Comment on A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming...
Waryle@jlai.lu 4 days agovs basically no risk with renewables
Except for:
- the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so if the world decides to seriously shift toward renewables, it will lead to competition for the metals and other materials needed to build them
- the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so it takes a huge amount of oil to extract them—oil that we’re running out of
- the fact that they require an enormous amount of space, so current NIMBY issues will increase tenfold
- the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours, and therefore a 100% solar + wind scenario is science fiction
In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics problem solar and wind need to solve.
Redjard@reddthat.com 3 days ago
Solar is the main source of interest, since it’s gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon with trace amounts of mystery elements. The entire thing can be made extremely thin, but it doesn’t really matter. Because silicon is just fancy sand, and we have enough, it’s not a concern. The trace amounts of mystery elements (dopants) are so minor they don’t matter, regardless of what they are and how they are sourced. Then there are conductors and structural elements, for which you can use what is available. This would be say aluminum for contacts (though they are very thin so you can still use fancier elements), aluminum and epoxy for the frames and protective layers, …
In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.
Wind I want to say is similar. Mainly bulk construction materials like resin, concrete, steel. With some electrical components. The main difference is that here you have generators that might need a lot of copper. Though that is changing, I am not sure how far that is in the rollout but it won’t a concern into the future. Generators won’t need nearly as much copper in the future.
The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, … in the constituent resources are the batteries. If you put electric car batteries from 10 years ago into a box, you’ll have a bad time.
Since then though, we’ve seen chemistries that make good lithium batteries without problematic elements like cobalt or nickel.
Making batteries that don’t move lets you optimize things even further than for cars in that respect. The production for car vs grid batteries are now also separate due to that.
The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge. The existing production also does not emit enough CO₂ to matter in the ultimate CO₂/kWh numbers when those go into grid use for decades, especially under overprovisioning where you need less batteries per renewable power production to begin with.
And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future.
If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now. In 10 years I’d expect something like molten metal or iron batteries that don’t have any even slightly problematic elements.
Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land. Even if you don’t want to build some solar farms in place of existing farms for various reasons, it’s not that much compared to other large infrastructure like cities, roads, agriculture, so you can find mixed use situations where they fit well.
For example over parking spaces providing shade, on top of roofs where you don’t usually see them, or on top of crops that benefit from the shade.
If you look at countries that have a few tens of percent of their grid on solar at present (often with gas turbines instead of batteries), there will of course be a few panels visible when you get around, but it isn’t omnipresent.
Overprovisioning. If you naively assume you build exactly as many solar panels as you need to average to the demand over the year, you get some very large numbers for storage. But given that solar is very cheap and batteries are expensive and problematic, there is no reason to do that. What you do in practice with both solar and wind, is you build more than you would need, enough so that under suboptimal production you still don’t need to draw from storage. Wind turbines don’t always spin when it’s windy, especially very windy, since then they produce so much power all demands are fulfilled and the rest would overload the grid. For solar it’s increasingly the same, you just can’t tell.
Private micro-solar often has a maximum power it can send to the grid, and home solar installations are over-specced for that and can send the maximum for far more of the day. Simply because overspeccing is minor increase if cost compared to everything else so financially the best decision.
In short: The sun shines every few hours, you don’t have to store seasonal power.
Waryle@jlai.lu 3 days ago
Solar needs silver, tellurium, indium, gallium, cadmium and other things. Silver is already close-ish to become scarce, tellurium and gallium are for most part a China world-wide monopoly. Rare earth elements are needed in inverters and power conversion, and lithium/cobalt/nickel are needed for batteries needed by solar to be viable without a reliable power source. All of that will be in competition with EV and other applications.
And nope, the amounts involved are not minor if we talk about all country phasing out of both nuclear and fossil.
Nope. I mean as of today, and for decades to come the highly globalized production will be entirely dependent on oil. No oil: no ore mining, no manufacturing, no transportation, no installation, and therefore no wind turbines and no solar panels. And that’s before we even get to batteries and the power grid.
So in a world where peak oil has already passed, the price of everything that relies heavily on globalization will keep rising, including solar panels and wind turbines. And let me remind you once again that we’re still only at the very beginning of solar and wind power: competition among countries hasn’t even started yet.
So you might say that without oil, we can’t build nuclear power plants either, and that’s true. Except that with, say, 1 million liters of oil, we can generate far more megawatts through nuclear power than through solar and wind, because it requires far fewer resources and far less reliance on globalization.
It’s entirely dependent on oil. Nothing get produced without oil, and oil will get costlier and scarce year after year.
Also, we would need most of the entire world lithium reserve just to convert our cars from oil to electricity. Powering entire countries with batteries, which necessitate magnitudes more storage, is just science-fiction.
I mean, if I seriously start building gen II nuclear reactors in parallel, I’ll have a dozen by 10-15 years, and have almost entirely decarbonated my electricity by 20-25 years with more than 50 reactors. That’s feasible, France proved back in the 70-80’s, humanity is not not dumber and less capable than then.
But again, you can’t tell when/if you will ever find some storage technology that you can scale up to TWh for capacity, and GW worth of power input/output.
Batteries are not up to scale and might never be, and you would need like 5 of the Europe biggest STEP to cover capacity, and 15+ for power output just for France’s needs in a windless night in winter. We’re talking about 60-70GW over 14h. And that’s assuming you somehow have enough solar and water the next day to pump all the water back in 10h, to be prepared for the next night.
Also STEPs can’t be built anywhere, it’s highly dependent of the geography of the country. Some countries will need to rely on batteries exclusively, which again, are just plain science-fiction as of today.
Overprovisioning does nothing when sun is down and wind is missing over most of the continent, which will happen even more often due to climate change. Once again, just to hold a single windless night of winter in France, you’ll need close to a TWh of storage capacity, and 60-70GW of power output. And that’s without accounting for the remaining 2/3 of energy consumption that is still fossil-based and needs to be converted to electricity.
So yeah, you need a baseline of controllable power production AKA fossils, nuclear, or hydro. Fossils are out for obvious reasons, as well as biomass which is just Germany coping for its bad energy policies, and not all countries have access to hydroelectricity. So we need nuclear in the end.