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Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ... by tenuousemphasis on Thursday March 24, 2022 @08:02AM (#30788670)
You're missing energy storage there, and also the logistics of producing that many solar panels.
Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ... by EricE on Thursday March 24, 2022 @11:40AM (#30791414)
Not just producing that may solar panels, but maintaining them, replacing them, dealing with the waste panels (yes, panels do need to be replaced).

You just don't chuck out a field of solar panels and ignore them.

Modern reactor designs - you do basically ignore them once they are initially set up.

Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ... by mschuster91 on Thursday March 24, 2022 @11:32AM (#30791296)
We have better chances of producing that many solar panels than we have getting Gen4 reactors before 2050. As for energy storage - there's a lot of possibilities:

1) electric cars acting as buffers. Particularly rarely-used vehicles could earn some side money for being used in a smart grid.

2) battery storage like Tesla constructed in Australia

3) hydro pumped storage

In particular, base load could also be generated by permanent renewable energy (e.g. geothermal or running-water hydro power aka dams) to ease the requirement for energy storage.

Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ... by ch4s3 on Thursday March 24, 2022 @12:22PM (#30792034)
> 1) electric cars acting as buffers. Particularly rarely-used vehicles could earn some side money for being used in a smart grid.

Bidirectional V2G systems only exist as demonstration projects now, and we'll need a bunch of time to ramp that up. It requires a lot of EVs, lots of grid updates all over the place, and for people to willingly participate at a meaningful scale. This won't be cheap and the grid we have now can't handle it.

Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ... by tenuousemphasis on Sunday March 27, 2022 @01:56PM (#30822362)
>3) hydro pumped storage

Not likely to be a widely useful storage mechanism except in very specific geography.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/