Don't forget that only the high density fuel needs to be shipped long distance as well...
For a fully reliable 1gw of wind, that's something like 600 turbines (to simply), each turbine lasts about 20 years, and weighs about 200 tonnes. So about 5000 tonnes of finished wind turbine a year, with an equivalent waste stream.
Simon Michaux has already done this. It's worth a read through his reports [0].
Also, it's quite possible to reprocess spent fuel. France has been doing it for decades. [1] The price has not been enough to justify it, but eventually it will (or if other costs are imposed, like a tax on the mineral rights that would favor reprocessing fuel).
[0] https://www.simonmichaux.com/gtk-reports [1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
It's so ridiculous to think that human civilization would collapse just because we will eventually run out of stuff to dig out of the ground and burn, when the biosphere has been humming along on sunlight for about three billion years. Why is this so hard to explain to people?
(Also, on paper one doesn't need any grid storage, if only we could get governments to cope rates on a planetary grid. Texas doing it's own thing and Japan having two frequency zones shows how hard this would be in practice, but in principle it can work just fine).
The total sunlight that hits the Earth in 2 minutes is more than whats needed to power the entire world for a year.
Wasn't that the SuperPhoenix and Astrid reactors? I thought both had been cancelled because of politics?
Reprocessing is another thing entirely. It relies on the fact that used nuclear fuel is mainly not reusable due to accumulation of neutron poisons. In reprocessing, these poisons are removed so that the rest of the fuel can be reused. This too has many practical challenges as you end up with liquid radioactive materials and a lot of it is waste. So far it has proven more practical than breeders, though. Perhaps that is because the same processes can be used to extract materials for nuclear weapons.
Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts of processed lithium.
Have you perhaps heard of "muh pumped hydro", "muh flow batteries", "muh hydrogen", and the myriad of other less mature storage technologies currently being developed?
Have you done the napkin math* on "muh pumped hydro/batteries or hydro"? No? What a fucking suprise.
*on a grid stabilizing scale
The point is that there are many ways to store energy. The fact that there isn't enough lithium or not enough hydro sites doesn't change much.
Local factories etc. might see a need/use for hydrogen production (Swedish Hybrit comes to mind) but as a national grid stabilizer.. I'm doubtful
Fucking mong.
Even if you go with "muh flow batteries" or "muh hydrogen", we would require far more land with wind/solar to fill up those storage technologies than just use nuclear plants.
Even if I were to concede that covering every last surface with solar cells is a good idea (or what to do when recycling them), this doesn't take into account the enormous amount of energy currently used to make process heat. Neither wind nor solar are able to generate the hundreds of degrees necessary for so many chemical and manufacturing processes.
Don't let yourself get bamboozled by shiny futuristic graphics of storage or generation solutions without at least doing some basic napkin math about feasibility.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... [1] https://ambri.com/
You can find a full table, distribution maps, guesstimates for known but as yet untested deposits, etc in the big Red Book of Uranium stuff (free to download):
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28569/uranium-resources-pro...
> a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year?
Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20 - replacement | recovery is an ongoing process and that currently requires raw materials that come with a cost - including slave labour.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-f...
There are no magic problem free resources.
Yes, investors in the uranium fuel rod production pipeline will feel a lot of pain as a result of what's going on right now, but it's not like they weren't warned. Like Theranos investors, they failed to do their due diligence.
[edit] Just to add, the metric you want is ENERGY not $US, because what really matters is the amount of energy you have to put into mining the ore, extracting the uranium from the ore, enriching the uranium-235 in the ore to the point where it's useful in a nuclear reactor, and then packaging that refined product into highly expensive fuel rods made of fairly expensive materials. By the time you do that energy calculation, per-year, for the reactor (on top of ridiculously high initial construction costs), the whole thing looks like a massive long-term liability.
They're not especially robust in cold weather and while they do last longer, they do also degrade in output over time just as the poly versions do.
To maintain a 1 GW farm requires ongoing upkeep, etc.
Again, there are no magic problem free resources, just like low volume uranium mining, large volume mining and production processing to sustain solar power has toxic side effects and impacts people.
It's not even close, with some limited exceptions, like Finland and other Artic Circle zones.
Oh come on. This is an absurd claim with no evidence. Don't be ridiculous.
Polycrystalline panels last 20 years, sometimes longer (the sales pitch is "up to 25 years") but the 20% fall off in deliverable power after 10 years is real.
Monocrystalline last longer, they also gradually fall off and they cost more.
Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs, where's the optimal sweet spot for buying new and rotating out on a schedule | reacting to failure.
I'm not opposed to solar, I'm in Australia in one of the states with large amounts of residential solar and heavy mining industries that dwarf anything in the US currently going electric - we're costing out massive farms to run solar power to asia via HVDC cable.
The supply side of all that is sourcing the copper, the lithium, the aluminium framing, the long list of other raw material inputs, the processing to get from concentrate ores to usable elements, etc.
If it's real, why don't you provide evidence?
Unfortunately this is par for the course in discussions with nuclear power cultists. It honestly is that bad.
Because I went to bed, it was late in my time zone.
> nuclear power cultists.
Say what now? Are you an idiot?
The vast bulk of PV performance studies are dominated by relatively short term studies in temperate climates - the latitudes of California and Germany eg:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
references Australia and links to papers from Perth and Melbourne which are cooler climates.
See my comment above re: my region of interest - equatorial tropical regions with harhser temperature cycling and probable requirements for cooling to maximise returns (still part of an open study).
I'd be happy to provide more details but I'm afraid your comment above doesn't warrent engagement.
Your numbers seem off by atleast a facotor of 2. Average degradation is .5% per year so panels are guarantees are usually that you'll have 90% capacity after 10 years and 80% after 20 years.
> Now it's a game of Backblaze storage stats only with solar panels - how does an at scale solar farm balance purchase costs and maintainance costs,
The failure mode for solar is unlike traditional spinning hard drives. There isn't a "data loss" downside to waiting to replace. There won't be any risk mitigation, just calculations of when the opportunity costs become high enough to warrant replacement. I suspect in areas with cheap land, it'll be easier to build additional capacity than to replace existing degraded panels.
His work has shown that in this tropical climate, with high ambient temperatures and high humidity during the wet season, the a-Si array produces up to 20% more energy than ...
The optimisation issues include other factors, the cost of panel cooling techniques Vs their benefits for one.
Your average degradation figures are the figures from big meta studies such as the US Dept of Energy NREL lab Photovoltaic Degradation Rates https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf which you'll notice is dominated by temperate climate studies at the latitudes of Perth | Melbourne | Germany | Arcata, California etc.
Perhaps you should qualify your statements, because this:
> Currently panels drop to 80% efficacy after 10 years and are doorstops in 20
This is an unqualified factual statement and is simply not true.
> Your average degradation figures are the figures from big meta studies
The big meta studies do show that degradation is a bit faster in higher temp environments for some kinds of panels. There is however zero evidence that solar panels will be "door stops in 20".
If you're building a large area solar farm to ship power to Singapore would you keep a panel after 20 years or door stop it?
What if the peak power output for particular climatic conditions comes from lesser used cheaper PV types that degrade faster than common ones at temperate latitudes?
The people studying this are coming at this with mindset of those that move 800 million tonne of iron ore per annum.
My original comment was framed to indicate the interest was hyper efficient at scale deployment in specific environments .. not running a beer fridge in Melbourne.
No, it wasn't. If that was your intent, you should go reread it to see why everyone else sees you making a clearly false claim that does not contribute to the discussion.
> If you're building a large area solar farm to ship power to Singapore would you keep a panel after 20 years or door stop it?
That's gonna depend on land value, non-panel infrastructure costs and replacement costs. If replacement costs are high then and land value and other infrastructure costs are low, then solar farms will be expanded and replacement will be delayed. If the opposite then you'll see existing panels replaced sooner.
I do expect that in a couple of decades we will see solar panel reconditioning and recycling becoming increasingly important.
Regarding slave labour, I might have bad news for you: Not a single product you use in your lofe is free of exploitation, child labor or slave labor. Not a single one, from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.
This wasn't true when I manufactured them almost a decade ago. We were offering 30 year warranties with only 15% drop after 30 years - polycrystalline 20% efficiency.
Now, in comparison, a 1 GW coal-fired power plant needs to be fed with 3-4 million tons of coal per year (energy content of coal varies a bit, in relation to oxygen-based combustion at least).
And, a 1 GW reliable 24/7 solar/wind/storage system needs how many tons per year? (OK battery replacement is an issue... work it out yourself).