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A comment on New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light. Parent comment

Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by grey-area on Saturday October 31, 2020 @09:06AM (#24951116)
This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.
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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by evgen on Saturday October 31, 2020 @10:18AM (#24951682)
It is far from a solved problem, in fact it is a problem that shows the simple solutions to be infeasible. Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same. Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro and are quire soon going to run out of places where we can turn existing hydro resources into pumped storage.

There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables, which is why they continue to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more production shifts in that direction.

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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by grey-area on Saturday October 31, 2020 @10:29AM (#24951755)
> Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same.

Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries.

> Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro

Nope. There is large pumped storage being built in Scotland right now and there are hundreds more glens where it would be feasible.

>There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables

Just as one example that may well magic away these problems, grid attached storage in the form of electric cars and home storage is growing massively right now. It may be we rethink entirely our centralised approach to production and storage.

Fission is expensive, centralised and carries heavy decommissioning costs and extreme tail risks. Fusion may someday give renewables a worthy rival but till then the falling prices mean nuclear has had its day.

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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by evgen on Saturday October 31, 2020 @11:32AM (#24952231)
Scotland can provide, at most, less than 5% of required capacity if you turned every available loch into pumped storage. Claiming that pumped storage is in any way a viable grid-storage system that can handle baseload in the UK is inaccurate.

Even if every battery production facility on the planet was dedicated entirely to producing storage batteries for the UK it would take almost half a decade to meet the requirements. You can claim that more will be built, but there are resource pipelines involved that are not as elastic and just throwing a pile of money at someone to build a factory. Battery production is growing, but nowhere near fast enough to meet the requirements for grid scale storage.

Right now fission has no competition from renewables+storage because the storage part of that equation remains a fantasy.

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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by grey-area on Sunday November 01, 2020 @09:19AM (#24959621)
It doesn’t have to handle baseload, it has to handle peaks.
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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by belorn on Saturday October 31, 2020 @12:04PM (#24952550)
This is where a market solution should be used. Set up the conditions for minimum delivery of carbon-free power for a given period and let private companies bet on it. If people can deliver a battery solution that exclusively use renewable to charge them, and do this cheaper than nuclear, then they win the bid.

They don't get to use natural gas as a backup. They also need to be held liable to maintain the minimum capacity just as effective as more expensive solutions, but if they are willing and able to do that cheaper then they should win the bid and we should let them deliver carbon-free energy.

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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by jnxx on Saturday October 31, 2020 @01:15PM (#24953224)
In the EU there is actually already a market of different contingents of electrical energy with different availability guarantees. Sources with high availability are more expensive and this helps to finance the required technology. And all this works rather in an evolutionary way. For example, we can, today, predict how much wind power will roughly be generated within the next days, and we can adjust reserve capacities with different costs to even that out. It is not only feasibly but also the economical thing to do.
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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by belorn on Saturday October 31, 2020 @07:06PM (#24955953)
Yes, we do have that system and people do bid to deliver energy. We do however allow fossil fuels to be used when wind power is not producing, and such, the carbon-free reserve capacities are competing against fossil fuels on production cost without the external cost of climate change being added. The economical outcome of that is an constant increase in fossil fueled capacity in practically every country in EU, with new fossil fueled power plant being built today even when we know that the climate can't take it.
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Re:New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light by sofixa on Sunday November 01, 2020 @08:14AM (#24959276)
The costs and risks involved in large scale power generation facilities isn't really fit for private companies and market competition. And when you add a market element to it, companies might cut corners to increase profits ( or minimise losses), and you certainly don't want that.
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