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You need continuous baseband generation to keep an electrical grid stable. If not nuclear, then it's going to be coal, gas, hydro, etc. Of the list, nuclear is
by FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
You need continuous baseband generation to keep an electrical grid stable.
If not nuclear, then it's going to be coal, gas, hydro, etc. Of the list, nuclear is the cleanest and least ecologicially destructive (by far).
- bryanlarsen 1y agoDC power sources (aka batteries) with smart inverters are the cheapest and fastest sources of grid stability in 2025t.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoThe largest battery storage system in use today is 2 orders of magnitude too small to even handle it's local baseband, covers 22 acres, and has already caught fire once. Batteries are decades away from large scale usage. Scale is what will nail you... every time.
- anon84873628 1y agoAnd with "large scale usage" I'm more worried about battery fires than nuclear meltdowns.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoHow large a volume of battery is needed to power nyc if the wind and sun are out for 5 hours? In units of Walmart parking lots please :) (Answer: 10)
- ben_w 1y ago> In units of Walmart parking lots please :) From the pictures I've seen, I assumed those were areas rather than volumes? To put it another way, how high do you stack the batteries?
- mystified5016 1y agoThe entire world's supply of lithium batteries in 2024 was (rounding up) 4TWh. In 2024, the USA used 30,000TWh. In December of 2024, we used about 2,500TWh. The entire planet's production capacity of batteries in 2024 would store enough energy to power the USA for 70 minutes. Being generous, this would occupy 3.5 million cubic meters, or (conveniently) 3.5 empire state buildings. For an hour of electricity.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoThat's not very large. It's a tiny fraction of the size of the Hoover dam reservoir, for instance. We need about four hours worth of batteries by 2050 or so, and production capacity is increasing 50% per year.
- koolala 1y agoHow long would batteries used like that even last?
- pjc50 1y agoNot necessarily true if you have enough storage AND your renewables have grid-forming inverters. That may be quite a lot of storage. > least ecologicially destructive (by far) On average. The long tail doesn't look so great.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoHydro is the most ecologically damaging for the site (it tends to wipe out an entire ecosystem for many miles). As long as you don't care about proliferation danger (by militarizing staff and the site), you can reprocess and burn spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors/reprocessors.
- ben_w 1y agoHydro is indeed as you say. Also, surprisingly to many, a big source of CO2. Nuclear is high-variance in the ecological damage: 99.25% are basically fine, and those other three are (1) Three Mile Island; (2) Fukushima, more an embarrassing mistake than anything else, as the deaths and environmental damage due to the plant was far less than deaths and environmental damage due to the tsunami that also damaged the plant; and (3) Chernobyl. It is simultaneously true that (1) even including Chernobyl, the amortised cost of handling nuclear disasters does not add much to the cost of the electricity; and (2) the cost of handling the disaster probably played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.