Yes. It costs less and requires less mining to use the most expensive and wasteful storage option. The only reason there aren't more is a lack of sufficient investment in VRE required to make them useful.
schroedingershat
joined 1 year ago
Adding 1GW that runs 80% of the time with months long outages to a grid that has 10GW of power available 95% of the time and 3GW 5% of the time doesn't fix the issue and requires charging $4000/MWh rather than merely $200/MWh to pay back your boondoggle.
All the people chanting "baseload" understand this but pretend not to.
Coal is filthy, but this is a myth and also an attempt at paltering.
Someone compared a poorly filtered coal plant running cherry picked coal to a brand new nuclear plant in the middle of its fuel cycle once decades ago and got the expected result.
When you open it and get the fuel out and when you mine the fuel it's orders of magnitude more. Reprocessing plants like La Hague under normal operation release more of the long lived radiation than fukushima and TMI combined.
The U235 is good for about 3 years, and pinning everything on something that has never had more than a half proof of concept is a bad choice.
Why is it supposed to be easier to get people onboard with nuclear (which is decreasing) than wind and solar (which are increasing at triple the rate of the nuclear construction peak in the 80s and growing at 20% p.a.)?
People are on board with VRE. Some of the are on board with nuclear too, but it's not working.
Four points:
The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.
1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for "other".
It's not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they're so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the "other" (which is about 10-25GW).
5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.
Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.
That's about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.
Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it's fossil fuel propaganda.
It is obviously obviously true that it's a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.
When you demand free insurance from someone they get to set the risk profile.
Tell you what. You put up collateral equal to the value of any nearby city and everything in it, and you can stop ALARA.
Also even with that it's still bullshit. Nuclear had a higher negative learning rate before ALARA and is still horrifically expensive outside the US.
Also the suggestion that wind and solar aren't subject to more extreme regulation on potential harms is even more ridiculous.
Like the free insurance, or the free loans, or the underfunded decomissioning and waste management, or the unremediated mines?
Or is it the storage and grid redundancy required to meet peak load with a generator that runs at constant output and shuts down for months at a time?
Except overprovisioning your total load by 30% with nuclear capacity doesn't allow turning the transient gas off
Cobalt isn't even in most EV batteries anymore, and LMFP is replacing NMC next year.
Sodium ion will then replace LFP the year after.
It's also real weird how people only ever care about french colonial exploitation of africa when it comes to materials they pretend are in renewables and not when they're flooding villages drinking water with uranium tailings.
If you include the full costs of the nuclear programs including the various subsidies, wind has been cheaper for decades, possibly since before nuclear was a thing.
view more: next ›
This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).
The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.
Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks' worth.