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A comment on Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come. Parent comment

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.

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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.

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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/

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