3 ms·

Last time I looked into this, Terraform's 1MW reactor can fill a normal LNG truck in 145 days of operation. Or if you prefer, 145 such reactors would be needed

Last time I looked into this, Terraform's 1MW reactor can fill a normal LNG truck in 145 days of operation. Or if you prefer, 145 such reactors would be needed to fill one (1) LNG truck per day. The work they're doing will help prove out DAC, moving it further down the tech adoption curve, which is good. The task of making methane from the air should be performed with multi-GW nuclear reactors, which produce full power 90% of the time they exist, and which can use heat instead of electrolysis to free hydrogen, which is more energetically efficient. The use of an extensive and intermittent power source which only produces electricity is a severe limitation here.

rbliss 3y ago
Would love to see nuclear do this, but the challenges to getting nuclear built are myriad. Regulatory burdens, cost to build reactors, painfully slow learning rate for nuclear reactor design and buildout. Solar, while certainly not ideal, is comparatively trivial to build out. Functionally you buy and lay out cheap panels. Far smaller political challenges. Some friction around land use and interconnect, but compared to nuclear, orders of magnitude easier and the way forward seems clear with the existing political realities and economies of scale in action for solar panels.
- tyler569 3y ago
  The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere. Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation infrastructure for your product to where it's needed!
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation The main point of this operation is to utilize free surplus energy from solar and wind to store fuel for days where solar and wind can't produce enough. Free-as-in-beer surplus, since the energy would otherwise be wasted or sold at negative prices, like what we have been seeing lately in certain markets. Nuclear can always produce electricity, so converting to fuel has no benefits it's just a loss compared to using the electricity directly. Also, nuclear electricity is never free but always very expensive because you need a large amount of very highly educated people and expensive infrastructure to deal with it. >you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere. If things go very badly with a nuclear reactor, there's no such thing as a "middle of nowhere" that's far enough away. The fallout from Chernobyl made certain foods as far away as the arctic circle unsuitable for human consumption.
    - lofenfew 3y ago
      Nuclear can always produce electricity, but spinning plants up and down takes time. More importantly, a nuclear plant has a design lifetime, and most of the cost comes from building the plant in the first place, not from the fuel. It therefore costs a lot of money to let a nuclear plant sit idle. Furthermore, building a small nuclear plant is almost as expensive as building a large one, because of the regulatory hurdles and the effort needed to design it. So not building a nuclear plant as big as you possibly can has a cost as well. The difficulty is that you then need a consumer capable of using all that excess power, which necessitates putting it next to large population centers, who are likely to complain about the risk of nuclear. Being able to build a large reactor out in the middle of nowhere, and be able to rely on always having a consumer for its power even if at a very low price would make it much more viable.
      - Kon5ole 3y ago
        >most of the cost comes from building the plant in the first place, not from the fuel. I don't think that's correct. The costs of handling spent fuel is ongoing for an unknown amount of time. Eventually the running costs add up. The main storage site in the UK (which admittedly does more than just store waste) costs around USD 3 billion per year, basically as much as building a new nuclear plant every 5 years. Then you have unforeseen events that can drastically change the calculations. Like the Asse II mine in Germany where a storage site started leaking and has to be relocated at an estimated cost of at least 3.7 billion euro over the coming decades. After that is completed, the relocated waste will continue to cost money to handle as well. Such cost are generally NOT included, or has a fraction of the true liability included, in the cost estimates of nuclear power. When you take such things into account it quickly becomes clear that nuclear is not nearly as cheap as many have been lead to believe, but instead very expensive and very heavily subsidized. Consider also that even if it were cheap, it is strategically (both in a military sense and for reliability) a bad idea to have few large power plants instead of many smaller ones. The most recent nuclear reactor in the EU has had several emergency stops already and causes severe stress on the grid since it provides such a large percentage of the total power. Having a geographically diverse set of solar and wind plants combined with local batteries, gas generators and small peak-handling gas plants has to be a better solution than nuclear power. More resilient, cheaper and faster to build, easier to maintain, not to mention a much more predictable total cost.
rgmerk 3y ago
Intermittent, yes. Expensive, no. It's just not. It's a bit more expensive in the US because, hey, protectionism, but solar panels are now by far the cheapest source of electricity on Earth if you don't care when that electricity is delivered, and cheaper again if you're happy to have it in the Sahara or northern Australia. Solar power is now so cheap it is hard to conceive of any way nuclear power could ever compete against it where its advantages (24-hour all-year power) aren't relevant. Terraform's secret sauce is that they are designing their equipment to be cheap so it doesn't matter that they're only utilising it maybe 30% of the time.

rbliss 3y ago

Would love to see nuclear do this, but the challenges to getting nuclear built are myriad. Regulatory burdens, cost to build reactors, painfully slow learning rate for nuclear reactor design and buildout. Solar, while certainly not ideal, is comparatively trivial to build out. Functionally you buy and lay out cheap panels. Far smaller political challenges. Some friction around land use and interconnect, but compared to nuclear, orders of magnitude easier and the way forward seems clear with the existing political realities and economies of scale in action for solar panels.

tyler569 3y ago
The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere. Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation infrastructure for your product to where it's needed!
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  >The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation The main point of this operation is to utilize free surplus energy from solar and wind to store fuel for days where solar and wind can't produce enough. Free-as-in-beer surplus, since the energy would otherwise be wasted or sold at negative prices, like what we have been seeing lately in certain markets. Nuclear can always produce electricity, so converting to fuel has no benefits it's just a loss compared to using the electricity directly. Also, nuclear electricity is never free but always very expensive because you need a large amount of very highly educated people and expensive infrastructure to deal with it. >you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere. If things go very badly with a nuclear reactor, there's no such thing as a "middle of nowhere" that's far enough away. The fallout from Chernobyl made certain foods as far away as the arctic circle unsuitable for human consumption.
  - lofenfew 3y ago
    Nuclear can always produce electricity, but spinning plants up and down takes time. More importantly, a nuclear plant has a design lifetime, and most of the cost comes from building the plant in the first place, not from the fuel. It therefore costs a lot of money to let a nuclear plant sit idle. Furthermore, building a small nuclear plant is almost as expensive as building a large one, because of the regulatory hurdles and the effort needed to design it. So not building a nuclear plant as big as you possibly can has a cost as well. The difficulty is that you then need a consumer capable of using all that excess power, which necessitates putting it next to large population centers, who are likely to complain about the risk of nuclear. Being able to build a large reactor out in the middle of nowhere, and be able to rely on always having a consumer for its power even if at a very low price would make it much more viable.
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      >most of the cost comes from building the plant in the first place, not from the fuel. I don't think that's correct. The costs of handling spent fuel is ongoing for an unknown amount of time. Eventually the running costs add up. The main storage site in the UK (which admittedly does more than just store waste) costs around USD 3 billion per year, basically as much as building a new nuclear plant every 5 years. Then you have unforeseen events that can drastically change the calculations. Like the Asse II mine in Germany where a storage site started leaking and has to be relocated at an estimated cost of at least 3.7 billion euro over the coming decades. After that is completed, the relocated waste will continue to cost money to handle as well. Such cost are generally NOT included, or has a fraction of the true liability included, in the cost estimates of nuclear power. When you take such things into account it quickly becomes clear that nuclear is not nearly as cheap as many have been lead to believe, but instead very expensive and very heavily subsidized. Consider also that even if it were cheap, it is strategically (both in a military sense and for reliability) a bad idea to have few large power plants instead of many smaller ones. The most recent nuclear reactor in the EU has had several emergency stops already and causes severe stress on the grid since it provides such a large percentage of the total power. Having a geographically diverse set of solar and wind plants combined with local batteries, gas generators and small peak-handling gas plants has to be a better solution than nuclear power. More resilient, cheaper and faster to build, easier to maintain, not to mention a much more predictable total cost.

rgmerk 3y ago

Intermittent, yes. Expensive, no. It's just not. It's a bit more expensive in the US because, hey, protectionism, but solar panels are now by far the cheapest source of electricity on Earth if you don't care when that electricity is delivered, and cheaper again if you're happy to have it in the Sahara or northern Australia. Solar power is now so cheap it is hard to conceive of any way nuclear power could ever compete against it where its advantages (24-hour all-year power) aren't relevant. Terraform's secret sauce is that they are designing their equipment to be cheap so it doesn't matter that they're only utilising it maybe 30% of the time.