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Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Manuel_D on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @10:05PM (#41386523)
> We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to.

Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours.

Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.

Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by oezi on Thursday August 29, 2024 @08:53AM (#41390307)
Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed. We will solve this.

It just requires some money. If you research it, it is surprisingly little in relation to global annual GDP (at least less than I was expecting).

Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Manuel_D on Thursday August 29, 2024 @11:39AM (#41391968)
> Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed.

And what, exactly, is that speed? The US plans to deploy "15GW" (presumably the authors mean GWh of storage, GW is not a unit of storage) of grid storage in 2024. That's less than 2 minutes of storage!

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202#:~:tex....

Again, global battery production is only about 6-700 GWh (be careful with figures that cite capacity, which is distinct from actual production). And very little of that is dedicated to grid storage.

Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by oezi on Thursday August 29, 2024 @01:40PM (#41393344)
Those figures are about maximum dispatchable power usually for a time of more than 1 hour (2 to 4 seems typical).

So 16 GW battery allow you to power the US similarly to 3x times the power of the largest US nuclear reactor for probably 3 hours.

If such projects are economically feasible now, the economics are just getting better and better and this means we will see exponential growth. California is seeing improved grid stability and reduction in CO2 emissions due to batteries today.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/batte...

Re:How do you make safe, cheap nuclear reactors? Bury them a... by Manuel_D on Thursday August 29, 2024 @02:04PM (#41393607)
Somewhere between 4 and 8 minutes worth of storage deployed over the span of a whole year is not even remotely close to feasible. Even diurnal storage to even out solar production will require 8-12 hours worth of storage. Seasonal intermittency will require days or even weeks.

Since 2020, battery prices have gone flat. Moore's law works because computers get faster as transistors get smaller. That's not the case for batteries, or most other goods. A new car cost a million dollars in 1900, $100k in 1910, and $10K in 1920. Would it have been reasonable to assume that a new car would cost $10 by 1950? Of course not, the steel and rubber in the car is worth much more than $10. A car cannot cost less than the input materials used to build it.

Input materials account for 75% of the cost of a battery already (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...) The room for further price reductions become ever more slim.