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Your argument only makes sense if 1) you take it as a given that nuclear can't help get us reach our goals sooner. And 2) that storage is a solved problem at th

Your argument only makes sense if 1) you take it as a given that nuclear can't help get us reach our goals sooner. And 2) that storage is a solved problem at the highest possible scales needed for this. #2 is highly debatable, and #1 relies on #2. There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there. This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.

ncmncm 5y ago
Storage in principle is simple because you only need one method that is universally applicable. Storage in practice is complicated just because you always want to use the cheapest and most useful alternative in each place and time, which will be no more expensive than the universal method, and often cheaper. But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices. We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us. In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.
pydry 5y ago
Gas is completely dispatchable and makes up such a huge % of our energy that we should right now just be producing the maximum number of green GWh ASAP at the minimum cost and time and put off worrying about intermittency. If we can get to the point where we are routinely overproducing from solar and wind and turning off the gas then yea we should ramp up storage. We will see it coming years away though. China is ahead of the curve on this having just completed a 40GWh 3.6GW pumped storage battery. Nuclear power would also need a lot of this if we were to rely upon it 100% since it is not dispatchable.

ncmncm 5y ago

Storage in principle is simple because you only need one method that is universally applicable. Storage in practice is complicated just because you always want to use the cheapest and most useful alternative in each place and time, which will be no more expensive than the universal method, and often cheaper. But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices. We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us. In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.

pydry 5y ago

Gas is completely dispatchable and makes up such a huge % of our energy that we should right now just be producing the maximum number of green GWh ASAP at the minimum cost and time and put off worrying about intermittency. If we can get to the point where we are routinely overproducing from solar and wind and turning off the gas then yea we should ramp up storage. We will see it coming years away though. China is ahead of the curve on this having just completed a 40GWh 3.6GW pumped storage battery. Nuclear power would also need a lot of this if we were to rely upon it 100% since it is not dispatchable.