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What we need it a viable battery to make wind and solar viable for 24 power delivery. How about a rechargeable nuclear battery? What if during times when there
by tasty_freeze 7y ago
What we need it a viable battery to make wind and solar viable for 24 power delivery. How about a rechargeable nuclear battery?
What if during times when there is an excess of power being generated, the excess is used to accelerate protons into a block of some material that (a) captures the protons well and (b) has a half life on the order of 24 hours. Generate the isotopes, when then decay and generate heat over the course of a day or two. Obviously, the isotopes don't wait for night to decay, so it would be generating heat continuously. In effect, it would be a big capacitor.
Just how inefficient would it be?
(Yes, I know very little about nuclear, and I expect it is terribly inefficient, but I'm curious to hear just how bad)
- acidburnNSA 7y agoExtraordinarily inefficient. The energy in nuclear fission comes not from when a proton is accelerated, but when a neutron splits a large nuclear fuel atom. To store energy in nuclear reactions, you'd have to fuse the fission products back into uranium. This process can only be done at scale in very large supernovas. But what we can do is store heat. You can have a nuclear plant storing heat in a thermal storage system (e.g. a huge vat of molten salt). As the sun sets, this tank can fill in the extra energy while the (constant power) nuclear reactor keeps the pace. Effectively, the nuclear plant can now ramp rapidly from 50% to 100% full capacity since the salt tank can be sized to double the reactor capacity. Lots of reactor companies are talking about doing this thermal energy storage thing to best help out in an increasingly intermittent energy world. You can also steam bypass the nuclear reactor to make hydrogen, desalinated water, etc.