5 ms·

So it's supposed to be impossible to get the 3 hours or 9TWh (12 years of 2022 production) of battery needed to shift the grid to >99% renewables (including bio

So it's supposed to be impossible to get the 3 hours or 9TWh (12 years of 2022 production) of battery needed to shift the grid to >99% renewables (including biogas from waste plant matter, planned HVDC, and existing hydro for dispatch) with the much larger than current lithium production that is already pipelined, but scaling Uranium production and the entire reactor and enrichment supply chain 10x with no significant pipelined expansion is trivial? What happens when the known Uranium resources run out 12 years after that?

lazide 4y ago
1) not that it would happen, but if it did, they won’t just run out. 2) There are vast Uranium deposits in the Southwest and Canada that were identified and either mined a little, or left untouched after WW2 - because we had so much, we didn’t need them. Early lithium was ‘hard to find’ until it wasn’t, and now there are vast reserves. Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  (2) is already included in the "resources" figure.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense. Y'all just love making up lies out of whole cloth. This is incredibly wrong and you didn't even consider the idea of checking before deciding it was true. Stanning for nuclear does involve incredible density but it's not power or energy density. Weight for weight, the amount of lithium you need for a 1kW renewable system with diurnal storage (80-160g/kWh for 8-12kWh to provide for 1kW) and the amount of Uranium you need for 1kW of nuclear reactor (45-60MWd/kg @ 32% thermal efficiency with a 7.4:1 tails/fuel ratio with a 3-6 year fuel cycle) are about the same: Roughly 1kg. The lithium battery will last 2-4x as long as the Uranium fuel (12-20 years vs 3-6). At 1-7% the lithium ore is 1-2 orders of magnitude more concentrated than the 0.01-0.7% of most Uranium deposits (Canada's untapped high yield deposits are about the same as good lithium ore but they are deep underground, unique, and only a tiny fraction of what would be needed). The typical ore mined in a mass expansion scenario (0.01-0.03%) would have an energy density between that of coal and crude oil. Mining for the uranium would involve around 100-1000x the quantity of mined or leached ore and tens to hundreds of times as much leaching chemical. The Uranium extraction process doesn't end at the mill. Enrichment is just as involved as brine extraction. The end product of the Uranium fuel costs twice as much as an LFP grid battery and has about the same embodied energy per joule delivered (or double if from an underground or deep open pit mine). Diurnal lithium battery storage is irrelevant where good pumped hydro is available, and is far more than is needed to reach 85-90% VRE (which can be done with 3 hours). Early uranium was also hard to find, then tens of billions were spent trying to find more. There are fairly reliable methods of estimating how much hasn't been found based on the rate of finding it vs. the effort spent and the answer is there's not a lot undiscovered at concentrations that make fuel affordable. It's also largely irrelevant because any you find after you open your 3-8TW of nuclear plants (which are somehow built in 12 years) is not going to be developed before they all run out.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Bwaha, 1kg of uranium produces 8.64 x 10^13 joules of energy when fissioned. That's ~ 24 MWH per gram, not per KG. You're off by ~ 3 orders of magnitude. So what are you talking about? Because your math at the start is so far off, it’s pretty hard to tell here.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      You haven't understood his post, he is correct under worst-case scenario for nuclear -> once through fuel cycle achieves 5% burnup, that's 4 million MJ/KG, or roughly 60MWd/kg Enrichment requires that we throw away most of uranium as depleted uranium, that's what he means by "7.4:1 tails/fuel ratio" That's gives us ~20 years of power at 1KW, but we have are converting to electricity, so it really only gives us 6 years or so. The main flaw with his argument is, in my understanding, he assumes a once-through fuel cycle, whereas France and others reprocess nuclear fuel. It also discards reactors that work on un-encirched uranium like CANDU. I am not sure about the ores, but I am greatfull for the detailed writeup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Reprocessing doesn't turn fertile material into fissile. It mostly just costs money and pours more fission products into the nearest body of water than Fukushim released. It also extracts the dregs of Pu239 and U235 to get another 5-15% of final energy out. CANDU + reprocessing is a bit better than a PWR, but still significantly under 2x the energy in the original U235. Closed fuel cycles are a myth so there is no need to specify 'once through'.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Just gonna double down on the 'it's so dense' myth huh? Do it with a real fuel cycle, real turbine efficiencies and stop trying to conflate the fertile content with the fissile. Here's a hint to get you started: the reactor fleet uses about 67500 tonnes of raw Uranium and produces about 2650TWh each year. New reactors are about 1.8x the average and most SMR proposals are worse. The world produced 760GWh of batteries from around 75,000 tonnes of Lithium. Also note that 2650TWh / 760GWh is 3500 which is less than the number of cycles an LFP battery will last.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> So it's supposed to be impossible to get the 3 hours or 9TWh (12 years of 2022 production) of battery.. but scaling Uranium production and the entire reactor and enrichment supply chain 10x with no significant pipelined expansion is trivial Yes, that is exactly right! Energy density of natural, raw, unenriched uranium is 1,000,000 MJ/KG, and energy density of a lithium battery is 0.46 MJ/KG. 1 kilo of uranium gives you 1,000 times more energy than a kilo of lithium will be able to 'process' over the entire 10-year life expectancy of the battery. You will need 1,000 fewer excavators, dump trucks and people involved in mining if you choose uranium. If price of uranium increases 3x nobody cares, fuel is like 5% of cost for nuclear. If price of lithium increases 3x it's a disaster, the entire transition to electric vehicles will fail. We don't even have enough batteries for vehicles, the grid needs another solution, either hydro + hydrogen storage or nuclear.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Now do it again with the electricity output of fuel cycles that actually exist and the amount of lithium in a new battery. The only density here is that required to mindlessly parrot factoids about the theoretical thermal energy content fertile material as if they were relevant to electricity output of fissile content. > If price of uranium increases 3x nobody cares, fuel is like 5% of cost for nuclear. If price of lithium increases 3x it's a disaster, the entire transition to electric vehicles will fail. If the price of Uranium triples, the raw Uranium becomes as expensive as renewables' LCOE in one year rather than 5. If the price of lithium triples, it's still irrelevant because PHES still exists and so do Sodium Ion, Zinc Bromide and Iron batteries. > We don't even have enough batteries for vehicles, the grid needs another solution, either hydro + hydrogen storage or nuclear. The amount of batteries required for >90% renewables is tiny compare to the amount needed for overly large EVs everywhere. If you're going to change one of these variables to stop climate change faster, far better to unban light electric vehicles in countries with mandatory monster trucks and spend a few percent of that nuclear reactor money on transit, low speed roads and pedestrianisation.

lazide 4y ago

1) not that it would happen, but if it did, they won’t just run out. 2) There are vast Uranium deposits in the Southwest and Canada that were identified and either mined a little, or left untouched after WW2 - because we had so much, we didn’t need them. Early lithium was ‘hard to find’ until it wasn’t, and now there are vast reserves. Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense.

pfdietz 4y ago
(2) is already included in the "resources" figure.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Lithium is harder to extract per power unit though, as Uranium is incredibly power dense. Y'all just love making up lies out of whole cloth. This is incredibly wrong and you didn't even consider the idea of checking before deciding it was true. Stanning for nuclear does involve incredible density but it's not power or energy density. Weight for weight, the amount of lithium you need for a 1kW renewable system with diurnal storage (80-160g/kWh for 8-12kWh to provide for 1kW) and the amount of Uranium you need for 1kW of nuclear reactor (45-60MWd/kg @ 32% thermal efficiency with a 7.4:1 tails/fuel ratio with a 3-6 year fuel cycle) are about the same: Roughly 1kg. The lithium battery will last 2-4x as long as the Uranium fuel (12-20 years vs 3-6). At 1-7% the lithium ore is 1-2 orders of magnitude more concentrated than the 0.01-0.7% of most Uranium deposits (Canada's untapped high yield deposits are about the same as good lithium ore but they are deep underground, unique, and only a tiny fraction of what would be needed). The typical ore mined in a mass expansion scenario (0.01-0.03%) would have an energy density between that of coal and crude oil. Mining for the uranium would involve around 100-1000x the quantity of mined or leached ore and tens to hundreds of times as much leaching chemical. The Uranium extraction process doesn't end at the mill. Enrichment is just as involved as brine extraction. The end product of the Uranium fuel costs twice as much as an LFP grid battery and has about the same embodied energy per joule delivered (or double if from an underground or deep open pit mine). Diurnal lithium battery storage is irrelevant where good pumped hydro is available, and is far more than is needed to reach 85-90% VRE (which can be done with 3 hours). Early uranium was also hard to find, then tens of billions were spent trying to find more. There are fairly reliable methods of estimating how much hasn't been found based on the rate of finding it vs. the effort spent and the answer is there's not a lot undiscovered at concentrations that make fuel affordable. It's also largely irrelevant because any you find after you open your 3-8TW of nuclear plants (which are somehow built in 12 years) is not going to be developed before they all run out.
- lazide 4y ago
  Bwaha, 1kg of uranium produces 8.64 x 10^13 joules of energy when fissioned. That's ~ 24 MWH per gram, not per KG. You're off by ~ 3 orders of magnitude. So what are you talking about? Because your math at the start is so far off, it’s pretty hard to tell here.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    You haven't understood his post, he is correct under worst-case scenario for nuclear -> once through fuel cycle achieves 5% burnup, that's 4 million MJ/KG, or roughly 60MWd/kg Enrichment requires that we throw away most of uranium as depleted uranium, that's what he means by "7.4:1 tails/fuel ratio" That's gives us ~20 years of power at 1KW, but we have are converting to electricity, so it really only gives us 6 years or so. The main flaw with his argument is, in my understanding, he assumes a once-through fuel cycle, whereas France and others reprocess nuclear fuel. It also discards reactors that work on un-encirched uranium like CANDU. I am not sure about the ores, but I am greatfull for the detailed writeup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Reprocessing doesn't turn fertile material into fissile. It mostly just costs money and pours more fission products into the nearest body of water than Fukushim released. It also extracts the dregs of Pu239 and U235 to get another 5-15% of final energy out. CANDU + reprocessing is a bit better than a PWR, but still significantly under 2x the energy in the original U235. Closed fuel cycles are a myth so there is no need to specify 'once through'.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Just gonna double down on the 'it's so dense' myth huh? Do it with a real fuel cycle, real turbine efficiencies and stop trying to conflate the fertile content with the fissile. Here's a hint to get you started: the reactor fleet uses about 67500 tonnes of raw Uranium and produces about 2650TWh each year. New reactors are about 1.8x the average and most SMR proposals are worse. The world produced 760GWh of batteries from around 75,000 tonnes of Lithium. Also note that 2650TWh / 760GWh is 3500 which is less than the number of cycles an LFP battery will last.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> So it's supposed to be impossible to get the 3 hours or 9TWh (12 years of 2022 production) of battery.. but scaling Uranium production and the entire reactor and enrichment supply chain 10x with no significant pipelined expansion is trivial Yes, that is exactly right! Energy density of natural, raw, unenriched uranium is 1,000,000 MJ/KG, and energy density of a lithium battery is 0.46 MJ/KG. 1 kilo of uranium gives you 1,000 times more energy than a kilo of lithium will be able to 'process' over the entire 10-year life expectancy of the battery. You will need 1,000 fewer excavators, dump trucks and people involved in mining if you choose uranium. If price of uranium increases 3x nobody cares, fuel is like 5% of cost for nuclear. If price of lithium increases 3x it's a disaster, the entire transition to electric vehicles will fail. We don't even have enough batteries for vehicles, the grid needs another solution, either hydro + hydrogen storage or nuclear.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Now do it again with the electricity output of fuel cycles that actually exist and the amount of lithium in a new battery. The only density here is that required to mindlessly parrot factoids about the theoretical thermal energy content fertile material as if they were relevant to electricity output of fissile content. > If price of uranium increases 3x nobody cares, fuel is like 5% of cost for nuclear. If price of lithium increases 3x it's a disaster, the entire transition to electric vehicles will fail. If the price of Uranium triples, the raw Uranium becomes as expensive as renewables' LCOE in one year rather than 5. If the price of lithium triples, it's still irrelevant because PHES still exists and so do Sodium Ion, Zinc Bromide and Iron batteries. > We don't even have enough batteries for vehicles, the grid needs another solution, either hydro + hydrogen storage or nuclear. The amount of batteries required for >90% renewables is tiny compare to the amount needed for overly large EVs everywhere. If you're going to change one of these variables to stop climate change faster, far better to unban light electric vehicles in countries with mandatory monster trucks and spend a few percent of that nuclear reactor money on transit, low speed roads and pedestrianisation.