my panels and had a few more Powerwalls, I'd need to pull from the grid in some of the rather bad cold snaps we had this winter. This is why people say that Nuclear can solve the problem now. Renewables are a great long-term solution, but we still need a lot of R&D to solve the problem of storing energy in the summer for use in the winter. In contrast, the nuclear power plant 15 miles from my home can run my heat pump in the dead of winter, without requiring any new storage technology.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It sounds to me like maybe you should consider a hybrid of solar and wind power. When I lived in Northern Ontario (where winters are brutally cold) whenever we did not have sun we had plenty of wind. Once the wind generator was up we never needed outside power (in our case: a generator).
- dv_dt 7y ago
  I agree that storage really isn't up to seasonal demand variation yet. But I also don't think we should take out current nuclear and should run current plants to end of life - even extending their life where practical. But I strongly think that project success/completion data points to new nuclear plants being a poor investment financially and time wise for carbon suppression vs our other options. I am a bit curious why running a wood fired stove in the winter doesn't meet your heating needs in a modern well-insulated low carbon home? We need a set of different, possibly non-uniform solutions. For heat, why not store power by growing forests in the spring/summer, and burning wood in the winter? Not high-tech I know, but some of the automatic pellet feed systems are very low touch.

by dv_dt 7y ago

Robotbeat 7y ago

I agree that nuclear isn’t technically the only option, but statements like “Can’t be built fast enough to make a difference” is also not true, particularly if you use historical examples YES in France. We’re going to need deep decarbonization, and actually the most likely scenario is it will take decades, so there’s actually substantial time for nuclear to make a difference. It doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to build a nuclear power plant. I’m firmly in the “every zero carbon option now, as fast as possible.” And nuclear is definitely part of that. I’ve become worried about the stalling solar power deployment rate in the US (and other places). It hasn’t stopped, but it no longer appears to be on the same exponential growth curve we needed it to be on. We’re going to need everything we can get.

dv_dt 7y ago
France itself is saying it shouldn't build a new round of of nuclear power plants and instead should invest in renewables & storage (and would save money and risk) going that route. If you look at the timeline and frequent schedule overruns of nuclear plants we can't build them fast enough in the US to make a critical difference at this point. If you look at China without many of the supposed anti-nuclear legal deterrents, their projects were getting more and more overrun vs estimates and they halted all new plants except for a couple plants of their own design. (and those obviously have self-development motivations). They're trying to finish their initial round of plants right now and likely have come to a similar conclusion of too slow, too expensive vs renewables.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  France is not immune to the social forces impacting the rest of the world.
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    I assert is more of a financial & time to carbon reduction question: France calculates it would save $45B by going to renewable energy instead of replacing aging nuclear power plants with new ones. https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energy-france https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
imtringued 7y ago
The statistics tell me a different story. Seasonal differences in the renewable share are almost nonexistent. Maybe somewhere around +-20%. Sure we will need storage that lets us bridge weeks and if it is economic even up to a whole month but anything beyond that is not about trying to compensate energy shortages, it's about capturing the overproduced energy to sequester carbon. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=monthly https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Also I recommend you to take a look at the daily variance. https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=ren-share&period=daily https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm?year=2018&source=... Anything below the average of 40% is awful. The longest interval below 40% I have found was from 19.03 to 29.03. A month of storage is more than we would ever need. two weeks would be the sweet spot, one or zero weeks is doable if we use gas plants. Really the only amount energy storage that I would consider absolutely mandatory is 24 hours because we still want to use solar energy at night and wind power that is mostly generated at night during the day.
- petre 7y ago
  You still need 60% from somewhere. This is why France's new policy of replacing 20…25% nuclear out of 70…75% with renewables is good. Germany is just obliviously burning almost 50% coal instead.

belorn 7y ago

Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. It would be great if Germany replaced all their natural gas power plants in favor of storage. It is the perfect solution and it would end the nuclear power discussion rather quickly if nations would actually start to use it rather then building more gas based power plants. I am in the political camp that says we should ban all burning of fossil fuels today. Doing so would create all the incentives needed to answer the question of storage vs nuclear in a very short time.

mimixco 7y ago
Banning fossil fuels would also set society back 100 years. They're literally the basis of all of modern life. I don't think you'll get many takers for that argument.
- newswriter99 7y ago
  This is the short version of my argument.
cesarb 7y ago
> Storage is talked about in the similar ways as molten salt reactor. It is a nice concept but I don't know any nation which energy grid uses it. Wikipedia says otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
- belorn 7y ago
  Thanks for the link. Compared to salt reactors which only holds a few experimental 100MW generators in the world, it seems that storage in comparison is clearly ahead in development with the largest producing around 3GW at peak. In order to replace fossil fuels in the US they would need to build about a million new ones of the current biggest version, through 11hrs capacity sounds low in regard to seasonal changes. They also need to build a matching number of renewable power plants to fill the storage, plus some overhead since storage use more energy that they produce. It is definitively plausible solution which I have nothing against. Looking at the US grid I interpret it to mean that storage is currently responsible for less than 0.1%.

gwbas1c 7y ago

As a huge renewable energy fan, I need to point out that your viewpoint is factually incorrect. For example: I built a very low carbon home a year ago, with giant solar panels sized to charge two electric cars, and to heat the house with heat pumps. I live in the Northeast US, where it gets cold in the winter. The reason why it gets cold in the winter is because the days are very short. Because the days are shorter in the winter, the solar panels do not generate enough electricity to heat the house, so I end up using a lot of grid electricity in December and January. And, what really stinks is that April was unusually cloudy this year. So, when I should have generated excess, I ended up pulling from the grid. In contrast, I have a lot of excess power in the summer when the days are long. (Air conditioning doesn't use as much electricity as heating.) Now, comes the facts: We don't have technology that can store the energy that I generate in the summer for use in the winter. Batteries are great for short term storage: Charge at noon when the panels generate the most power, discharge at night. Even worse, my very expensive Powerwall can't run my heat pump, nor could it hold enough charge to heat my home overnight. Even if I doubled my panels and had a few more Powerwalls, I'd need to pull from the grid in some of the rather bad cold snaps we had this winter. This is why people say that Nuclear can solve the problem now. Renewables are a great long-term solution, but we still need a lot of R&D to solve the problem of storing energy in the summer for use in the winter. In contrast, the nuclear power plant 15 miles from my home can run my heat pump in the dead of winter, without requiring any new storage technology.

jacquesm 7y ago
It sounds to me like maybe you should consider a hybrid of solar and wind power. When I lived in Northern Ontario (where winters are brutally cold) whenever we did not have sun we had plenty of wind. Once the wind generator was up we never needed outside power (in our case: a generator).
dv_dt 7y ago
I agree that storage really isn't up to seasonal demand variation yet. But I also don't think we should take out current nuclear and should run current plants to end of life - even extending their life where practical. But I strongly think that project success/completion data points to new nuclear plants being a poor investment financially and time wise for carbon suppression vs our other options. I am a bit curious why running a wood fired stove in the winter doesn't meet your heating needs in a modern well-insulated low carbon home? We need a set of different, possibly non-uniform solutions. For heat, why not store power by growing forests in the spring/summer, and burning wood in the winter? Not high-tech I know, but some of the automatic pellet feed systems are very low touch.