News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by cygx on Friday November 08, 2019 @01:47PM (#21485395)
Lots of German households and industries use natural gas for heating, hence we've got something like 400,000 km of pipeline as well as storage facilities sitting around. Instead of buying natural gas from Russia, we could fill them with synthetically produced methane and/or hydrogen, generated during off-peak hours.
Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by manfredo on Friday November 08, 2019 @01:57PM (#21485474)
Synthetic methane production has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 30-40%. So we'd need to build 3x as much power and is actually needed, and a bunch of electrolysis and Sabatier reaction plants on top of that.

Or we can just follow France's example and build nuclear plants.

Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by cygx on Friday November 08, 2019 @02:01PM (#21485519)
Those numbers are outdated. Round-trip efficiencies of up to 80% have been claimed:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...

If that's legit and can be made cost-effective, the case for nuclear is largely gone...

Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by manfredo on Friday November 08, 2019 @02:06PM (#21485568)
Efficiencies of over 100% have been claimed. Over 50% of the US patent office's applications are for entropy-reversing devices.

Come back to me once these claimed figures are actually implemented.

Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by cygx on Friday November 08, 2019 @02:59PM (#21486103)
Reverse fuel cells aren't magic, though. I agree that 80% seems rather ambitous...