Re:The first Gen III+ Nuclear plant begins fuel loading
by ben_w on Monday October 17, 2022 @06:17PM
(#33240228)
I am sympathetic to both of you regarding the word "trivial".
No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.
It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.
The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.
Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.
And so on.
For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).
No new problems need to be solved, so in that sense it is trivial.
It costs a lot of money in absolute terms, so in that sense it is not trivial.
The cost (for global battery based storage, the most expensive serious storage option) is in the order of 6 months global supply of crude oil to turn rocks into batteries (i.e. the dumbest possible limit on the cost of recycling), those batteries last at least three years even using the worst cycle-count estimates I've seen and throwing the batteries away at 70% of initial peak capacity, that's trivial.
Opening new mines and factories, even if the new mines provide new work for workers currently in fossil fuels, may be a significant geopolitical and economic shift, so in that sense it isn't trivial.
And so on.
For hydrogen, it's "build a tank that only leaks a little bit". (We'd probably be better off adding some carbon to that hydrogen, but I have no idea if anyone is working on that at sufficient scale even though the tech is over a century old).