this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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"Why we should continue burning fossil fuels as long as we can while we trying to figure out energy storage solution. Sure it might never come, or we might boil the oceans before we figure it out, but on the upside the government will save a bit of money, and saving money is what's important."
New nuclear takes about 15 years to get built. Time is not an argument in favor of nuclear
New energy storage facility capable of storing enough energy to keep a small city going through the night takes [NaN] to build. Because it doesn't exist. There is a number of probable solutions that might need to nowhere, and if they don't, they need unknown amount of years to even go to the first commercial prototype. All the while we will be burning foccil fuels and enriching the same people who brought us to this mess.
Moreover, 15 years is a time to build your first nuclear power plant if you are in isolation and you start from fundament recearch. Thankfully the world is interconnected, and the engineering of the regular nuclear plant was perfected decades before you were born, so I strongly suspect the time will be way better.
It will be expensive, way more expensive than continue to burn oil, and shareholders of oil companies will be very unhappy. But I hope I don't need to tell you why it's not a good argument
It's called hydro (pumped or just deferred as it has been used in a diurnal storage role for inflexible nuclear power) or a battery with 12 hours storage. Keeping a small city powered by wind and solar going through the night takes 0-1GWh of storage. There are plenty of commercial facilities of this size (and they are not necessary yet because generation is still the bottleneck). There are plenty of cities or even whole countries that run renewables for days or weeks at a time with minutes of storage -- the bottleneck is still generation even in those.
The scale of the battery industry is about 20x the scale of the nuclear industry (ie. The TWh/yr of batteries being produced can power thousands of small cities overnight were it to be used for that rather than more important things, but annual new nuclear generation can power five to ten -- annual net new nuclear generation is negative).
Current estimates for hinkley C are around 24 years. From committing first funding to actually functioning at full power is generally at least ten years. The "perfected" N4 reactors (like many other models before them) not only took the better part of two decades to build, but have also cost considerably more in maintenance after under twenty years than it would take to replace them entirely with something functional.
It's nothing but a very expensive distraction which produces very little for the resources and cannot scale.
Hydro is great, but it works if you have natural reservoir, or if you are somewhere in the mountains. And even then do you think it's easy to build a reservoir to hold enough water to generate your proverbial 0-1GWh? Well, maybe if it's 0 they yes, but if it's 1, you need millions of tons of water. It's situational at best, unless you have some technology to build kilometers wide reservoirs and infrastructure fast, maintain it all properly, and not destroy the environment while doing it.
I don't know what "a battery with 12 hours storage" is supposed to mean, but if those are the technologies that we have right now, nothing is scalable up to the level we need.
Which batteries? Lithium? You seriously trying to tell me that you think we have enough of that? If not, what? Everything else that I'm aware is is still in early stages and may or may not be scalable somewhere in the future. Which is cool and all, but we aren't in the future yet.
Kind of my point also. Renewables we have right now are situational. If it's sunny or windy we have more power than we're using, if it's not, we don't have power at all. In order to smooth it out, we burn fossil fuels. That's the reality we live in, and in order to stop burning fossil fuels, we need to use something else instead. Yeah, if you have an enormous lake nearby, or perfect mountains, or unlimited supply of lithium and a gigafactory or whatever secret technology you are talking about - sure, it will be better than building a nuclear plant. But if you don't, and unfortunately that's the majority of places, you need something to generate power. And in our reality right now it's only fossil or nuclear, and if you stop nuclear from existing, you get where we are right now, pumping out fossil fumes and enjoying heating planet.
Again, if we were in a strategy game and were choosing where to put a science point in order to get a button to spawn the technology, I would say go for the bigger battery and improved wind turbine.
If you think that economy of scale can't make nuclear cheaper, then whatever storage can't be scaled too, and in this case we're fucked. If the economy of scale works, then nuclear is very good situational solution to stop burning fossil fuels.
Pumped hydro is far less site constrained than nuclear (which needs a river or coast) or watershed hydro <1% of potential sites would cover needs and there are only a tiny handful of people living out of range of sufficient PHES resource. More fossil fuel propaganda.
Lithium as a 3 hour battery buffer is needed in smaller quantities than uranium per kW of target generation. Any assertion that there is not enough lithium is an assertion that there are about two orders of magnitude too little uranium to make a difference (when in reality it'scloser to one). There's no secret either. 100s of MWh to GWh batteries are being commissioned every month, and minor participation of v2g would eclipse that.
Battery storage over 30 minutes is also still completely unnecessary for increasing renewable penetration (even in places it's already over 70%), but they compete very nicely with peaking plants, so are wildly profitable and reduce emissions by allowing for more efficient closed cycle thermal generation to provide peak load.
Sodium ion is also an option if you insist on pretending grid storage is more than a rounding error on EV production. It's not yet year 1 of high energy density Na-ion and production is roughly the same scale as the nuclear industry at around 5-10GWh/yr somewhere (where 3 hours is sufficient for >99% penetration in most places).
Wind and solar alone (no storage) can hit around 90% penetration. Even a zero storage and sipatch strategy where the existing hydro and w2e is abandoned will produce fewer emissions over the next century than attempting to switch to nuclear (and there's no evidence >90% nuclear penetration is even possible without massive overbuild).
You're bringing out the same old lies that the fossil fuel industry has been repeating for the last decade, but you're so stuck in the past you didn't even notice that the premises your faulty logic is built on are obviously completely false now.
As to whatever you're trying to say about scaling Nuclear is also not over the initial negative learning curve. Every reactor design and every individual reactor is more expensive than the last, because every installation has something new go wrong given that they're so complex and have so many safety critical parts.
That's not the portion of scaling I was talking about though, it's the raw materials (rare earths like gadolinium, minor metals like indium, precious metals like silver, uranium etc) that limit production. Just matching the current wind + solar installations would require increasing uranium mining about 8x for first fuel load. Running enough LWRs to make a difference would exhaust assumed uranium resource in 20 years. Indium and rare earths would also be a bottleneck.