4 ms·

What are you proposing instead?

Manuel_D 4y ago
Solar and wind are good to supplement a dispatchable source like fossil fuels or hydroelectricity. But they are not viable as a primary producer without storage. And we don't have the capacity to build storage at anywhere near the required scale. It's often said that storage hasn't been developed because until renewables became significant there wasn't any demand for energy storage. This is untrue, energy storage has been attempted in order to smooth out fossil fuel use for the better part of a century. Sites at Turlough Hill [1], Ludington [2], and Bath County [3] were built to smooth out energy load on coal fired power plants. But these sites were expensive to develop and couldn't scale because of geographic limitations. They also were used for temporary daily demand, not the seasonal fluctuations of wind and solar that last for months. Energy storage simply isn't within the capacity to build, unless some breakthrough in technology happens. Until that breakthrough happens, it's not viable. And if you're willing to accept plans contingent on an engineering breakthrough, then just use fusion. So how do we decarbonize the grid? We can look at how countries that have successfully driven their fossil fuse to near zero and examine how they did it. Countries like Norway, Brazil, and Tajikistan use hydroelectricity for almost all their generation. This is great, but is geographically dependent. We should definitely built it where possible, but it's not a universal option. Same deal with Iceland and geothermal power. France was also able drive fossil fuel use below 5%. Only 10% of its electricity comes from hydroelectric power, since most of country is on the North European plain (flat land = no dams). They made up the rest through serial production of nuclear power. They built multiple copies of the same nuclear plant designs [4]. Within 15 years the country had over 80% of its electricity coming from nuclear power. The United states was actually on a similar track during the 1960s and 70s. Nuclear plants were being built at scale, and being delivered for costs between $1-2 billion per GW of capacity. These plants were actually some of the cheapest sources of energy amortized over the entirety of their lifetime. Overreaction from 3 mile island led to reduced nuclear construction. This diminished benefits from economies of scale, and led to higher nuclear costs. Vogtle costs over $20 billion because it's one of only (the only?) reactor under construction, and no economies of scale exists. Plenty of parts like steam generators [5] have no demand, save for nuclear power plants, so instead of serial production of a run of 30 or 40 it's only an order of 3 or 4. This is less efficient, and leads to larger costs. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Those second two hydro stations came online at roughly the same time as nuclear plants quite close to them. Seems odd that so much hydro came online near nuclear power plants at roughly the same time if it's there to support fossil fuels. Renewables are on the order of 100GW net per year. This is projected to double or quadruple by 2030. Where does the millions of tonnes of Natural Uranium to start terawatts of reactors come from? If you want to bring down costs via serial production you need to start now and it will take you 20 years. The current capacity of lithium battery production operating or opening next year is around 1TWh/yr. If 50GW of reactors was brought online per year it would require doubling current Uranium mining and enriching facilities to provide the first load for each. The _current_ world battery production can provide 10-20hrs of storage each year for 50GW of new renewables (most analyses show you can replace most of your energy with about 4hr storage if you keep the gas turbines for emergencies). 100s of GWh of new production are coming online each year with new chemistries scaling up to ease strain on lithium extraction. Looks like Nuclear power can at best match current renewable and storage production. By all means build as many PWRs as you can as a small suppliment to the renewable production, but the nuclear industry just does not have anywhere near the scale needed and we can't afford to wait for the industry to figure out MSRs and then build them in serial.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > The current capacity of lithium battery production operating or opening next year is around 1TWh/yr. We'll see. The price of lithium went up by 300% in 2022, and it's still rising: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium It's true that batteries only contain a few grams of lithium, but cathode materials do make up half of a battery's cost. Once battery manufacturers exhaust existing inventories and have to place new orders we'll see how well these predictions pan out. > If 50GW of reactors was brought online per year it would require doubling current Uranium mining and enriching facilities to provide the first load for each. Where did you get these figures? The existing nuclear power production is 3,000 GW [1]. An increase by 50 GW would be less than 2% increase. On the note of uranium, the energy density of uranium is such that fuel extraction is less than 1% of nuclear's total cost (fuel enrichment, is a different story, but that's not a mineral extraction problem). 1. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... 27,000 TWh per year production = 27,000 / (365 * 24) = 3,080 GW of production. > The _current_ world battery production can provide 10-20hrs of storage each year for 50GW of new renewables (most analyses show you can replace most of your energy with about 4hr storage if you keep the gas turbines for emergencies). 100s of GWh of new production are coming online each year with new chemistries scaling up to ease strain on lithium extraction. I don't think you realize how pitifully small 50 GW is. the United States' electricity production is 500 GW on average. So the entire world's battery production would take 10 years to provision just the United States' demand. And the figure of 4 hours of storage is way more optimistic than realistic explanations. The output fluctuations from wind and solar vary both by the hour, and seasonally as weather changes. Estimates for a de-carbonized grid go as high as 3 weeks [1]. It's hard to criticize your plan of 4 hours of storage when you don't cite a source or explain how this will function. Usually a storage figure that low would assume some amount of load shifting. But then the cost of energy interruptions to industries needs to be a cost factored in - shutting down industries means increased costs borne by customers and load shifting needs to include this cost. > Looks like Nuclear power can at best match current renewable and storage production. By all means build as many PWRs as you can as a small suppliment to the renewable production, but the nuclear industry just does not have anywhere near the scale needed and we can't afford to wait for the industry to figure out MSRs and then build them in serial. Not only can nuclear match the scale that's required, it did match the scale required in France, Sweden, and other countries. The US has demonstrated its ability to build plants on the necessary scale, and we'd have a completely nuclear and hydroelectric grid today if nuclearization wasn't interrupted in the 1970s. By comparison wind and solar combined are still outproduced by nuclear power both in the US and in the world as a whole [2]. No country has produced the majority of its electricity through renewables other than hydroelectricity. The amount of storage to provide just 1 day's worth of electricity storage (4 hours is not a reasonable assumption for a de-carbonized grid without frequent blackouts) amounts to 60,0000 GWh as compared to just 400 GWh of current annual production. I have no doubt you are convinced in the idea that it's easier to increase battery production 50-100 times greater than humanity has ever achieved is more attainable than building 3 nuclear plants for each one that presently exists, but that requires an incredibly optimistic attitude towards battery production. And I mean "incredibly" in the literal sense: I do not find it credible. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods_of_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

Solar and wind are good to supplement a dispatchable source like fossil fuels or hydroelectricity. But they are not viable as a primary producer without storage. And we don't have the capacity to build storage at anywhere near the required scale. It's often said that storage hasn't been developed because until renewables became significant there wasn't any demand for energy storage. This is untrue, energy storage has been attempted in order to smooth out fossil fuel use for the better part of a century. Sites at Turlough Hill [1], Ludington [2], and Bath County [3] were built to smooth out energy load on coal fired power plants. But these sites were expensive to develop and couldn't scale because of geographic limitations. They also were used for temporary daily demand, not the seasonal fluctuations of wind and solar that last for months. Energy storage simply isn't within the capacity to build, unless some breakthrough in technology happens. Until that breakthrough happens, it's not viable. And if you're willing to accept plans contingent on an engineering breakthrough, then just use fusion. So how do we decarbonize the grid? We can look at how countries that have successfully driven their fossil fuse to near zero and examine how they did it. Countries like Norway, Brazil, and Tajikistan use hydroelectricity for almost all their generation. This is great, but is geographically dependent. We should definitely built it where possible, but it's not a universal option. Same deal with Iceland and geothermal power. France was also able drive fossil fuel use below 5%. Only 10% of its electricity comes from hydroelectric power, since most of country is on the North European plain (flat land = no dams). They made up the rest through serial production of nuclear power. They built multiple copies of the same nuclear plant designs [4]. Within 15 years the country had over 80% of its electricity coming from nuclear power. The United states was actually on a similar track during the 1960s and 70s. Nuclear plants were being built at scale, and being delivered for costs between $1-2 billion per GW of capacity. These plants were actually some of the cheapest sources of energy amortized over the entirety of their lifetime. Overreaction from 3 mile island led to reduced nuclear construction. This diminished benefits from economies of scale, and led to higher nuclear costs. Vogtle costs over $20 billion because it's one of only (the only?) reactor under construction, and no economies of scale exists. Plenty of parts like steam generators [5] have no demand, save for nuclear power plants, so instead of serial production of a run of 30 or 40 it's only an order of 3 or 4. This is less efficient, and leads to larger costs. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill_Power_Station 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Those second two hydro stations came online at roughly the same time as nuclear plants quite close to them. Seems odd that so much hydro came online near nuclear power plants at roughly the same time if it's there to support fossil fuels. Renewables are on the order of 100GW net per year. This is projected to double or quadruple by 2030. Where does the millions of tonnes of Natural Uranium to start terawatts of reactors come from? If you want to bring down costs via serial production you need to start now and it will take you 20 years. The current capacity of lithium battery production operating or opening next year is around 1TWh/yr. If 50GW of reactors was brought online per year it would require doubling current Uranium mining and enriching facilities to provide the first load for each. The _current_ world battery production can provide 10-20hrs of storage each year for 50GW of new renewables (most analyses show you can replace most of your energy with about 4hr storage if you keep the gas turbines for emergencies). 100s of GWh of new production are coming online each year with new chemistries scaling up to ease strain on lithium extraction. Looks like Nuclear power can at best match current renewable and storage production. By all means build as many PWRs as you can as a small suppliment to the renewable production, but the nuclear industry just does not have anywhere near the scale needed and we can't afford to wait for the industry to figure out MSRs and then build them in serial.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > The current capacity of lithium battery production operating or opening next year is around 1TWh/yr. We'll see. The price of lithium went up by 300% in 2022, and it's still rising: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium It's true that batteries only contain a few grams of lithium, but cathode materials do make up half of a battery's cost. Once battery manufacturers exhaust existing inventories and have to place new orders we'll see how well these predictions pan out. > If 50GW of reactors was brought online per year it would require doubling current Uranium mining and enriching facilities to provide the first load for each. Where did you get these figures? The existing nuclear power production is 3,000 GW [1]. An increase by 50 GW would be less than 2% increase. On the note of uranium, the energy density of uranium is such that fuel extraction is less than 1% of nuclear's total cost (fuel enrichment, is a different story, but that's not a mineral extraction problem). 1. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... 27,000 TWh per year production = 27,000 / (365 * 24) = 3,080 GW of production. > The _current_ world battery production can provide 10-20hrs of storage each year for 50GW of new renewables (most analyses show you can replace most of your energy with about 4hr storage if you keep the gas turbines for emergencies). 100s of GWh of new production are coming online each year with new chemistries scaling up to ease strain on lithium extraction. I don't think you realize how pitifully small 50 GW is. the United States' electricity production is 500 GW on average. So the entire world's battery production would take 10 years to provision just the United States' demand. And the figure of 4 hours of storage is way more optimistic than realistic explanations. The output fluctuations from wind and solar vary both by the hour, and seasonally as weather changes. Estimates for a de-carbonized grid go as high as 3 weeks [1]. It's hard to criticize your plan of 4 hours of storage when you don't cite a source or explain how this will function. Usually a storage figure that low would assume some amount of load shifting. But then the cost of energy interruptions to industries needs to be a cost factored in - shutting down industries means increased costs borne by customers and load shifting needs to include this cost. > Looks like Nuclear power can at best match current renewable and storage production. By all means build as many PWRs as you can as a small suppliment to the renewable production, but the nuclear industry just does not have anywhere near the scale needed and we can't afford to wait for the industry to figure out MSRs and then build them in serial. Not only can nuclear match the scale that's required, it did match the scale required in France, Sweden, and other countries. The US has demonstrated its ability to build plants on the necessary scale, and we'd have a completely nuclear and hydroelectric grid today if nuclearization wasn't interrupted in the 1970s. By comparison wind and solar combined are still outproduced by nuclear power both in the US and in the world as a whole [2]. No country has produced the majority of its electricity through renewables other than hydroelectricity. The amount of storage to provide just 1 day's worth of electricity storage (4 hours is not a reasonable assumption for a de-carbonized grid without frequent blackouts) amounts to 60,0000 GWh as compared to just 400 GWh of current annual production. I have no doubt you are convinced in the idea that it's easier to increase battery production 50-100 times greater than humanity has ever achieved is more attainable than building 3 nuclear plants for each one that presently exists, but that requires an incredibly optimistic attitude towards battery production. And I mean "incredibly" in the literal sense: I do not find it credible. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods_of_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...