Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow. Renewables are great and cheap, but they aren’t a complete solution without grid level storage that doesn’t really exist yet.
Comment on Anon questions our energy sector
Hugohase@startrek.website 22 hours ago
Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?
scholar@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Solar with Battery grid storage is now cheaper than nuclear.
whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
If the demand goes up I have some doubt, also, mining for Lithium is far from being clean, and then batteries are becoming wastes, so I doubt you would replace nuclear power with this solution
I guess in some regions it could work, but you’re still depending on the weather
Ooops@feddit.org 21 hours ago
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building you house the batteries weight 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
They’re currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in “the first vendor is selling them right now”). They’re bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don’t need lithium.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Yeah, lithium mining and processing is extremely toxic and destructive to the environment. On one hand, it’s primarily limited to a smaller area, but on the other hand, is it sustainable long-term unless a highly efficient lithium recycling technology emerges?
ceiphas@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
you know that grid storage does not always mean “a huge battery”, you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it…
iii@mander.xyz 21 hours ago
Would love to see a source for that claim. How many 9’s uptime to they target? 90%, 99%
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
This is old news now! Here’s a link from 5 years ago. forbes.com/…/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fos…
This is from last year: lazard.com/…/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.
I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.
Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.
Hugohase@startrek.website 22 hours ago
Thats a chicken/egg peoblem. If enough renewables are build the storage follows. In a perfect world goverments would incentvice storage but in an imperfect one problems have to occure before somebody does something to solve them. Anyway, according to lazard renewables + storage are still cheaper than NPPs.
LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
Imagine this (not so) hypothetical scenario:
Yellowstone or another supervolcano erupts and leads to a few years of volcanic winter, where there is much less sunshine. This has historical precedent, it has happened before, and while in and of itself it will impact a lot of people regardless of anything else, wouldn’t you agree it would be better to have at least some nuclear power capacity instead of relying solely on renewables?
Sure, such a scenario is not probable, but it pays to stay safe in the case of one such event. I would say having most of our power from renewables would be best, having it supported by 10-20% or so nuclear with the possibility of increase in times of need would make our electric grids super resilient to stuff
Ooops@feddit.org 21 hours ago
Yeah let me imagine a supervolcano explosion of that scale to effect global weather patterns. What do you think will happen to your reactors? No, they are not indestructable just because they can handle an earthquake of normally expected proportion.
Microw@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
Nature catastrophes are the top 1 danger to nuclear energy. See Fukushima.
And the real question here would be a comparison between risk of a nuclear accident event and a renewables-impacting climate event.
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
theguardian.com/…/power-grid-battery-capacity-gro…
US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Let’s be clear, the only reason grid-level storage for renewables “doesn’t exist” is because of a lack of education about (and especially commitment to) simple, reliable, non-battery energy storage such as gravitational potential, like the ARES project. We’ve been using gravitational potential storage to power our mechanisms since Huygens invented the freaking pendulum clock. There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
Well, I don’t know about you, but the nearest hill to me is 200km away, and a whopping 300 meters above me.
Also, scale is a huge fucking issue. The little country of the Netherlands, where I ha etl
So let’s store 1 day of power, at 100% efficiency, using the tallest Alp (the Mont Blanc).
Let’s round up to 5000 meters of elevation. We need to store 2.6e18 joules, and 1 joule is 100 grams going up 1 meter. So to power a tiny little country, we need to lift roughly 5e13 kilos up the Mont Blanc. To visualize, that’s 1.7 billion 40ft shipping containers, or roughly 100 per inhabitants.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
And hey, you know what, that’s almost got a point. Firstly, I’m in the US, and I’ll freely admit that my comment was highly US-normative. However, I believe my comment on government corruption stands for the US case, where there is an insane amount of space that is already partly-developed in random bits of desert.
Now, let’s get into your claims against the Netherlands case, aside from the ad-hominem of your incredibly condescending tone. Let’s do some “basic fucking maths”, thou king of Numenor:
- Unless the IEA is very, VERY wrong, your claim that the Netherlands consumes “2600 petajoule per day” is INSANELY high. Every statistic I can find shows electricity consumption being between 113 [2] and 121 [1] Terawatt-hours per annum. Let’s divide that larger value by 365 (assuming uniform seasonal demand), then convert that into joules, and we get 1.19 Petajoules per day. more than a THOUSAND times smaller than your number.
- Secondly, this “for a tiny country” bit is spurious, since your “tiny country” is the 33rd-greatest electricity consumer in the world for the 77th highest population [2]
- The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous. Let’s be generous and assume that you have to store 50% of the day’s energy demand, despite the fact that the off-hours are during the night, when electricity demands fall off.
- Next, let us point out that we don’t need to abandon literally every other method of energy generation. From wind energy to, yes, nuclear, the Netherlands is doing quite well for itself outside of solar. Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
- Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
- Because I neither want nor need your supposedly-charitable assumptions, let’s use the actual numbers from ARES in Nevada:
- Their facility’s mass cars total 75000 tons in freedom units, or about 68040000 kg. [3]
- They claim 90+% efficiency round-trip [4], but let’s assume that your condescending tone has made the train cars sad, so they’re having a bad day, and only run at 80% efficiency, despite the fact that we’ve known how to convert to and from GPE with insane efficiency ever since Huygens invented the fucking pendulum clock.
- Now, is this perfect for everywhere? Of course not. Not everywhere has the open space necessary. The ARES site requires a straight shot about 5 miles long, but they managed to find one that, in that distance, drops 2000 feet (~610 m) [5]
- Now, let’s do the math together: 475000000000J / 10m/s^2 / 68040000kg / 80% Efficiency = 880m total elevation needed
- Thus, unless my math is quite off, we would only need 2 of the little proof-of-concept ARES stations running at 80% efficiency to cover the energy storage needs required for your country to completely divest from fossil fuels and go all-in on solar for the remainder of your needs.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
[1] www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands [2] en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_by_electrici… [3] aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ [4] aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/ [5] energy.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/…/4 - ARES.pdf
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Not sure I get what you mean by “slow”.
And it’s not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we’ve been building and less of the one we stopped building.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
This argument again?
Ooops@feddit.org 21 hours ago
Yes, it’s called reality. I know it’s an ugly thing that just doesn’t go away no matter how hard you want it to.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 20 hours ago
Dude, thorium reactors will be ready any day now, along with mini reactors! Everything will be super cheap and all the waste will be reused and we won’t be dependent on any fuel sources from Russia and all our problems will be gone!
/s, in case it’s not obvious
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
Reality can be anything anyone says, you just gotta believe it really hard.
And then repeat the
liereality in service to the ones than benefit from it.
Mannimarco@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
You go on thinking renewables are ever going to replace fossil fuel while we charge full tilt to our doom
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
Renewables once surpassed fossil fuels, until some brave knight killed all the windmills.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Hey now, someone who knows almost nothing is just asking questions here.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
You are saying we should be kinder to the less fortunate?
That’s a nice thought.
mEEGal@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production
reliable when done well
it shouldn’t be replaced with renewables, but work with them
Hugohase@startrek.website 22 hours ago
Yes, but energy density doesn’t matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
StrongHorseWeakNeigh@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
85% of used fuel rods can be recycled to new fuel rods. And there’s military uses for depleted uranium too. So, essentially every bit of the waste can be recycled. Can’t say the same for fossil fuels.
Ooops@feddit.org 21 hours ago
“85% of used fuel rods can be recycled” is like “We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means”.
In theory it’s correct. In reality it’s bullshit that will never happen because it’s completely uneconomical and it’s just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
rtxn@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
It’s a solved problem. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
Remotedeck@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat, its just the reactors make use of an actual reaction that nuclear waste can’t do anymore. Yever watch the Martian, he has a generator that’s fuel is lead covered beads of radioactive material, it doesn’t generate as much as reactors but it’s still a usable amount.
rtxn@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
That’s an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don’t use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.
The most common RTG fuel is ^238^Pu, which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can’t be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it.
^90^Sr can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn’t used as RTG fuel today.
whome@discuss.tchncs.de 20 hours ago
But it’s not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it’s still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
Do you know WHY they went over budget?
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
That’s for the nuclear industry to figure out. But the fact that companies from different companies originating in entirely different countries suggest that it’s a problem with the tech itself.
The hard truth many just don’t want to admit is that there are some technologies that simply aren’t practical, regardless of how objectively cool they might be. The truth is that the nuclear industry just has a very poor track record with being financially viable. It’s only ever really been scaled through massive state-run enterprises that can operate unprofitably. Before solar and wind really took off, the case could be made that we should switch to fission, even if it is more expensive, due to climate concerns. But now that solar + batteries are massively cheaper than nuclear? It’s ridiculous to spend state money building these giant white elephants when we could just slap up some more solar panels instead. We ain’t running out of space to put them any time soon.
whome@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
Sometimes it’s documented but often I’d say it’s a selling technique that works for any big infrastructure project. You give a rather low first cost projection, governments decide let’s do this and after a while you correct the price up. First, people say: well that is to be expected the project shouldn’t fail because of a little price hike. Then the price gets corrected again and then the sunken cost fallacy kicks in. now we are to deep in and we have to pull through. And so on. And you probably can’t get price guarantees for such big projects cause no one would make a bid. It’s a very flawed system. I’d like to know how often solar or windpark projects get price adjusted?
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
The same problems faced the oil industry too, with their drilling rigs & refineries, it’s just less in the media & more spread out (more projects).
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things - we have the money, we just don’t tax profit enough. And don’t talk about how the whole budget gets spent (private or public), where all the money actually goes, instead we get the highlighted cases everyone talks about.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
That sentence shows that you really aren’t thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I’ve found that most fission boosters don’t so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.
There’s also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They’ll blame nuclear’s failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they’ll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear’s failure: it’s just too fucking expensive.
whome@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
Well if we had no alternative I would agree with you and I would be okay if we had to subsidize nuclear (which isn’t emissions free due to the mining and refining of uranium bye the way). But if a country like France, which has a pretty high rate of acceptance regarding nuclear, can’t get it to work, who will? Apart from maybe authoritarian countries. Just think about the amount of plants we have to build to create a significant impact, if hardly any plant has been built in a relative short timeframe. I’d say put money in research yeah but focus on renewable, network, storage and efficiency optimization for now.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 17 hours ago
Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn’t even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.
mEEGal@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
just compare 1 ton of fissile fuel and 1 ton of Silicon or steel. how much power do you get out of it ?
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 12 hours ago
What are you trying to say here? Are we still talking about fuel types here?
Again, let me point out that solar power does not consume any fuel. The materials used to construct the solar panels are not having any power extracted from them. And secondly, nuclear power plants require construction materials too. … So I really don’t know what kind of comparison you are asking for here.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Who cares? We use economics to sort out the relative value of radically different power sources, not cherry-picked criteria. Fission boosters can say that nuclear has a small footprint. Solar boosters can say that solar has no moving parts and is thus more mechanically reliable. Fission boosters can say fission gets more power from the same mass. Solar boosters can point to the mass of the entire fission plant, including the giant concrete dome that needs to be strong enough to survive a jumbo jet flying into it.
In the end, none of this shit matters. We have a way of sorting out these complex multi-variable problems. Both fission and solar have their own relatives strengths and weaknesses that their proponents can cherry pick. But ultimately, all that matters in choosing what to deploy is cost.
And today, in the real world, in the year 2024, if you want to get low-carbon power on the grid, the most cost-effective way, by far, is solar. And you can add batteries as needed for intermittency, and you’re still way ahead of nuclear cost-wise. And as our use of solar continues to climb, we can deploy seasonal storage, which we have many, many options to deploy.
The ultimate problem fission has is that it just can’t survive in a capitalist economy. It can survive in planned economies like the Soviet Union or modern China, or it can run as a state-backed enterprise like modern Russia. But it simply isn’t cost effective enough for fission companies to be able to survive on their own in a capitalist economy.
And frankly, if we’re going to have the government subsidize things, I would much rather the money be spent on healthcare, housing, or education. A lot of fission boosters like fission simply because they think the tech is cool, not necessarily because it actually makes economic sense. I say that if fission boosters want to fund their hobby and subsidize fission plants, let them. But otherwise I am adamantly opposed to any form of subsidies for the fission industry.
marcos@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Energy density is a useless bullshit metric for stationary power.
Produces more waste than almost all of the renewables.
Reliable compared to… … … ok, I’m out of ideas, they need shutdowns all the time. Seems to me it’s less reliable than anything that isn’t considered “experimental”.
And it can’t work with renewables unless you add lots and lots of batteries. Any amount of renewables you build just makes nuclear more expensive.
They are an interesting technology, and I’m sure they have more uses than making nuclear weapons. It’s just that everybody focus on that one use, and whatever other uses they have, mainstream grid-electricity generation is not it.
ColdWater@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
Right now we probably use more energy to produce antimatter than getting it back
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you’re planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission’s lunch.