Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an 'emergency'

Re:Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an... by ori_b on Monday August 05, 2013 @05:21PM (#6163151)

Pumped water storage is probably one of the better options out there right now. Of course, it's far from perfect, but it certainly beats batteries.

In addition for evening out dips and bumps in unreliable renewable energy, it's a good option for excess using excess capacity in nuclear power plants in order to deal with load variation. (Nuclear reactors don't like changing their energy production levels, so evening out the load on them by buffering with pumped water energy storage is a great benefit).

Flywheels are also another option, although I don't think they're nearly as popular.

Overall, purely mechanical solutions seem to be preferred over chemical energy storage for large installations.

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Re:Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an... by dredmorbius on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @01:11AM (#6164923)

Pumped-hydro suffers from a serious capacity lack.

Flywheel storage is OK for spinning reserve (responding to fluctuations on the order of an hour or two) but is too expensive otherwise.

My money is on thermal storage, and cheap-substrate batteries (molten salt, liquid metal) for longer-scale storage. For national scale grid storage there are many alternatives for which there's simply not sufficient material to create a feasible alternative.

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