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chickenbig

Re:Turning a solar power system into its own backup on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:27AM (#50314185)
> to boil water

Brayton cycle so no water needed. It seems as if the concept has not changed since https://www.rostinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10...

Foundations, maintenance, fire risk.

Land is cheap relative to a container full of cells.

> just have storage for a week of cloudy days.

1 week of storage that is cycled perhaps once or twice a year. 30 year lifetime, say, so 60 cycles in its lifetime. $50/kWh so perhaps $1/kWh for two (presumably cold and dark) weeks a year.

> Like CATL announced a cost of $19 per kwh > I think the actual cost to buy one now it more $40-60.

Plus battery assembly and installation costs (inverter, grid connection).

> If you spread $60 over 15000 cycles

A 30 year lifetime (11k cycles if charged/discharged once a day). Using a 5% discount rate the cost goes up to 0.78c/kWh for the cells. The cost goes up if it can not cycle once a day, for instance intermittent source of energy or excess capacity. And the cost goes up with all the rest of the equipment involved, and round trip efficiency.

> That is a lot of energy to dissipate

The NRC report states "with regard to the effects of shock associated with aircraft impact, WEC demonstrated that these shock loadings are less than those resulting from a design basis seismic event"

> burning jet fuel is a lot of thermal energy that can quickly eat away at steel

Hmmmm, it does have to get past the concrete. "for the fire aspect of AIA ... WEC demonstrated that the requirements of 10 CFR 50.150 are met."

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1101/ml110170004.pdf

> You can't streamline your way out of the need to have to build containments capable of surviving a fully laden Airbus A380 crashing into it from 43.000 ft.

Most of the plane is not a problem for 6ft of concrete and a steel liner. Planes are built to just about hold together. The main thing to worry about are the jet engine cores.

The AP1000 was an incomplete design, plus the aircraft impact assessment change happened. Even the Chinese had trouble constructing it.

But now there is a design, and the Chinese construct CAP1000/CAP1400 on a regular basis.

> Nuclear takes far too long (>10 years) to build.

Latency and throughput are not the same thing. 10 years to the first result, and less once the planning and construction process is streamlined.

> didn't follow an existing design

https://www.onr.org.uk/publications/regulatory-reports/other... is an interesting read; the ONR claims it was not them, and EDF/Framatome claim it was not them either.

The Fingleton Review goes into this and other design changes required by other agencies. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/taskforce-calls-for-radic... .

Sizewell C has an approved design, so the risks are much reduced, and the political/regulatory environment is behind simplification.

> Batteries are scheduled to become so cheap

Wait, you can schedule price drops?

https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017110 / https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(18)30583-X make the battery takeover look like a foregone conclusion, but past performance is no indication of future performance.

Also what about the systems to turn the batteries into something useable? It is telling how cheap lead-acid batteries looked on the first paper's Figure 2, yet overall system costs were vastly higher.

> individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries

Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter. Having a portion of $50/kWh batteries that cycle once a year results in pretty high energy costs. At some point non-battery storage (e.g. generators running on diesel) take over.

Of course, if people are willing to go totally off-grid then good luck to them.

> For power production they have been much to expensive for decades.

Sizewell B signed a contract for difference at £70.50/MWh for the next 20 years, which is cheaper than UK offshore and onshore wind in CfD AR7.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sizewell-b-power-plant-gi... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif...

> worse rates for prosumers

Put alternatively, better rates for consumers. How should one portion the cost of the electrical system as a whole to different groups of people? If someone seldom draws electricity from the grid, and only when it is likely more expensive how much should they pay? What about the limit where everyone is a prosumer and has this usage pattern?

Of course, the officially titled World Nuclear Industry Status Report is actually produced by anti nuclear activist Mycle Schneider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycle_Schneider).
Another liquid metal you have to watch out for is mercury. A former employer of mine traced elevated RAM degradation in a particular datacentre to mercury contamination in the canal the used for cooling water. Mercury has an interesting way of migrating through other metals.
Re:Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:26AM (#49827407)
> When the strait closes because Africa and Spain push together

So really no danger of the Med drying up over the lifetime of a nuclear power station, conservatively 100 years.

Re:Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:14AM (#49827309)
> France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave

Spain's reactors were fine. Regulations of cooling water discharge temperature are what are limiting the reactor output. Adding cooling towers to the power stations leads to a poorer condenser vacuum than river water, reducing electrical output by a few percent, but still a possibility. Whether it is economically worthwhile to retrofit cooling towers is another question.

Re:Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:57AM (#49827167)
> https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...

From google translate """ Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion. """

No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.

Zstandard is an awesome piece of technology. Even the very low compression levels -1, 1 or 2 (IIRC the default of 0 is actually a much higher number) can be very effective, especially for more situations where CPU is a bottleneck.

It is particularly effective when you can 'rotate' the data to enhance compressibility; https://github.com/google/riegeli does this automatically for wire format protobufs by splitting data by protobuf field (well, recursively). It doesn't even have to know the message schema. Shame the project is not more widely known.

> Northern Germany is already overproducing electricity, leading to curtailment of renewables.

Overproducing some of the time. And pulling electricity from Sweden and Norway at other times.

> I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything.

Why is Denmark running the CfD auction if everything is so rosy for onshore wind and solar (plus batteries)?

> the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.

OK, they are betting on the future value of the electricity they produce being lower than today.

> The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero

So existing generators with older CfDs have priority over new generators with CfDs? Interesting.

> Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline?

Why were they offline?

> Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?

So the 1.X GW of standby is bad, but the whole-system sized standby required for intermittents is fine? Also let's not confuse the capacity factor of nuclear (including scheduled maintenance) with the odds of nuclear being offline unexpectedly.

> you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.

Wait, is this where I am meant to talk about SMRs? Or nuclear peaker power stations?

> desperately trying to poke holes

Basic maths

2.2 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 3.025x LCOE for the first nuclear power station. 1.6 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 2.2x LCOE for the second plant. 1.0 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 1.375x LCOE for remaining plant.

Wind/solar is heavily dependent on the required storage (which depends on matching supply and demand), additional transmission and backup generation prices.

Finding the price tipping points is the point of the exercise. When you catch someone's fingers on the scales you realise what the game is.

> Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?

They could spend much less and restart some nuclear. https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/radiant-energy-gr...

> You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world?

CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.

Denmark required CfDs too. https://windeurope.org/news/successful-danish-offshore-wind-...

Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.

> https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/Ge...

It is interesting to see how large-scale nuclear is handled.

120% and 60% increase in cost for FOAK and NOAK (Table 2-1), plus no learning rate for nuclear construction beyond that (Table C.2).

Interest rates during construction unfairly penalise nuclear as "GenCost uses the simplest way which is to increase the capital cost by the assumed discount rate raised to the power of the construction time" (page 97)." This results in ~20% increase in capital costs against other simple scenarios like equal construction costs across each year.

30 year plant lifetime, rather than say 60 years. That results in ~10% increase in capital costs.

> Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.

That line of reasoning only works if there is something to make one plant more expensive to produce electricity than another. For natural gas the cost of fuel is far greater than the CAPEX. For intermittents only the variable OPEX can distinguish between generators, which is mostly for wind and I guess most severely for offshore wind. Cannibalisation is the big problem for intermittents. The notion of succession doesn't work for them.

> Not sure what relevancy a 2019 paper has today?

The underlying demand and production has not changed so much since then. The requirements for storage still exist, and strongly depend on when the power is delivered as well as needed.

> a fossil system would also need to have months of storage

Coal and gas also get produced in the winter at a relatively constant rate. Plus we know how to handle piles of coal, caverns full of gas, tanks full of LNG, and linepack for shorter duration gas storage.

> you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve

Sure, you then have an economic problem. The effective capacity factor of the intermittents get driven down. How are they going to be paid for, if much of the time the market is saturated?

> Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it

OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?

Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.

> If solar becomes 2 times cheaper

It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.

> There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now.

Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.

A concentrated problem is one that could have a concentrated solution. Sewage farms use microbes to generate the methane which goes back into the gas grid e.g. https://www.stwater.co.uk/news/news-releases/severntrentinve...
Does this mean we should be advocating for more intensive cattle rearing? Stockyards and special breeds may not be the worst way to meet demand and reduce environmental impact (measured by CO2/methane emissions as well as biodiversity loss, for instance).

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