No hydro. I am not talking about baseload just an energy source that can operate during the day to meet higher demand and then scale down. Whats the solution if hydro is not available?
What carbon free energy source can a country build out if they want to have predictable relatively cheap energy that can scale up and down to meet demand during day time?
Solar panels.
Depends on where you live. I'm in northeast US and my solar panels are worthless from November to April.
Maine and Vermont are tied for the second highest rooftop solar potential in the country, only behind the state of California.
I'm in the US Pacific Northwest. Solar panels would also be useless in my area for about half of the year with constant overcast skies, low light and short days.
Stop following and harassing me.
This is a public forum and I read all the posts on this sub. I didn't "follow" you and I am not "harassing" you. If you don't want to have people reply to your misinterpretations of reality, don't post them.
You've repeatedly posted incorrect information here, and I even apologized for being rude when I pointed out how wrong you were. That's apparently a worthless engagement when you keep making comments that simply aren't accurate.
Geothermal.
Are there viable geothermal sites no more than, say, 500 miles apart?
Geothermal is everywhere if you can drill deep enough. The problem is that drilling deep wells (miles deep) is super expensive. Interestingly, frakking tech is making this cheaper.
But can geothermal actually be turned off and on at morning and evening? I thought it was purely baseload
Yes, it can.
Like is the generator turned off or something? How does it work?
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25d
Or store it in batteries. Ideally non-chemical ones like water or gravity batteries.
Or why not use it to power Thermal batteries at night to decarbonize heavy industry like antora energy?
This : )
Why that restriction though? It seems unnecessary.
The problem is that if you just use a lot of baseload then you Will have to much electricity at night. You Will need to scale down to follow load
That's not a problem. You can scale geothermal generation down fairly quickly if you don't need the electricity.
Or, since there's almost no cost difference between generating or not generating with geothermal, you can just keep generating and push out all the more expensive options.
Solar and wind are similar, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.
Mine bitcoin with it and make it more unprofitable for others to pay for electricity to mine it.
How does it actually work to scale geothermal up and down Quickly? Is the generator turned off?
Look it up. You are assuming that geothermal can't scale. Find some evidence to support that assumption. Again, with geothermal, it doesn't matter if you can scale down production or just throw the power away.
But your whole premise is flawed. First, the idea of baseload is bunk. Baseload isn't required. In fact, conventional baseload power sources (coal, nuclear) don't scale up or down quickly. One would also want a baseload power source that is cheap, cheaper than all the other options. Coal, and especially nuclear, are now quite expensive options, due to cheap renewables. The economics for expensive baseload power sources don't exist. Baseload is dead, if it was ever alive.
There is the idea of dispatchable, or flexible, power generation. Natural gas generation being the current big player in this space, and battery storage being the new kid on the block. Dispatchable power is very valuable because it can fill in the gaps when cheaper power sources aren't available.
And one can reduce their reliance on dispatchable power generation by importing power from other regions, preferably cheap renewably produced power.
If you want a broad understanding of these issues. Listen to the Chris Nelder's Energy Transition Show. It's a podcast that is well worth the $7/month.
Pump less water underground before you want to reduce power I guess. And you can always vent steam to condensers. I'm not well versed in geothermal plants though.
Scale it down at night, or keep it running 24/7 and route the unused power to storage to sell during the day. Could be pumped hydro, gravity-based, electric thermal, whatever works in your situation.
Nuclear as a baseline, and solar/wind for peaks in demand.
solar/wind for peaks in demand
Solar peaks at local noon, and quickly drops to nothing outside of the hours around local noon. Wind has week long “droughts”. Without cheap grid storage (some new kind of batteries - Li Ion are great for cars but too expensive for grid storage) we might as well just build more fission nuclear generation.
If they could get lithium from seawater, it would solve the price issue of batteries. And if they can get uranium from seawater for LWRs, then lithium is even easier. I've calculated that from a certain volume of seawater, you get enough lithium for an amount of batteries, that in 100 charge/discharge cycles equal the amount of energy obtained from uranium processed into LWR fuel, from the same volume of seawater.
Hopefully sodium batteries will have their moment
You can also use hydro for peaks in demand.
Nuclear can also be used to meet peaks in demand. There are ways to quickly increase and decrease the output. Bruce Power Generating Station has it along with some French nuclear poer plants.
Another option is to use batteries with nuclear to cover peaks in demand. It would require far fewer batteries than trying to provide backups for all demand on a grid scale.
Another option is to develop new types of reactors that operate at higher temperatures so they get higher thermodynamic efficiencies and can quickly raise and lower their outputs. Reactors like molten salt, liquid metal and gas cooled reactors.
nuclear. it's not exactly cheap but it fills all needed requirements for a proper carbon neutral energy source.
Read some of this about how the costs of nuclear are unnecessarily increased due to hostile regulators and over regulation . It starts with a story about an incredibly convoluted procedure that has to be followed to change the types of light bulbs that are used.
edit. They're written by professionals in nuclear power. They're talking about their personal experiences.
so deregulate
I would say that a massive re-evaluation of regulations is needed. Especially considering the harm that they have caused by driving up the cost and construction times for nuclear power. Some of the things said by professionals in nuclear power over here really give a sense of how the regulations and hostile regulators drive up costs.
1960s regulations should be considered to be mostly adequate. No one died from the Three Mile Island accident and the reactor that melted down was the newer one that was built under more complex regulations. The older one built under simpler regulations continued to function for 40 more years.
That's an incredibly poor idea that has no basis in knowledgeable plant management.
The person you're responding to is not a nuclear professional and is under the very mistaken impression that regulation and restrictions (none of which they can articulate) are holding plant development and construction back.
They aren't, really. Nuclear has a very bad PR problem, thanks to a few missteps, lack of public comprehension, and a very big fossil fuel lobby.
FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT!
I'm also onboard for your midcentury aesthetics push.
i like you, you've got good sense and good taste
Ditto!
An unsourced opinion post on a subreddit is not legitimate analysis or evidence. The only actual source in the thread is from The Daily Kos, not the most reputable news site, but with a clear indication that actual mismanagement of construction in an attempt to bypass regulations resulted in this:
The cutting process began in October 2009. Within an hour, cracks appeared in the wall of the containment building. Soon "large chunks" were popping loose and falling out. The work was halted. The company’s efforts to save itself $15 million had resulted in the destruction of a $2.5 billion building.
Again, would love to see actual legitimate evidence of specific cases where unnecessary 10CFR50 codes have hampered or delayed production. You know, analysis by actual experts in nuclear engineering.
You could try reading some of them. They're written by professionals talking about their experiences. Those professionals also talk about hostile regulators.
It's the same with law in general since the word of law is not absolute. Hostile lawyers and judges can make a far worse experience than lenient lawyers and judges; all using the same laws.
There was the story about a hostile inspector holding up work for several weeks because nuclear grade desiccant wasn't used to keep nuclear grade pipes dry. The problem was that nuclear grade desiccant doesn't exist. You will probably claim that the story is invalid because it doesn't include several hundred pages of documentation.
Why do you think that plans to build so many nuclear power plants were abandoned in the 80s and there have been so few built since then?
As for the concrete I don't know what went wrong. I have never been involved in something like de tensioning pre stressed or post tensioned concrete. I also doubt that there were any attempts to bypass regulations. Doing something like that just carries a very high risk of things going wrong.
Look at that. I didn't just automatically claim that your story was invalid like you would do just because you didn't include hundreds of pages of sources. You didn't even include a link to it.
First, I really want to apologize for being an asshole to you. You don't deserve that and I absolutely took my frustrations out on your good intentions.
Anyway, I did read the thread when it was originally posted. The comments all anecdotes, and most mentions of 10CFR50 are extremely general and don't specifically nail down why a particular regulation cost X amount of time and Y amount of money. Those are interesting anecdotes, but nothing concrete (sadly, pun intended).
Anecdotes not super valid until someone actually verifies and collates these into a comprehensive study. Personal biases and exaggerations are very common, and we really have to tease those out to get a clear picture of what's happening.
HOWEVER: does adherence to antiquated regulations gum stuff up? I think we can gesture at humanity as a whole and acknowledge that as a pretty sound observation. The problem isn't specific to nuclear: it's just that when nuclear goes wrong, it can go very wrong and/or the PR damage is catastrophic.
Why have so few nuclear power plants been built? Nuclear has a PR problem. A lot of intentionally and unintentionally misunderstood science and technology, an unwillingness to engage with the public because of both backlash and hubris, the fossil fuel lobby, NIMBY contrarians, politician machinations, etc. It's a volatile discussion that is often super emotional and not exactly rational.
Should nuclear have a PR problem, especially compared to fossil fuels? Absolutely not. It's beyond frustrating, but the fossil fuel companies had the big bucks before nuclear did, so they were able to get ahead of the PR game.
I appreciate your feedback on the concrete. I don't know anything about concrete beyond shielding calculations, other than it's more complicated than most of us idiots think, especially on large scale. I'll defer to your expertise. The article (again, Daily Kos is a really left-wing site) indicates this happened to get around regs. Regardless, stuff went sideways, intentionally or unintentionally, and it really hosed the plant.
Possibly useless anecdote, and reminder this was 20 years ago. We had a seminar course where the head of NEI came one week. I asked them which interest group, organization, or demographic was the biggest roadblock to the advancement of nuclear power. The answer was firm: K through 12 educators, because they commonly inserted their personal biases instead of factual answers when nuclear power was brought up. They're mini community leaders and influence both parents and kids directly and indirectly. I asked what NEI was doing to alleviate that pain point, and the answer was "We leave that up to ANS." The very next week, the outgoing head of ANS spoke. Same questions: "We leave that up to NEI." I let them know that's what NEI said and asked why nobody was tackling the issue. The answer was,"Well, maybe that's a good project for student groups." Fewer than 5 students in our entire department were willing to work on that voluntarily. Lack of time wasn't even the biggest concern: the vast majority of folks just didn't want to spend their time trying to teach folks about nuclear energy. I suppose that's a valid point, but if our job literally depends on us engaging with the public so they support the building of the things we work on, maybe we should do something about it.
I think you want to help fix that: if you haven't already joined NA-YGN, I highly suggest doing so. It's not just for nuclear engineers, and I think you'd really love them and vice versa. It's a super-organized, highly motivated national group that is attempting to tackle nuclear engagement with communities. If you are interested in moving into nuclear professionally (either as a CivE or going back for a NE masters), they are an amazing networking group.
Your asking a dodgy question. Renewables don’t work that way which is why battery or storage tech tech is going to be the next big thing.
If your looking for nuclear as an answer then just remember that it’s monumentally expensive.
Yep and the build out time kills it in the short term. You're talking a decade or more.
A combination of all sources does it. A well built grid is also an important component so you can ship energy east-west together with houry rates so that people can help balance the grid with their demand. You don't have to run everything at the most expensive hour of the day.
And Hydro to balance demands.
You want a very diverse portfolio of renewables based on the peculiarities of your geography. Japan is rather mountainous which can make solar trickier but has some of the highest potential for wind power on Earth https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/archives/energy/offshore-wind-in-japan-the-untapped-potential
Whereas China has the Gobi desert to turn into one massive wind and solar farm https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-aims-build-450-gw-solar-wind-power-gobi-desert-2022-03-05/
You then have geothermal, biofuel, nuclear and hydro. You have a nice mix of all that and a tonne of ever increasingly cheap grid scale batteries and you’ll have a clean grid. The cheaper the batteries get and the better the technology gets the less you’ll need biofuel and nuclear because you can just spam wind and solar (which is what I believe will happen)
Nuclear, compressed air in salt caverns, EV fleet, there’s also some fun ideas with literally giant blocks of concrete being stacked by a crane. A solid equivalent to pumped hydro.
There's massive potential to change our consumption patterns to fit intermittent generation better and to average out wind and solar across larger geographical areas with grid upgrades
Exactly. You could even get a good start down this path without grid upgrades.
Nuclear all the way.
Tens of thousands of people biking stationary bikes masked as gyms. Might not be entirely carbon free though cause they're all breathing out carbon.
Cold fusion.
Tidal + batteries.
100% always / year round / forever / absolutely / no questions.
End of answer.
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25d
Luckily Vancouver and Seattle have their own ocean access : )
Many of the coastal communities between you and Seattle will grow exponentially due to habitat change for humans - all of them will need tidal energy.
Cheering you on!
Nuclear is always the cleanest option.
Renewables and non chemical batteries like water batteries, spin batteries or gravity batteries
Solar salt reactors are great for warmer climates too
Why non-chemical batteries? Because of rare metals or? We're not running out of any metals for the amount of batteries we'll need, and even if we were, we could just use something like sodium-ion batteries, which don't use any rare metals at all.
Because they are very cheap and don't need to be replaced like chemical batteries, just replace a few moving parts every few years and they are good to go
Chemical batteries are way more energy dense though
But I'd argue they are much harder to scale up, for a non chemical battery you can make it larger like the basin of water can just be a few hundred meters larger to last longer vs a chemical battery. in my opinion a bit shorter term and more expensive needing to be replaced every so many years besides a large non chemical.
Either is fine but for like a city wide scale I don't have much faith in chemical batteries
The way nature works is that living beings have to go where the resource they seek can be found. Countries are artificial.
There is none, only the illusion of reduction is the only thing that can work under a certain structure, most of what is going in is counterproductive because most of it is deceptions and propaganda to begin with.
N. S
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If batteries are cheap enough, solar + batteries.