this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Has anyone actually built 100 hour storage at a significant scale? There's potential for things like iron-air and green hydrogen, but they seem like uncertain emerging technologies.
Pumped hydro exists in many places (and is available pretty much everywhere). There are also demo installs for other low-discharge batteries. Also "put another battery next to the other battery" isn't some undiscovered technology, as soon as it's necessary LFP is ready even if you assume there's no other option.
It doesn't really matter though because wind/solar has demonstrably higher grid penetration capability with less storage and less overprovision than nuclear. Geographic over-concentration and unreliability is a much bigger downside than intermittency in that regard.
So for grid reliability, it would be better to build (e.g.) a distributed fleet of 100 MW reactors than a single 1 GW reactor?
Yeah that would likely improve it, but then you're paying as much for the fuel as the renewable grid's total cost and much more on top of that for security and O&M. You also need to quadruple uranium mining overnight to just do the first fuel load for enough new generation to keep up with new wind and solar installs.
Rather than going to more and more tortured extents to try and make nuclear work, we could just do the thing that's working extremely well. In the absolute worst case where we assume medium and long term storage is impossible rather than not yet necessary, the total emissions from the residual thermal generation over tue next century are less than the emissions from delaying the transition to try and make nuclear work.