tl;dr: It’s too expensive

  • @schroedingershat
    link
    3
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    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.

    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.