The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors. The design was bad to begin with and it really didn't have any sort of containment or bunker or anything like that to speak of.

This is why they go on and about the "sarcophagus" required to keep it contained. They had to build a proper containment unit after the fact. You want that stuff built BEFORE you have a nuclear reactor. Not wait until after one blows up.

I, very literally, would love to have a nuclear reactor in my backyard if it's off the correct design. A design that depends on physics to be safe, not human operators.

Which is entirely possible. You can build a nuclear reactor in such a way that if the worst possible case happened it would meltdown and dump it's guts into a container. Then just sit there until it cooled to the point were it could be processed correctly.

> The solution to Chernobyl style accidents is to not build Chernobyl style nuclear reactors

Or, indeed, any at all. Thus, also no Fukushimas, and no TMIs, and no Santa Susanas.

you know that "nuclear energy fear" is conceptually equal to "airplane fear" in trasportation?. Both are the most safe by output (kwh vs miles travelled) against deaths in their own categories.

Rendering large areas uninhabitable is plenty of harm. And death is not the only detrimental health impact.

Santa susana is bad and something I’m even vocal about, but that was nuclear experiments, not nuclear power

It was officially enforced lying about nukes causing a public health disaster. Nukes is nukes, first of all.

The Chernobyl power plant did not have a containment building around the reactors until after the meltdown. Every Western nuclear power plant has a containment building around the reactors. That's the single biggest factor.

TMI and Fukushima had containment, for all the good it did.

It did a lot of good? TMI slagged the core but the containment held, and Fukushima's cores (the ones that melted, obviously) was still mostly covered, the hydrogen explosion was the major problem.

TMI vented a very large amount of radioactive krypton. (Given its density, it would better be described as dumped to the river, where it spread out along the banks downstream, gassing riverfront neighborhoods.)

Fukushima's containment exploded in hydrogen detonations, and vented a great deal of radioisotopes. They are today flushing tritium to the ocean, which seems wasteful; we will want the 3He that decays to.

Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms.

Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.

In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk.

And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)

In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality.

If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.

The website is official information from the German federal agency for radiation protection. While the risk now is low, and the article is actually giving a useful comparison to radiation exposure in airplane travel, you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day, and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl. The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.

> you probably still wouldn’t want to eat those mushrooms or game every day

For the mushrooms, as a side order, even every day would be harmless. If you follow some stone age diet, eating only meat, then MAYBE eating those boars every day might cause a measurable increase in cancer risk. Probably still less than simply breathing the air in a city, though.

> and the contamination was much higher in the first months/years after Chernobyl

In the first days and months after Chernobyl, there were real reasons to be somewhat careful. That was before the short-lived isotopes had decayed. Once the decays of those isotopes took over, and Cs-137 became the main source, the levels were pretty safe, even if they were double compared to today (the half-life of Cs137 is 30 years).

> The overall point is that the impact was not restricted to a 50 mile radius as suggested by the GP.

And this is where my main objection is. The "impact" as counted in measurable increase in cancer risk, is nil.

By employing the ultra-conservative "linear no-threshold model" (LNT) of radiatino risk, then theoretically, over a very large population, you could calculate some number of expected cancer cases. But there is (last time I checked) no consensus that the LNT hypothesis matches data better than a null-hypothesis that doses under about 100mSv are harmless.

In any case, at that level, the risk for any given individual is so small, that it disappears next to any other risk you can imagine from pollutants or similar, so there is no reason to take such hypothetical risks into account for your personal behavior.

Arguing that leaked radioactive contamination is less harmful than often assumed does not make habitually leaky nukes seem any more attractive, vs. alternatives that leak nothing hazardous at all, ever.

" the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy"

From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

We seem to have been fine burning coal and not thinking about the radiation that puts into the surrounding environment.

It's also disingenuous to think that there aren't negative environmental externalities from the production and operation of "renewables".

All forms of energy production will have some negative consequences and we need to understand what those are and think of ways to mitigate them, rather than just pointing to what's bad about one form and ignore what's bad about others.

Coal is on the way out, so immaterial to argument now. Only just enough coal is burnt to fill in for insufficiently built-out renewables and storage.

In many places that role is being moved to NG. The immediate hiccup is a short-term setback that will be fixed the way we are doing, building out renewables, later storage.

Yeah but that coal radiation is tiny! Nuclear reactor radiation is big!

It's like a kid preferring 5 nickels to 2 quarters because 5 is more.

Both are irrelevant. Twittering about them is disingenuous.

For someone who understands science, it actually DOES make them more attractive, when they realize that the "contamination" is at concentrations usually associated with homeopathy.

Nobody wants to need to pay attention to them wholly unnecessarily when the alternative is overwhelmingly cheaper besides.

These different radiation types are NOT equivalent.

The purpose of the Sievert scale is precisely to to provide a measure that enables equivalent comparisons of radiation doses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert

Even if it's not perfectly accurate, it's probably quite close.

How radioactive are covid vaccines?

They are bioactive, not very radioactive....

Then why bring them up here at all? I hope it's not to push some backwards anti-vaccine bs.

Quite the contrary. It is based on the obvious premise that it's a good idea to get vaccinated.

Just because it is well known that vaccines come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not take them. They save a lot more lives than they take.

is the same as

Just because it is well know that nuclear power come with a tiny, tiny risk of some complication doesn't mean we should not use it. It saves a lot more lives than it takes.

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying!

Planning nuclear power plants based upon the Chernobyl disaster is kinda like planning road and bridge construction based upon the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) )

Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."

They all resemble a historic disaster, more or less. Renewables don't, though.

Ah, no. The (numerous) historic disasters which most renewables resemble are those where civilizations implicitly assumed that the current climate - patterns of wind, rain, temperature, etc. - would continue indefinitely. Then...SH*T, the climate changed, often over rather large areas, and the civilization(s) which had conveniently assumed that that couldn't happen suffered or failed.

(If you're not familiar with this in the context of renewable energy, then you might want to google for news stories on what the long-term drought in the western U.S. is doing to the "sure thing, forever" supply of hydroelectricity at many of the major dams.)

Moving goalposts, much?

The environs of Hoover Dam are exactly as safe today as 10,000 years ago, and will reliably be as safe 10,000 years in the future provided no nukes blow up upwind or upstream.

Solar panels floating on the Hoover Dam reservoir will happily produce as much power as the dam at full tilt, with enough left over to pump water back up to it for overnight use, reduce evaporation enough that water drought will be substantially less problematic, and provide power for desalination besides.

Floating, water-chilled panels will last at least 50 years, by which time they will likely not be needed anymore.

Probably the issue is that access to water (for cooling) correlates highly with access to water (for human civilization).

There was also no real incentive to clean up the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The town of Pripyat existed for the purpose of supporting the nuclear power plants. So when the plants closed, there's no reason to clean up the contamination. This is in contrast to Fukushima, in which the majority of the exclusion zone has been rehabilitated.

I don't disagree with your main point, but what's the point of making a nature preserve in an already uninhabited area? Since it's uninhabited right now the animals are probably doing just fine. Also, power plants (of any kind) need heavy machinery for construction as well as regular maintenance.

A nature preserve is there to keep somebody sweeping in anytime and eliminating the habitat. Which happens all the damn time.

Starbase, e.g.

If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak electricity for less money.

Except those solar panels generate energy intermittently. Not just in the short term due to the day/night cycle, but also over the long term with weather and seasonal shifts.

Nuclear is unique in that it's the only geographically independent, and non-intermittent energy source. Hydroelectricity and geothermal are non-intermittent but are geographically dependent. And also fossil fuels, but those emit carbon dioxide.

As has been explained to you numerous times, intermittency is a trivial technical matter that cannot justify diverting capital to nuke construction or operation.

Repeating your falsehoods here does not make them true.

And as has been explained to you numerous times, intermittency is an incredibly difficult problem and cannot be solved without some miraculous storage mechanism that makes energy storage effectively free. It's so trivial to solve, yet you neglect to mention the solution.

As per your previous comments, you assume that hydrogen, compressed air, or some other form of energy storage will be this silver bullet. This is a very risky assumption. We have no cost history for these systems being built at scale. There's a massive difference between writing a white-paper promising a super cheap storage cost, and actually building an energy storage facility and looking at the bill.

Interesting that you can understand this concept when its applied to development of grid-scale storage.

But you think its easier and risk free to develop from where we are to R&D plus supply chain, operating procedures, and workforce for safe and cost effective nuclear power?

Grid storage has no cost history. Nuclear power has a known cost history of being too expensive, and its had trillions of dollars of investment so theres no low hanging fruit.

Grid storage has existing components used in other industries and applications, nuclear power doesn't.

The grid storage that has actually been deployed like hydroelectric and battery storage does have cost history. But it's too expensive, and are geographically limited in the case of the former. The grid storage systems like hydrogen electric storage, or ammonia have not been deployed at scale and has no cost history. I'm not inclined to gamble the future of civilization on technologies that we have zero experience building and operating.

By comparison, we have 70 years of experience building and operating nuclear plants. We only need to build 4 nuclear plants for each one we currently have to achieve a 100% decarbonized grid. The cost history of nuclear power shows a clear trend that serial production is cheaper than one off builds.

And you are incorrect about nuclear power not sharing components with existing applications. Nuclear power plants use steam generators, turbines, dynamos, and cooling towers. These are used in other heat engine based power plants.

>build 4 nuclear plants for each one we currently have to achieve a 100% decarbonized grid

Uhh, mining and uranium enrichment and transportation all require fossil fuels, and more fossil fuel energy than a fueled nuclear produces in electrical energy. Increasing 4x nuclear plants would increase fossil fuel consumption in the nuclear supply chain.

Nuclear isn't some secret technology you've just discovered thats being suppressed by environmentalists. It literally ended the biggest war ever and was pursued for decades afterwards. Unless you know a secret, if its feasible it would have been done.

> Uhh, mining and uranium enrichment and transportation all require fossil fuels, and more fossil fuel energy than a fueled nuclear produces in electrical energy.

Incorrect. Nuclear power actually has the second lowest net CO2 emissions per energy source, second only to hydroelectricity. Less than solar and wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

So wrong its funny. Maybe if you assume the pre-existance of the nuclear supply chain due to a weapons program. I challenge you to actually follow the sources on any of estimates like that, or the hilarious "12g c02/kwhr" quote. It's all ESTIMATES (not measurements) FROM The nuclear industry. But keep on believing.

The estimates are from the IPCC, not from the nuclear industry. This is stated in the article.

The IPCC did not do primary research. They cite a source. That source did not do primary research, either. The actual data comes from an estimate from the industry itself. The estimates came from costs. Estimating embodied fossil fuel energy based on cost is a not a bad estimation technique except when a huge amount of your supply chain is subsidized.

And, all more expensive to operate than alternative methods.

Which is why nukes are today uncompetitive, and get less so every day. The cost to build all those nukes would build far more renewable generating capacity and storage, far more than we will need. So, we will instead spend far less and get all the power we need. Existing nukes will shortly be too expensive to continue operating, and will be mothballed. Their eventual dismantling will consume a not insubstantial fraction of our much reduced energy budget.

I'm not familiar with this area. Can you explain why it's a trivial technical matter, and what the solution(s) are?

Many billions of dollars are today going into constructing factories worldwide to produce equipment for storage of numerous kinds. It takes time to build the factories, and then time to run them to build out the storage capacity.

There is, thus far, little use for storage, because there is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be stupid.) By the time we need much of it, it will be very, very cheap. In the meantime, building generating capacity and factories is the right use of capital.

Although people insisting there is a problem love to talk about expense of batteries, only a tiny fraction of utility-scale storage will ever be batteries. The cheapest storage is gravity, exemplified by pumped hydro, which represents today almost all utility storage. But there are many variations that all work.

The only uncertainty is which ones will be cheapest. Each is a different mix of build cost, maintenance cost, storage cost, charging cost, and discharging cost, with capex and opex for each. Different users will favor different places on those axes. Best for most uses are those that cost only capex, and store as much energy as you care to, cheaply.

Synthetic ammonia and hydrogen are attractive storage media, despite some higher costs, because they may be sold, and burned in gas turbines.

Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature tech and, like the synthetic fuels, valuable in its own right. Power is extracted by boiling in ambient air to drive a turbine.

Compressing air underground, adiabatically, is another mature method. Compressing to a sea-floor bladder through a hose from a compressor onshore, likewise. Turbines, again.

Buoyancy, drawing a float down toward a pulley on the sea floor, using a winch onshore; and raising a very, very heavy weight up a disused mine shaft are other, very similar examples of gravity storage. Both have startup time of seconds, and are useful for stabilizing grids. Energy is released by running the winch out, driving a generator.

There are various battery chemistries, for cases where batteries are useful at all. All under consideration are much cheaper than lithium. Farthest along may be iron-air, molten-metal, and sodium-bromide, none of which are prone to fires.

Storage costs of all kinds are falling much faster than solar generating capacity. Utilities will build whatever is cheapest when they finally need any. As prices change, the mix will change. There is no value in picking just one, and plentiful value in using the right one for immediate circumstances.

Nobody needs very much storage, because you can always import and burn fuel. The cheapest fuel will be surplus ammonia and hydrogen, although burning aluminum powder for direct process heat has been used in production at local scales. Scrap aluminum is very cheap.

Note that none of these exotic storage systems have ever actually been deployed commercially. Yes, liquid nitrogen is used for things like cooling. But no one has deployed a grid-scale storage system using liquid nitrogen. Liquid hydrogen has been used in rocket launches, but has not been used for energy storage. These technologies are mature in applications besides energy storage. They are not at all mature in the context of energy storage. Grid-scale storage systems using these technologies remains the stuff of prototypes and white papers.

This commenter is also incorrect in the claim that there is not enough renewable capacity to charge up storage. California , Hawaii, and other energy markets often hit days of excess renewable production. Proponents of energy storage promised that companies would swoop in to store and resell this excess energy. But this has not materialized, because energy storage is not nearly so simple or cheap as this commenter claims it is.

You can insist until you are blue in the face that these are all untried and exotic, but you will be wrong throughout. And you know you are wrong as you say it.

If in fact they were exotic and untried, billions of dollars would not already be committed to factories to produce them in industrial volume. The processes involved are used industrially billions of times worldwide every day.

You only wish they were exotic because you imagine it would make nukes more appealing. But nothing can make nukes appealing. They get less so with each passing day.

> If in fact they were exotic and untried, billions of dollars would not already be committed to factories to produce them in industrial volume. The processes involved are used industrially billions of times worldwide every day.

Yes, for purposes different from energy storage. The massive amounts of ammonia synthesized through the Haber process for fertilizer production does nothing to demonstrate ammonia's viability for electric grid storage.

Likewise the hydrogen used in space rockets has no bearing on the feasibility of electrolyzing water, storing the hydrogen, and converting it back to electricity. If anything, the fact that most hydrogen is produced through steam reformation highlights the difficulties of electrolysis at scale.

We have plenty of experience with flywheels. Almost every car has a flywheel in it. Does that mean it's guaranteed to be extremely cheap and scalable to store electricity by spinning a bunch of giant flywheels? That's the kind of leap you're making here.

When someone actually builds and operates a facility that takes in electricity, produces ammonia, and then taps that stored ammonia to produce electricity later, then we can actually measure real-world cost of such a storage system. Until then, it's just optimistic predictions. And optimistic predictions don't actually store any energy.

> Electric ammonia synthesis plants are right now under construction all over the world.

Source? I'm not finding any result for electric ammonia synthesis plants under construction right now.

The best I could find is this [1] but it's not a plant under construction, and there still significant challenges to overcome to make this viable.

> You imagine that engineers are idiots who cannot direct existing, familiar processes, unchanged, to new purposes. But engineers are not idiots. Neither are we.

Those engineers have opted not to build any of the storage systems you listed. I agree they're not idiots.

1. https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/ammonia-synthesis-go...

Your search skills do not define the limits of investment or build-out.

There are no ammonia electric storage plants under construction. You write that there's many under construction, all over the world. Yet you fail to identify one such plant that's actually under construction.

Ammonia synthesized electrically is not restricted in how it may be used. Identically the same ammonia will be used for many things: burned in combined-cycle turbines for power, burned in retrofitted cargo ships displacing bunker oil, made into fertilizer, injected as working fluid into warehouse-scale refrigeration systems, dissolved in water for window cleaner, used as feedstock in a thousand other chemical pipelines, sent abroad in tankers, mixed into hydrogen fuel to scavenge NOx. It is exactly its wide usefulness that makes it attractive. Similarly for hydrogen.

Insisting that a synthesis plant must jealously direct every last liter produced to be tanked and later burned in a local peaker turbine is fetishism. The ammonia doesn't care, and neither does the synthesis equipment owner: any customer who pays is a good one.

Every air separation plant (you know, the kind used to make oxygen for steelmaking) employs expanders for recovering energy from cryogenic nitrogen. This is an off the shelf technology.

It's off the shelf technology for chemical processes. It's not off the shelf technology for energy storage.

We have plenty of experience with flywheels. I bet there's millions of cars built every year that have a flywheel in them. Does that mean energy storage using giant flywheels is guaranteed to be insanely cheap and way cheaper than the existing storage systems?

Just because we have plenty of experience using a given technology in one application doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be a smash hit in a different application.

Air separation is not a chemical process. It's a physical process, involving compression, heat exchangers, and expanders. You know, just like an energy storage system using cryogenic gases. None of this is magical unknown technology. The components are literally in use today and have been for years.

Now, whether LN2 (or LAir) energy storage is practical is another matter. The efficiency seems poor unless you have a source of waste heat to juice the process.

Air separation is mostly used for chemical processes [1] to isolate certain gases like oxygen or nitrogen. This is what I wrote in my previous comment:

> It's off the shelf technology for chemical processes. It's not off the shelf technology for energy storage.

The while point I'm making in these last few comments is that just because a certain technology is effective for one application doesn't guarantee it's effectiveness for a different application.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_separation#Applications

So what if it's used for chemical processes? To make it efficient, there is careful transfer of heat from the input stream to the outgoing streams, with compression/expansion to convert the heat energy back to work. Making this efficient involves just the kinds of components that are needed in a cryogenic energy store.

You correctly point out that air separation is made efficient by transferring the heat from the output stream to the input stream. After cooling air enough to isolate whatever chemical is needed (like nitrogen) the cold output stream is run back through the warm input stream to help cool the input stream. This also has the effect of warming the output stream back to ambient temperature. This is fine if you're separating out oxygen to use in a smelter, or nitrogen to be used in the haber process.

But you can't do this for cryogenic air storage. The whole point is to produce liquid nitrogen (or liquid air) that can be stored and then reheated later to drive an engine to generate electricity. If you ran the liquid nitrogen output through the input stream like in typical air separation, you'd warm the output stream and turn it back into a gas. So even though the two systems both involve cooling systems they're actually substantially different processes. One of them is separating air's constituent gases, and mixes the input and output streams to achieve efficiency. The other is essentially a big liquid nitrogen plant.

Unfortunately the only existing cryogenic air storage plant delivered 15 MWh of storage at a cost of 8 million pounds [1]. That's about $650 per KWh, as compared to ~$130 per KWh for battery storage. Like I said, just because a technology is effective in one application, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be effective in another one.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage#cite_...

You tell me: which component of a cryogenic energy storage system is not already in use in some process (air separation or otherwise)? One of the attractions of this sort of thing is it's composed entirely of things that are already quite mature, and that have existing supply chains.

And for the third time, just because the individual components are used in different applications doesn't mean it's going to be cheap or scalable to use them in energy storage. The cost history of existing cryogenic storage plants indicates that no, it's not effective for energy storage it's 4-5x more expensive.

We build plenty of flywheels. Does that mean energy storage based on giant flywheels is guaranteed to be efficient at scale because we have experience using flywheels in other applications like automobiles?

You're changing the subject now. You were criticizing these for lack of maturity, not for being uneconomical. My point is that your criticism that they aren't mature is misplaced, since the component technologies are all well established. Of course, it could be LN2 or LAir storage doesn't compete.

No, my criticism of the lack of maturity of cryogenic air energy storage is still correct. The fact that it shares some components with air separation does not change the fact that cryogenic air storage is not mature technology.

Similar deal with ammonia energy storage. We've got plenty of experience with synthesizing ammonia for fertilizer production. We've got very little, if any, experience using synthesized ammonia as a form of energy storage.

It was you, not I, that started this tangent about air separation in this comment [1]. I was, from the beginning, talking about energy storage systems.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31760980

I.e., you cannot identify any single stage of any of these extremely familiar industrial processes that would make it unsuitable for energy storage or retrieval, so instead invoke ghosts of fear and doubt.

Do you imagine the ammonia knows why it is being synthesized, and would balk at being synthesized and tanked for energy storage or fuel? Do you imagine it will object to being burnt in a combined-cycle turbine?

Your credibility is at zero.

Why are you all of a suddenly replying to a super-deep thread? Is pfdietz your alt? Regardless if you're asking about the technical shortcomings of ammonia and cryogenic air storage I'm happy the enlighten:

Ammonia storage would first require a source of hydrogen. Currently almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation which releases carbon dioxide. So this has to be replaced with electrolysis, which is more energy intensive and has issues with corrosion of electrodes. Then there's the issue of heating up this hydrogen and nitrogen to ~400C and compressing it to fix the nitrogen into ammonia. Currently this is done through combustion of fossil fuels. That too needs to be replaced with an electric source. All these changes drastically increases the cost of producing ammonia over existing processes.

Cryogenic storage is essentially producing liquid nitrogen by refrigerating air, and then hearing the nitrogen to create a pressure gradient to drive a heat engine. Cooling the air is a huge energy sink, and releasing the energy often has to be coupled with a heat source in order transition the liquid nitrogen to a gas. It's actually using the heat gradient of the ambient air and the liquid nitrogen to drive the heat engine, and that ambient air often doesn't have the required energy density to produce more than a few dozen megawatts. Existing prototypes often scavenge waste heat from a fossil fuel power plant. But again, not an option if you plan to eliminate fossil fuels.

If heat capacity of air were too low to boil LN2, it would also be too low to condense nukes' operating steam. You don't get it both ways.

You pretend that electrolysis has not been known for centuries. But nobody is fooled.

*in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...

Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday

Not even remotely true. Global battery production is around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That's 8 years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour of electricity storage.

> Global battery production is...

Now repeat the same math for global production of new nuclear power plants, in GW/year.

While writing your reply about how this isn't the right way to think about the future of nuclear power, realize that those exact same arguments apply to batteries, too.

No, the same arguments do not apply. Lithium ion battery production is essentially a chemical industry. It cannot become cheaper than its input materials. Most of the cobalt produced goes to lithium ion batteries [1]. Eventually, the battery industry hits the ceiling of what extraction industries can supply and shortages are already on the horizon [2].

Nuclear power plants are mostly steel, concrete, and copper. They need to be manufactured to precise tolerances, but the cost of a nuclear plant isn't driven by the cost of concrete and steel as rae inputs. The nuclear industry accounts for a negligible share of steel, copper, and concrete consumption. The lion's share of the cost is in the design, approval, and construction of the plants. Unlike batteries, these are factors that benefit from building the same repeated design. A serial run of 40 heat exchangers is a lot cheaper than a one-off production of 3 or 4 heat exchangers. This is why nuclear plants were so much cheaper in the 1970s and 80s when the same designs were built repeatedly.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143399/global-cobalt-co...

2. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...

There are two flaws with your argument. First, it’s actually somewhat unlikely that lithium ion batteries are going to be the cheapest grid storage. Second, natural resources almost always get cheaper to extract as demand increases, especially when they’re not actually scarce (there’s tons of Lithium out there).

> First, it’s actually somewhat unlikely that lithium ion batteries are going to be the cheapest grid storage

Then please share what storage mechanism is going to be cheaper.

> Second, natural resources almost always get cheaper to extract as demand increases, especially when they’re not actually scarce (there’s tons of Lithium out there).

Incorrect, as easily accessible reserves get depleted more and more remote reserves must be tapped. This increases cost of extraction.

You’d think so but in reality extraction costs just drop as technology improves. For example, lithium..

Lithium prices have more than doubled over the last decade: https://www.metalary.com/lithium-price/

They've increased more than sixfold since 2000.

"Past performance does not indicate future returns."

All you're doing is repeating the fact that we've been under-investing in lithium (and other energy minerals[0]) for the past decade+. Everyone already knows that.

Nothing indicates lithium mining & refining is at its physical or technology limits. Far from it: we see large low-hanging fruit for process improvements in both.

Ion exchange and/or membrane and/or electrochemical separation vs ponds, lithium carbonate intermediate vs lithium hydroxide, clay vs spodumene, etc. Lots of exciting stuff going on!

[0] https://youtu.be/Keja23R2N7g

Lithium ion is just one type of battery. There are many including quite a few that don't involve exotic materials. For grid storage, energy density is a lot less important.

Even so, we're on track to produce li on batteries for cars by the twh per year. And most of those will have a second life in grid storage. That's before considering the effects of vehicle to grid storage.

There are no plans for nuclear anywhere close to the same scale. Changing that will require a debate about cost. This article does a great job of avoiding that topic entirely.

Why are you comparing cost with industrial output?

There is absolutely no need for batteries to provide for storage, so that is a misleading assertion.

And what, pray tell, would we be using for storage instead? Surely you're not going to suggest some untested and unproven storage mechanism like hydrogen storage, ammonia, thermal batteries, etc. Those technologies have never been built at anything remotely close to grid-scale, and thus we have no idea what they'd actually cost when we attempt to build them at grid scale.

Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the only energy storage mechanisms for which we have any meaningful cost history.

> what ... would we be using for storage instead?

You are already well aware of numerous alternatives. Insisting they are "untested" is not fooling anybody.

Yes I'm well aware of the numerous alternatives you repeatedly insist are incredibly cheap and scalable, despite the fact that no such systems have been deployed.

Are thermal batteries unproven? I thought they were at the "available for purchase from Siemens and GE" stage of development.

They exist in prototypes, I am not aware of any grid scale energy storage facilities using thermal batteries.

Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember the US uses 8GWh of electricity per minute.

> Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities?

I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world’s biggest battery storage system" opened last year in California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh.

[0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-at-worlds...

Which is a lithium ion battery facility. Not a thermal batter facility.

Yes, I realise that. That's why I said "I don't know" and "for comparison".

My point was that GWh-scale thermal battery proposals would be competing with already existing (and possibly cheaper) chemical batteries, and that energy storage on this scale is not unheard of.

The point is that current energy storage facilities are too small for fully renewable grid (or arguably even 60% renewable grid).

Even as a nuclear supporter I would welcome more renewables if we had cheap scalable storage, which no one has it seems. (at least no one pointed out such project in the entire thread)

A minor caveat: some regions have large hydroelectric generation, which doubles as a great energy storage site. Countries seem to be able to manage a roughly 1:1 ratio between intermittent sources and hydroelectric generation. Sweden is managing to decarbonize it's grid with ~1/3rd each of nuclear, intermittent sources, and hydroelectric.

But for much of the world what doesn't have this option, nuclear remains the most viable energy source.

Yes, that's what I meant by "scalable". You can't just continue picking low hanging fruit forever.

Btw even the Sweden example uses nuclear for decarbonization of the grid ...

Certainly there are >1GWh thermal storage systems. I'm not sure if any are set up to generate electricity though.

The only deployed thermal storage systems are in solar thermal arrays. Those have costs that aren't not competitive with nuclear, and they're still subject to seasonal output variability due to weather and Earth's inclination.

And district heating systems. Where a 1-2GWh thermal accumulator will be used.

District heating systems distribute heat, usually scavenged from a power plant. They don't store heat really - they do in a pedantic sense in that heat is "stored" in the distribution pipelines, but not in the sense of a battery. And they don't transfer heat at gradients large enough to generate electricity effectively.

They store heat in the sense that one of the components is a giant thermal accumulator.

That's why you mix in wind too.

And there are still days (like during Texas' winter power fiasco) where neither the sun, nor the wind are strong enough to generate sufficient power from renewables alone. How people still believe that you can get by without any baseload power generation capacity is beyond me.

How do we get by without "base load power" today?

Answer: We import fuel. We will have no reason to give up the ability to import fuel at need. We might even stockpile some.

This was the original (1040s, Fermi) idea, hence reactors in Idaho (after becoming alarmed that they had constructed a reactor in downtown Chicago). I think however there's a reason this isn't done now: it acknowledges that large reactors aren't safe (which they're not), therefore begs the question why build them at all. For the idea to become viable, climate change would need to become a much more immediate pressing concern, allowing the trade off to be made between irradiating some Utah desert vs boiling the planet.

Lots of reasons invite the question, why build them at all? There is no answer, because we have overwhelmingly more attractive alternatives.