REAL Green wrote:“Bill Gates' nuclear venture plans reactor to complement solar, wind power boom”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN25N2U8
“A nuclear energy venture founded by Bill Gates said Thursday it hopes to build small advanced nuclear power stations that can store electricity to supplement grids increasingly supplied by intermittent sources like solar and wind power…The 345-megawatt plants would be cooled by liquid sodium and cost about $1 billion each. Nuclear power is a top source of virtually emissions-free electricity, but many plants are shutting in the United States because of high costs and competition from solar and wind. Critics of advanced nuclear have also warned that smaller nuclear is even more expensive than conventional. The new plants, however, are designed to complement a renewable power because they will store the reactor power in tanks of molten salt during days when the grid is well supplied. The nuclear power could be used later when solar and wind power are low due to weather conditions. Molten salt power storage has been used at thermal solar plants in the past, but leaks have plagued some of the projects. Levesque said the Natrium design would provide more consistent temperatures than a solar plant, resulting in less wear and tear.”
Newfie wrote:Bill Gates is backing nuclear powered commercial ships.
I would feel better about this if his software didn't crash and ships didn't run into reefs and each other and such.
https://gcaptain.com/bill-gates-nuclear-ship-battery/
Maybe they consider the ocean a “water tank.”
dissident wrote:They will not dissolve into the ocean water.
dissident wrote:Molten metal unpressurized fast neutron reactors are the prime choice for shipping. Keep the reactors running in port at all times and the issue of them naturally freezing solid will not be a problem. And that is their key advantage, during any crisis they just wind down and the coolant (e.g. lead-bismuth) solidifies. Using pressurized water reactors is always prone to have meltdown situations like at Fukushima since pressurized water is just too volatile for a safe coolant. The fast neutron reactors have passive cooling that no water cooled reactor could dream of.
If the concern is all the reactors littering the sea floor from all the deep sea, unrecoverable shipwrecks, then it is not such big of a deal. The reactors will become part of the sea floor over time. They will not dissolve into the ocean water.
eclipse wrote:Help! My opinion seems to be changing and I don't like it! I'm a fan of nuclear power for Australia, but I'm starting to have second thoughts. Not because of any over-hyped problems with nuclear - but because of how cheap Wind and Solar Plants (WASPS) are becoming.
100% renewable papers used to assume all this extra electricity storage from pumped hydro acting as big 'batteries'. But on-river pumped hydro is already over-used, doesn't have enough estimated resource to backup today's grids, and has serious ecological concerns with these dams destroying our last fisheries and intact ecosystems. Mark Jacobson infamously over-assumed the amount of on-river pumped hydro capacity in America by 100 fold! America's National Academy of Sciences spanked him for it! https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722.full
Shellenberger had a real rant about Jacobson's lies. https://tinyurl.com/y3mq8fqh
BUT WHAT ABOUT OFF-RIVER PUMPED HYDRO 'BATTERIES'?
But what if we look at ANY hilly areas that might have the topography to run a pumped hydro dam - but are just not on a river? We can build the dam anyway. We could pump the water in from a nearby river. We could cover the dam in plastic to reduce evaporation by 90% and sometimes allow local rainfall to top up the dam. This increases the world's potential pumped-hydro several orders of magnitude. Indeed, satellite mapping for these sites has come up with 300 TIMES the grid storage required to take Australia 100% renewable. The cost? Pumped hydro = 1 GW storage capacity for 14 hours at $1.8 billion. https://tinyurl.com/yddkfp7r The global study concluded there was 100 TIMES the required topography - although had the huge disclaimer that this was from satellite data and while they had excluded urban areas, had not checked the other areas for land tenure and local environmental concerns. But even if you rule out 90% of the sites, there's still TEN TIMES the available resource if you want to develop it. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php
Now, the punchline. Does the lower costs of WASPS + high availability of off-river pumped hydro sites mean we finally have an understanding of what a WASPS grid might look like? We have to build enough WASPS to both run the country and pump all that water uphill everyday for the night time grid. What happens in Northern Europe and America where ponds and dams freeze during winter? Would they build nukes, or import power from regions that don't freeze? But down here in Australia our dams don't freeze. So are WASPS so cheap now that we could really do it, and go mostly renewable? This paper from the CSIRO seems to say so - at least 90% renewable here in Australia. https://tinyurl.com/y8dyaxkg
dissident wrote:At the end of the day a wind-down to modern consumerist excess is not negotiable. Unlike the imbecilic opinion of BAU reactionary politicians would have it.
Using gravity and water to store intermittent wind and solar power is limited by scale. Now you need to build storage reservoirs (vast amounts of concrete and steel)
The cost of solar and wind may be coming down, but not fast enough
and the cost of these water reservoirs cannot be assumed without first building them.
There is always sparkles in the eyes delusion as we see with geoengineering. The costs are pathologically underestimated and the impacts not even considered.
A problem with nuclear power is the corruption associated with its deployment. The absurd costs of building new plants which have all the indicators of fraud, such substantial delays and cost overruns. This is true for western products and it is clear that this is not some natural cost of nuclear power.
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