3 ms·

When I say nuclear, I don’t mean as the primary fuel source, but as a few strategically placed plants to serve as back up until large scale battery storage gets

by rcarr 3y ago

When I say nuclear, I don’t mean as the primary fuel source, but as a few strategically placed plants to serve as back up until large scale battery storage gets sufficiently commonplace until it is no longer needed. Eventually every house will have its own large battery and solar panels on its roof. In combination with grid battery storage, increased panel efficiencies and huge amounts of solar and wind farms eventually the need for backup nuclear energy plants will be next to zero and would probably only exist as small, mobile units that could be moved to disaster zones. Obviously I’m talking on a massive timescale here, we probably won’t get to this point this century unless someone really does make a room temp superconductor and then we can just pipe energy from the equator to where it’s needed.

ben_w 3y ago
> and then we can just pipe energy from the equator to where it’s needed. Superconductors aren't the limiting factor for that, on paper we can already make a 40,000 km long 0.5Ω power line for costs comparable to current annual fossil fuel mining (Chinese annual coal alone is expensive enough for the aluminium). The problem is geopolitics and that it's a megaproject.
- rcarr 3y ago
  Interesting, I knew there was talks about piping energy from Morocco/Sahara to the UK but didn't know anything about projected costs or feasibility. Politics is the worst.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Sahara to UK (or equivalent) is a necessary, but not sufficient, early step to learning how to do a full-scale planetary grid. It will highlight many of the engineering issues and some of the political ones, and ideally will seem like an overpriced mess when we reach the level where we even want to optimise design and process for a full-size grid. For a true planet scale grid, think half a trillion dollars of aluminium, 3.75 years of current annual worldwide production: its doable, just not what you should jump into without smaller scale experiments.
pjc50 3y ago
> a few strategically placed plants to serve as back up until large scale battery storage gets sufficiently commonplace until it is no longer needed I suspect battery storage will reach that point before any nuclear plant started in the West today generates its first watt: about 10-15 years.
- rcarr 3y ago
  I really hope so!

by rcarr 3y ago

ben_w 3y ago

> and then we can just pipe energy from the equator to where it’s needed. Superconductors aren't the limiting factor for that, on paper we can already make a 40,000 km long 0.5Ω power line for costs comparable to current annual fossil fuel mining (Chinese annual coal alone is expensive enough for the aluminium). The problem is geopolitics and that it's a megaproject.

rcarr 3y ago
Interesting, I knew there was talks about piping energy from Morocco/Sahara to the UK but didn't know anything about projected costs or feasibility. Politics is the worst.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Sahara to UK (or equivalent) is a necessary, but not sufficient, early step to learning how to do a full-scale planetary grid. It will highlight many of the engineering issues and some of the political ones, and ideally will seem like an overpriced mess when we reach the level where we even want to optimise design and process for a full-size grid. For a true planet scale grid, think half a trillion dollars of aluminium, 3.75 years of current annual worldwide production: its doable, just not what you should jump into without smaller scale experiments.

pjc50 3y ago

> a few strategically placed plants to serve as back up until large scale battery storage gets sufficiently commonplace until it is no longer needed I suspect battery storage will reach that point before any nuclear plant started in the West today generates its first watt: about 10-15 years.

rcarr 3y ago
I really hope so!