this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Exactly. I'm 100% on board with both renewables and nuclear, but the time to build nuclear would seem to have passed. We're a few decades too late.
That's not too say we shouldn't be building any new nuclear plants - in particular modern designs like SMRs, but I think it would be wiser to focus our energy now on large, grid-scale storage to help smooth out intermittent generation from renewables.
If "we" meaning society could "focus our energy" on anything except profit generation, we could build hundreds of nuclear reactors in less then a decade. We could also eliminate cars and domestic flights, and all kinds of other utopian shit. While you want to live in the status quo but with magic batteries. I'd rather "focus our energy" and live in the Star Trek post-scarcity universe.
It doesn't take 25 years to get a nuclear plant off the ground because people are too busy sitting around counting their capitalism dollars to finish the construction. There are a tremendous number of things that need to happen in addition to planning, approving, building, and commissioning a nuclear facility. I'm fact, is those economic forces that make it happen as fast as possible, because investors want to see a return on their investment. Nuclear plants - and large power plants in general - are not a back deck. They are enormously complex, and given the sensitive nature of their fuel, there are additional things that need to happen on top of what you would expect from, say, a coal or oil generator.
But I'm not sure what you are saying about "magic batteries". How, exactly, do you plan to make intermittent renewable generation viable without some sort of grid-scale storage?
You don't just click your heels together there times and find yourself in a star trek utopia. That's not how things work.
Batteries exist yes. But batteries at the scale required to store the amount of energy that even a small country uses in one day do not exist, and would be by all accounts magic.
Nuclear reactors are not magic, they are real, and they can be built, and should be built both to increase our energy production and replace fossil fuels and of course supplement renewables. Because if nuclear reactors are not built, that supplemental energy won't come from magic storage, it will come from fossil fuels.
When did I say anything about batteries?
That is a battery. But the type of battery it is describing doesn't actually exist.
Grid-scale storage doesn't necessarily mean lithium batteries. It could mean redox flow batteries, it could mean pumped hydro, it could mean gravitational potential storage, it could mean pressurised air in abandoned mineshafts. It could even mean smart grids with dispatched domestic batteries and dispatched EVs reverse charging back to the grid.
Nuclear is a great energy source, but it's not renewable. If we start rolling out nuclear all over the world on a large scale, we would sooner or later run out of nuclear material. I've heard estimates as high as 200 years, and as low as 50 years. The long-term future has to be something renewable, and all the renewable energy sources we currently know of are intermittent. Therefore there needs to be some sort of storage to smooth out the short term discrepancy between generation and consumption.
I do believe nuclear has a role to play. It could have seriously helped us as a stepping stone to get us from fossil fuel-based generation to renewables. It's my personal opinion that it's a bit late for that, and wind and especially solar are very competitive now, from an economic perspective. Having said that, I still see value for nuclear in the future, I just think the bulk of our efforts should be elsewhere.
FYI I worked in the energy sector for over a decade, in market modelling, simulation, optimisation, and control theory, and I helped drive policy and governance, especially as it relates renewable generation.
If people like you, that seemingly don't have a good grasp of physics, are the people driving governance and policy of energy, then it's no wonder most of the world doesn't have a cohesive energy plan besides burn more fossil fuels. You lead with "market modeling" which operates on constraints that aren't useful for a society, only for arbitrage, so finding local maximums within that market would absolutely lead you to believe that subsidized renewables are the best ROI, since you aren't really examining the whole picture. After all you aren't paid to actually examine or understand the energy problem, only to extract value from the current market conditions.
To wit: The examples of energy storage you have given completely ignore the primary value of a battery, energy density. Energy density is the number one most important aspect of storage because if you don't optimize the energy density problem, you literally cannot scale your energy storage solution. For example, lithium batteries are pretty good for energy density, not as good as gasoline, but they were a huge breakthrough when they were invented, and they are the reason we have cell phones and electric vehicles. They are ~10x better then previous gen batteries.
This is something that needs to be understood before any examination about the feasibility of "storage" is ever discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
The important points are these:
The meaning of those above points is that any other battery you bring up (pumped storage, compressed air, etc etc) requires at least an order of magnitude larger in size then the best technology we have today. You need 10x liters of Lithium Ion batteries to store the energy of 1 liter of gas. And remember lithium ion is the most economical we have so far. And it isn't actually viable for storing anything compared to the amount of output a single wind turbine can provide. Let alone a nuclear reactor.
It would take around 3trillion liters of lithium ion batteries to store a years worth of power from a single wind turbine or around 8million/L for a single days worth of energy. We cannot actually build that. We don't have enough lithium on earth to do that. So I stand by my initial claim. You want magic batteries, I want to build nuclear reactors that can actually exist.
There are very different constraints on something portable, like a phone, laptop, car, or even plane, compared with something like an electricity grid.
You need to have high energy density for cars, planes, and phones. You don't need high energy density for a grid. What's more important there is scalability and reliability.