this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Nice. This seems to be the future that solves a lot of problems. Right now in Australia, we’re seriously entertaining building nuclear power plants for the first time ever, to provide base load power that renewables allegedly can’t. Large sodium batteries could help us avoid that.
The LNP doesn't have a legitimate interest in transitioning to nuclear power or they would've begun over the last decade or so that they were in power.
Instead they've proposed - now that they're in opposition - a technology which is banned at the Federal level and individually at the state level, because they know that gives them years of lead time before they ever have to begin the project.
On top of that, all of the proposed sites are owned by companies who've already begun transitioning to renewable generation or renewable storage, and most of them are in states in which the state Premiers have publicly stated that they will not consider overturning their bans on nuclear power.
All this talk about nuclear only does one thing, keeping fossil fuels relevant for longer.
I tend to agree. The right time to build nuclear was like 30 years ago.
The same people who opposed it then are the same people saying it's the future now. If anybody agrees to build it, the you'll have 15-20 years of renewable energy being cancelled because the "nuclear is on the way".
Exactly. They've brought up nuclear because they're desperate to have some kind of energy policy, but one they know they'll never have to bring to fruition because that allows them to continue with coal and gas for as long as possible.
It's not just base load, turbines also provide grid stability. All the quick fluctuations as people turn things on and off are hard to load balance with solar, wind, or battery. A big spinning turbine has a lot of inertia. That helps keep thr grid at a constant frequency. As solar gets bigger and bigger we might need big solar powdered flywheel generators just to stabilize the grid.
Inverters could also provide "virtual inertia" which help to stabilize the grid frequency. However most of today's inverters don't have it, or it's disabled.
This means we don't need solar powered flywheels, which are inherently inefficient, we just need software (edit: and batteries of course) more or less.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/7/654
Partially. Inverters providing virtual inertia is good but has the problem of still being active and reactive. It helps and is cheaper and more efficient than flywheels.
Flywheels and turbines however provide a very sticky frequency. They help out a lot with stability and give inverters time to respond.
Think balancing a stick on your hand vs anchoring it in clay.
If we take enough turbines off line we are still probably going to need some mechanical power stabilization no matter how inefficient.
But yeah I think we are going to see a blend using as much electrical and as little mechanical as possible.
The other side of that is matching supply to demand is basically instant. You pull power from batteries and they give you more (provided they're not at their safe limit). There's always a lag in getting turbines to spin up and down, and so there's a non-trivial mismatch time.
Actually no. Batteries and thier inverter adapt in the about one second to half a second range. The massive inertia of a turbine adapts in the millisecond range.
To maintain 60 hz you need to be in the very low milliseconds range. Remember at 60 hz you do a full sin wave cycle in 16ms.
Turbines act as a tremendous power smoother in the grid.
Lol,
Batteries are perfect for load balancing.
Please, know your facts
The main issue with using batteries for load balancing is the massive resource investment required for them at a grid level, BUT that's more of a concern with lithium based batteries due to a number of factors. Sodium batteries use way more easily accessible and abundant materials.
NGL I'm hella fuckin hyped about sodium batteries vs lithium batteries.
Batteries can't stabilise frequency. If the frequency changes too much, the grid will go down.
You literally need a giant spinning turbine for this.
It's pretty basic energy engineering, and is not related to load balancing.
Sounds like a way to waste loads of money and keep people on fossil fuels.
Must be way cheaper to build more batteries and build out inertia. (Would still need backup power at this point though).
Reminds me of Elon's Hyperloop. Not intended to actually work, but instead be a distraction to deflate interest in public transportation.
Nuclear power should be expanded, a lot, it is the only realistic way to replace fossil plats for base demand.
And before anyone starts whining about "radiation scary", nuclear waste is a solved problem.
You dig a hole deep into the bedrock, put the waste in dry casks, put the full drycasks in the hole, and backfill it with clay.
Done, solved!
A bigger radiation hazard is coal ash, from cosl power stations, they produce insane ammounts of ash which is radioactive.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
Storing coal ash is also a big problem:
http://www.southeastcoalash.org/about-coal-ash/coal-ash-storage/
Here is an interesting documentary about our fear of radiation, it is called Nuclear Nightmares, and was made by Horizon on BBC:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
Imo “put it in a hole” isn’t exactly a great solution when the alternative is renewables but you’re definitely right about coal that shit is terrible.
So far I have not seen any real renewable energy source that can cover base demand, I am sure there will be eventually.
Nuclear is not a replacement for renewable energy, it is a shortcut to getting rid of fossil power generation and buying us time.
Nuclear power plants take a long time to do properly. Starting to build nuclear now would take a decade plus.
They’re also more expensive per watt of energy generated over the lifetime of the plant than renewables.
It would be cheaper and faster to build renewables, batteries, hydro electric, and other storage methods.
Nuclear is a distraction and you fell for it.
Standardisation will bring down the cost and time of building a powerplant.
I don't think it is fair to compare the cost of nuclear against the cost of renewable power since they will fullfill different roles.
Renewables are great at dynamic demand, nuclear is great at base demand.
Hydro power has been shown to be quite harmful to local fish dammaging the eco system, but yes, some hydro should absolutely be used.
But renewables still can't cut it for base demand.
I see nuclear powerplants as being a drop-in replacement for coal, oil and gas powerplats, buying us time to develop renewables further while also developing better and more efficient tech.
Oh so the costs will drop in 10…20 years? That’s too late to help.
You are straight up refusing to acknowledge that baseload can be provided by other means and isn’t actually an issue.
Building flywheels is cheap. They last practically forever. They don’t produce toxic waste.
You are wrong. The politicians and corporate interests pushing this are wrong.
Sigh, I have heard the economics argument for decades, and it basicially boils down to "we should have started 10 years ago", well yeah, that would have been the ideal, but today is the second best day to do it.
Untill now, no one in this thread has addresses the baseload problem.
Ok, flywheels, that is an interesting concept, depwnsing on the connection to the motor/generator and how much energy is lost in the transmission it could absolutely work.
I also wonder how scalable it would be...
You say that I am wrong, fine I can take critism, but when I just keep seeing people saying "NO" to any resonable way to remove our dependence on fossils with in a resonable timeline.
Tell me when would renewables be able to completely take over from fossil power generation, I mean in the long run (20+ years without any fossil fueld plants or nuclear plants), and run reliably even during the dark and cold winters in say northern scandinavia?
Give me a resonable idea on that.
A decade of building renewables would start generating power nearly immediately and would produce more energy per dollar invested even with storage attached.
Nuclear is a dead end for fools.
I don't see how people like you miss the entire concept of "base load".
I live in a region with vast amounts of renewable energy resources. It's always windy and the sun shines almost every day. I have solar panels on my house that cover most of my DHW and a large fraction of my summer cooling load, and keep most of my appliances running.
But right now, the sun is down and the wind is flat. And I still need power. My battery storage would be depleted by morning, damaging it through overdischarge if I don't buy power from the grid instead.
And it's a lovely summer evening with no heating or cooling demand! What about midwinter, -35C and dark and snowy? Where is my power coming from on that day, after a month of days just like it?
Nuclear.
This 90's talking point against Greenpeace is no longer valid. The economics have changed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/no-miracles-needed/8D183E65462B8DC43397C19D7B6518E3
I am not buying a book to prove your point.
At least here in Sweden, the high cost of nuclear power is due to artificial taxes, that are being lowered.
Oh, fuck a book, aahhhhhh
I'd check it out if it was free, but I am not paying to prove someone else on the internet right.
Your response just tells me that you are not interested in a good faith debate.
You don't have to pay to "prove" I'm right. You just have to accept that experts have looked at this, and nuclear does not need to be part of the conversation. Not beyond keeping whatever we have already, at least.
I am absolutely certain that experts have looked at it, and come to different conclusions.
I'll even go as far as to accept that there is no scientific consensus.
However, seeing that we keep outputting more and more co2, we need to do something drastic, fossil plants are one of the biggest sources of co2, so it makes sense to shut them down as soon as possible.
Nuclear power doesn't really produce co2, the radiation is a local, limited problem, co2 emmisions is a global, existential problem.
Renewables are still not ready to deal with base load in a power grid long term, hydro power messes with local fish and environment, solar doesn't work during the night, wind is quite unpredictable, batteries degrade over time and can't supply AC without extra equipment.
So what is left but Nuclear power?
Nothing, nuclear power will buy us time to develop reliable renewable power while cutting our co2 emmissions drasticly.
And what reference do you have for that? A recent one, because as I said, the economics have totally changed in the last 30 years.
Concrete does. Reactors need a lot of concrete. A lot.
Which doesn't matter. Base load exists because it's cheap to make power plants that stay at the same level all the time. The economics of that don't apply to renewables.
Utterly untrue. It'll take 10 years to deploy a single new GW of nuclear. That's not buying time.
The nuclear process itself doesn't produce co2, the construction of the building does, you are absolutely right about that.
This goes for all concrete needed for renewables as well, massive hydro power dams will produce far more co2 during construction than a nuclear powerplant.
It is obvious that the economixs have changed in 30 years, and they will change in the next 30 years as well. The hesitation of building new nuclear powerplants will not make the situation better. The best time to build nuclear powerplats was perhaps 30 years ago, the second best time to build them is today.
By using economics as an argument you are deliberately advocating against using all tools to reduce global warming.
Base load absolutely exists, without it our society would fall apart.
Nuclear power would give us time to reduce the baseload to managable levels and further develop renewables so they can cope and we can transition away from coal power that needs kilometer long trains of coal every day, to me that sounds like it is worth paying a bit extra to do it faster than drag our feet when we have the knowledge and capability to do it.
I bet that in 30 years when this debate is still going on, you will say that we should have started building nuclear plants 30 year ago because the economics has changed since then.
Context is important here. The conversation here was about Australia's nuclear capacity. A country where nuclear power is banned at both state and federal levels. Where the plan for it's use is currently uncosted, the planned sites have been selected without environmental protection studies and several of which are supposed to be SMRs.
Would you build a bleeding edge nuclear reactor without a legal framework to govern its construction or operation? Without a workforce trained in its functions? Without considering the environmental factors of its geography? Without considering the cost?
Probably not. But that's the current plan put forward by the reactionary right in Australia and this from a party who doesn't believe in climate change, have no emissions targets, and whose whole plan is to continue to run and build coal power until whatever time they work out the details on nuclear.
This is perfectly fair, I saw several anti nuclear power articles before thls, and I approached it from a more general viewpoint.
But if the alternative is coal, I'd go nuclear.
Well it's not really an either/or situation. The current Labor government's plan is a combination of majority renewables with gas and hydrogen. They are also running coal at the moment but have no plans to renew those plants during the transition. They've signed on to emissions reductions of 75% by 2035.
So you've got one plan which has some reduction targets (probably not steep enough) planned transition, costed and budgeted that doesn't require more coal, and one plan which will pull funding from renewables, and requires more coal until some time as which they can get nuclear approved, built and commercialised.