4 ms·

> A few times: https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability- https://www.ornl.gov/publication/investigations-reusability-... The adsorbent loses

• Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > The adsorbent loses efficiency after a couple elution cycles, but it is regenerated by an alki wash. Read this [1] if you want a better explanation. ..The longest lasting method in that paper is a scale model in idealized conditions of the same method I linked to but the first was in more realistic conditions... they ran one in the ocean but not more than once. > Regardless, this whole seawater extraction tangent is only a contingency if no new terrestrial reserves of uranium are found. Unlike intermittent sources which require massive amounts of grid storage, uranium seawater extraction isn't going to be necessary any time soon which is why I'm not super concerned about how seawater extraction isn't being commercialized. So we're back here. To match the scale of renewable when they start to run into the constraints that require scaling up storage, you need about 3TW by 2030 (before then a mix is viable along with using surplus for replacing non-electrical fossil fuels such as H2). That's 10,000 tonnes of fissile material up front, and another 10,000 every reload. You need to open every mine on the planet today and empty them by 2040. Then your sea mining rig needs to be ready to go (and hilariously has to be installed on a greater net capacity of offshore wind turbines than the capacity of nuclear reactors it supplies). After that you still need just as much storage for variable loads because ramping isn't an option as idle capacity would reduce your fuel runway by 6 years. All this because you think lithium production can't double when the extraction started a year ago? It's actually a comically bad plan. Well done. The bit where it needs the wind turbines was comedy gold.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    > ..The longest lasting method in that paper is a scale model in idealized conditions of the same method I linked to but the first was in more realistic conditions... they ran one in the ocean but not more than once. Sure, they may need to regenerate the adsorbent after just one use. But the polymer survives. Even if the adsorbent retains most of its efficacy after one elution cycle, it could be more efficient to refresh it to maximize the material collected per trip. You seemed to have been under the impression that the entire polymer needed to be replaced when you talked about how it'd be more effective to burn the polymer: "at ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet" For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates. Doubling, tripling or even quadrupling production still means we'd need to dedicate several decades worth of battery production just to satisfy 12 hours of present electricity demand. Not to mention the fact that electricity demand is going to increase as more transport moves to EVs and as poorer countries develop. Not to mention the fact that these batteries need to be replaced after a few thousand cycles. I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
    • Schroedingersat 4y ago
      The polymer is the sorbent. Please actually read the sources you send. Normally it is on a higher strength belt, but this scheme puts it in a plastic shell. That's the bit their charts show with tens of thousands of tonnes needed per fuel load (which turned out to be optimistic when someone checked). > For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates. You're off by over a factor of 3. There's around 1TWh/yr now, and 5TWh/yr under construction due before 2030. And only a few hours needs to be high power. The rest can be thermal, PHES, CSP dispatch, virtual batteries via load shifting, hydrogen for emergencies, and so on. > I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible. It's happened, if it were a nuclear project then it'd be at the stage where they've already declared it finished, but shut it down straight after loading and said it will reopen in a month. Other industries do things a little differently, but either way it'll mostly be running around 2028