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Something very important that anti-nuclear but otherwise environmental minded people should realize is this sentence: " There’s no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025." Also applies to grid storage. There does not exist a chemical energy storage solution that can substitute for “baseload” power. It’s purely theoretical much like fusion power. Sure maybe in 50 years, but right now IT DOESN’T EXIST. Economically, practically, or even theoretically.

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frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
That is completely wrong, and only shows you haven’t kept up with developments in storage.

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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s very infuriating talking to people about this because they never really accept that nuclear power is necessary. They spend all their time complaining about how it’s dangerous (it isn’t) and how it’s very expensive, and how you don’t have a lot of control over its output capacity. And yeah, all of those are true, but so what, the only other option is to burn some dead trees which obviously we don’t want to do.

Just because nuclear has downsides doesn’t mean you can ignore it, unless of course you want to invent fusion just to spite me, in which case I’ll be fine with that.

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- frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  This has been studied, and we don’t need nuclear. All the solutions are sitting right there.
  
  www.amazon.com/…/1009249541
  
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  - echodot@feddit.uk ⁨53⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Well I’m not going to buy the book to find out what they are so all I’m going to go ahead and say is this. Yes there are solutions such as battery storage (although they do tend to be extremely explodey) and using the power to pump water around, or using mirrors to heat up salt in insulated containers, but they are all very specific solutions that will only work in very particular situations, which we don’t always have.
    
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    frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨45⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Almost like we can have many solutions where one of them is workable in any given situation.
    
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- PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The new tack is to conflate nuclear energy with fossil fuels. As in assuming that nuclear energy is “legacy” power generation, and that obviously we need to use modern gernation like solar and wind, and magical grid-level storage technologies that don’t exist. Also ignore that baseload power is still required, and is currently fulfilled with Natural Gas and Coal.
  
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  - frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    There is absolutely nothing required about baseload power. It’s there because the economics of generating power favored it in the past. You could build a baseload plant that spits out a GW or so all day, everyday for relatively cheap.
    
    That economic advantage is no longer there, and no longer relevant.
    
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    echodot@feddit.uk ⁨40⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Well you still need baseload. You can’t forget about it just because it’s inconvenient.
    
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    BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨43⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    What makes power when the sun isn’t out and the wind isn’t blowing? Nuclear, gas, or coal.
    
    By being anti-nuclear, you force it to be gas or coal.
    
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Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Pumped hydro exists.

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- PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Do some quick math. How much pumped hydro in terms of acre-feet would be required to power a hypothetical city like Chicago at night? Where would this theoretical reservoir be built?
  
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  - frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    That’s a completely unnecessary way to do things. The mistake you’re making is that this specific way must provide all power.
    
    It doesn’t. You combine methods for a reason. The wind blows at times when the sun isn’t shining, and vice versa. We have weather data stretching back many decades to tell us how much a given region will give us of each. From there, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither is providing enough. Have enough storage to cover that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
    
    Getting to 95% water/wind/solar with this method is relatively easy and would be an extraordinary change. Getting all the way to 100% is possible, just more difficult.
    
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  - Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    acre-feet
    
    I can’t stop laughing at this as a unit of measurement
    
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    MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It’s easier to visualize than kilo-gallons.
    
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- snoons@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Bet is extremely limited to specific areas with the right geography that are also relatively close to a population centre.
  
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  - frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨23⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Not if you do HVDC lines. Which are a good idea, anyway.
    
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  - Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It isn’t so much limited by the geography but is made far more cost effective because of it. A long valley with a narrow exit means you don’t need to build much dam and store a vast amount of water.
    
    As far as distance from populated areas, I dunno, I live in the UK so its kinda close enough not to matter too much.
    
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Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I agree with this assessment of battery technology, I’m curious what your thoughts on storage through other means, such as dams, kinetic batteries, heat batteries, that style of thing? I understand that it’d be a massive undertaking, but if we really put our nose to the grindstone we might be able to pull off a good amount of power storage through methods that already exist.

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- echodot@feddit.uk ⁨33⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Building a dam causes massive amounts of ecological damage, plus unless you’re building it in the middle of nowhere you’re probably going to be turning people out of their homes, out of their entire towns. We could never build enough dams to be able to meet demand so even trying would be pointless. You would be destroying huge amounts of landscape for no reason.
  
  Kinetic batteries can only store power up to a point, the more power you want them to store the larger they need to be. Again to compensate for base load you would have to have a either a lot of kinetic batteries or a few enormous ones. Plus they are maintenance intensive since they are giant spinning things, or great big heavy falling things.
  
  Heat batteries are a good idea and have relatively little in the way of downsides, but they only work where it’s hot, not just sunny but hot. So the number of places you can build them is limited.
  
  If only we could get hold of some astrophage or something.
  
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- PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Another myth is that hydroelectric is “green.” It’s absolutely not. The huge amount of land required to build something like the hoover dam or the three-gorges dam is massively destructive to the existing ecology. It’s often overlooked, but land use has to be part of any environmentally sound analysis.
  
  I would say that while the Hoover Dam, or the Three-gorges dam by themselves are acceptable, they are wholly impossible solutions for grid level storage for the entire united states/China. How practical do you think it would be to build thousands of hoover dams?
  
  Other options like kinetic batteries etc, all come down to energy density. The highest energy density options that humans can harness are nuclear Isotopes like Uranium 238, or Plutonium 239 (what powers the voyager probes) After that is lithium batteries at ~<1% density of a nuclear battery. Everything else is fractions of a percent as efficient. Sure there are some specific use cases where a huge fly-wheel makes sense to build (data centers for example) but those cases are highly specific, and cannot be scaled out to “grid-level.” The amount of resources required per kilowatt is way too high, and you’d be better off just building some more power-plants.
  
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  - frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    This is why you have HVDC lines.
    
    The longest one is in Brazil, and is about 2400km long. With that kind of reach, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, wind in Nebraska can power New York, and every single existing hydro dam along the way can provide storage.
    
    These problems are solved. We do not need new nuclear.
    
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  - trailee@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Unclear if you’re misinformed or disingenuous.
    
    Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption. That’s known as pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and it requires having paired reservoirs in close geographic proximity with a substantial elevation difference. It’s not an ideal technology for several reasons, but it’s the largest type of grid-scale storage currently deployed. Fundamentally it’s gravitational potential energy storage using water as the transport medium.
    
    A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.
    
    Nuclear isn’t a good option to balance out the variability of wind and solar because it’s slow to ramp up and down. Nuclear is much better suited to baseline generation.
    
    There are plenty of other wacky energy suave ideas out there, such as pumping compressed air into depleted natural gas mines, and letting it drive turbines on its way back out. That might also be riddled with problems, but it’s disingenuous to claim that chemical energy storage is the only (non-) option and therefore increasing wind and solar necessarily also increase fossil fuel scaling.
    
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    PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Again, i’m talking energy density. All those other wacky ideas aren’t viable at all. Yes I know that the hoover dam is for generation, but the idea of pumped reserve power is literally identical to hydroelectric generation. The only difference is we would have a man-made solar/wind powered pump fill the resevoir, instead a natural source of solar power fill the resevoir. Either way, it’s a huge amount of land use for it to be considered “green.”
    
    Additionally I never claimed nuclear power should be used as a peak generation, it should 100% used for baseload replacing all of our fossil fuel reactors, with huge taxes being applied to carbon generators.
    
    As an aside:
    
    A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.
    
    This idea is trash and as far as I can tell the hypothetical existence of this is an oil industry fud campaign. The only viable version of this is pumped hydro, which has the land use problem I’ve already described.
    
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SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
First of all nuclear energy is a fossil fuel.

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- PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yikes. If words have no meaning, then sure. But there is no world where radioactive elements that come from stars have anything to do with fossil fuels that come from decayed biomass.
  
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