this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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They both suck. Going renewable is the only way.
You should search the term grid scale storage and get back to me with a viable solution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Already a thing m8
That's not viable everywhere or at scale. Creating new reservoirs would also cause great environmental damage.
creating nuclear plants is worse. nuclear plants have a conversion rate from thermal to electrical energy of around 35% So for every kWh you receive from your socket almost 2 kWh are used to heat or evaporate water. That is more environmental damage than a pumping reservoir.
Also the premise is wrong. We dont need the same amount of storage so we can continue using electricity like before.
Most electrical use can be sheduled to align with the availability of energy in the grid. The sun is up at noon? good time to do laundry and dishes. There is a steady wind tonight? Preheat the water in the tank and no need to heat in the morning.
The same can be done for many industrial applications. It just requires innovation and investments, which is why they rather lobby for destroying the planet.
Well since your arguments depend on niche and experimental technology I don't see why Nuclear proponents can't either. The waste heat from nuclear energy is only a concern when it is contained within water, which is pretty easy to use for warming houses or providing houses with warm water. There are already cities that do this. This has huge efficiency savings. https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/
This all seems a bit theoretical to me. The important thing is to stop fossil fuels right now. If we use a nuclear plant to buy us 50yrs to find renewable alternatives for the specific conditions of the site in question I say go for it. Every location has unique needs here, we can't look at any one technology as a golden bullet for every problem everywhere. We don't have the decades needed for huge innovation and cultural changes to support smart grids like you describe.
We proooooibably could do that if everyone agrees and we all do it together everywhere of the world. Will that happen? No. So we can not agree on that and therefore no big nuclear Masterplan will be build.
Let's say we also try to get everyone on the full renewable boat, try really hard. Will that work so that everybody agrees? No. So as we can not agree on that no renewables will be built. Wait.. Stop.. That's wrong. I still can built renewables even alone on my house. And here is the difference. For the nuclear plan we would almost all all over the world have to agree to make it work. For renewables, it will happen, because we can do it right here right now, everywhere, large scale, small scale. Doesn't matter. It's like with gravity and religion. For religion to "work" you need to believe. Gravity will work, if you believe it or not. That's what gives me at least a little bit hope, renewables are so fucking good, they are unstoppable by now. Question is just if we are fast enough.
I don't want to be excretingly pedantic but I mean f*** it give me a couple hundred fire alarms and I'll have enough Americanium to start a breeder reactor.
Silly me I didn't realize we were just going to install mountains every time we needed a battery. Unfortunately most of humanity lives on the coast unfortunately most of the coast is flat...
Furthermore we would still need to increase a renewable production by over 60% before we would be able to maintain base load and even need the pump storage but go on.
Our country barely has any coast. And we're done with nuclear anyway, so that sounds like a you problem.
How about a mixture of batteries (redox-flow, LiFePo, NaFePO, iron-air, Li-Ion), thermal storage (porous volcanic stone, heated water, liquid salt), mechanical storage (giant rotating masses, compressed air), pumped hydroelectrical storage, power-to-gas or power to liquid(hydrogen or ammonia) and creating interconnected power grids?
That should do. Would not create a single point of failure and prevent having everything in the hands of probably a single entity.
While I agree that we need to pursue energy storage solutions In addition to investing in renewables and nuclear. I feel that it would be staggeringly inefficient to have to harvest and store and then redistribute power at the scale you are describing. The power loss and transmission alone from generation to battery to end user would be over 30% most likely. And at that point It's far more efficient to directly energize the consumer with an on-demand source such as a nuclear power plant.
There's a strong argument to be made for nuke plants, but there's a solid, high production value video here. It's Kurzgesagt if you know them.
The important thing is clean energy, regardless of whether or not it is renewable.
Fossil fuel based solutions are significantly worse for climate change than nuclear. Saying that the other renewables are better is matter of discussion, but renewables without nuclear are not going to make the cut. Using both renewables and nuclear is best to cut emissions.
nuclear is not viable. It is not stabilizing but endangering the grid as nuclear plants are vulnerable to heat waves and dry spells. The kind of westher events to increase drastically with climate change. In Europe many nuclear reactors had to be powered down in the last summers because they couldnt get cooled anymore. Also they put further stress on limited water ressources by literally evaporating the water away.
You can life without electricity but you cant life without water.
I should have a copy pasta ready because every time nuclear is coming in a conversation we get the same argument about nuclear being vulnerable to climate change because some french reactors have been powered down in summer and trying to imply that renewables energies are immune to weather events
Yes some reactors have been powered down in summer because of heat wave but only some of the older design that send heated water back in the river. It's not a problem for the majority of the reactors.
It's not an issue because most of the reactors are still online, because summer is the moment with the lowest electrical consumption anyway and because in summer solar production is at the highest point so the power grid is fine even with few reactors off.
On the other hand winter is the moment where the power grid is under stress, December, January and February the country is peaking its electrical consumption, solar production is at the lowest point so reactors need to be fully operational at this period. It's fitting perfectly with the climate since this is also the months when the water is at the highest level and heat is not an issue.
But since we are talking about extreme weather events what is happening to solar panels during hail storms and to wind turbines during heavy storms ? They can take damage too, renewable energies are not immune to climate either.
Edit: Nuclear isn't the perfect solution, renewables are not perfect either but we need to work with what we have and using both nuclear where possible and renewables is probably the best option we have.