[ncmncm]

A molten salt reactor is, first and foremost, a distraction.

By the time any production molten-salt reactor design could get proved out and the first commercial one built, renewables + storage will be providing all our power for much less money than it ever could.

But we can waste a lot of $billions on it that could instead go to build out a hell of a lot of panels and wind turbines.

[inglor_cz]

I am personally not willing to put all the eggs into one basket, because I don't share your certainty about future course of things.

We have some lessons from the Energiewende in Germany, which turned out much more expensive than promised. German Green minister Jürgen Trittin assured the German public in 2004 that support for renewable energies is going to cost them "one ice cream scoop per month" [0]. Which was so wildly off-mark that you can only laugh about it bitterly in 2022.

Now it is possible that molten salt reactors are a waste of money, but I would still prefer having more options open for the future. Especially your idea that storage will be cheap needs to be tested in reality first. Currently, storing of electric energy is darn expensive.

[0] https://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Trittin

Edit: instant downvote instead of counterarguments. Energy storage is still pretty expensive regardless of the # of votes (positive or negative) that this comment attracts.

[diffeomorphism]

That is so wildly misleading that I am counting your post as a blatant lie.

The actual statement was that the "EEG Umlage" (=surcharge on the electricity bill) would cost about that much in 2004. And that was perfectly true.

[ncmncm]

Storage cost is falling even faster than wind or solar did.

[alvah]

What kind of storage? I wouldn’t bank on chemical storage technologies, at least if we want the type of reliable electrical grid that’s allowed us to develop as advanced industrial nations. Generally, reducing storage cost runs into the type of physical limits that software and silicon haven’t really encountered (yet). I wouldn’t bet against human ingenuity in the long term, but it’s not clear how the storage problem can be solved in the short-to-medium term.

[ncmncm]

In other words, you have chosen to assume. Storage cost is plummeting for the same reasons wind and solar costs did and still are: manufacturing scale.

[Manuel_D]

Some energy markets are already hitting saturation periods for renewables. This creates diminishing returns, where more and more of the energy generated from an intermittent source isn't actually used. We were promised that storage would be made cheap enough to capture this excess energy and release it during hours of under-production. But so far nothing has delivered storage at competitive costs.

Furthermore, renewable generation varies a lot by region. Solar's cost per watt is way different in California or Hawaii than it is in Massachusetts. This is both in terms of less sunlight (inclination of the Earth, plus weather) but also land costs. This could be ameliorated by long-distance transmission, but that has its own problems even within small states [1]. And we'd have to increase the net-cost of deployments to match.

There's none of these asterisks and hand-waving with nuclear. Heat water, spin a turbine. Energy where you want it, when you want it.

1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

[ncmncm]

Not true. Storage is not built out because you need a lot more top-line renewable generating capacity, to charge it from, to make it worth building. So, the money is overwhelmingly-better spent on generating capacity, meantime. Thus, it is being spent there.

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did. Some storage pilot projects have been abandoned as alternatives undercut them, as happened to concentrated-solar when fixed-PV cost fell below the cost of tracking mirrors.

But you have already had this explained to you, several times over. Pretending not to know about it is not a good look.

[Manuel_D]

The goal of the Paris accords is to have zero emissions by 2050. Not just zero emissions from electricity, but all emissions eliminated: transportation, industry, and heating too. Just the electricity usages amounts to 500 GWh per hour for the US and 2.5 TW globally. Storing even just 4 hours of storage (a modest goal, many renewable plans call for days of storage) is outside the scope of anything we could deliver through existing options.

The plan for renewables is to build until saturation is reached, then burn gas while we cross our fingers and hope that an invention makes storage effectively free.

[ncmncm]

You can repeat this until you are blue, and it will still not be true.

Also: the Paris accords are for net-zero. That means no more carbon emissions than carbon reclaimed and sequestered. (Carbon reclaimed and then burnt again does not count.)

[Manuel_D]

Sequestration is an even bigger moonshot than storage. Most of the "carbon offsets" are in the form of payment in exchange for other countries to agree not to cut down forests. It isn't actually removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Actually removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is the stuff of scientists and PR moves. Nobody has a serious plan to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at relevant scales. The only example I can find would capture only 900 tons of CO2 per year.

We'd need to build 4 nuclear plants for each one that exists in the US to have a 100% nuclear electrical grid. It's something that we've done before, we would reach this goal early if we built plants at the same place we did in the 1960s and 1970s. This doesn't rely on a moonshot succeeding.

Renewables rely on a storage breakthrough or a sequestration breakthrough (but if we have the latter we could just keep using fossil fuels anyway). Relying on any kind of breakthrough yielding a 1,000x improvement is very reckless. You can insist until your lips turn blue that we just need to some type of electrolysis invention of another breakthrough of thermal storage and it's surely right around the corner. But until storage or sequestration is on the market, there's no real plan just hope that some breakthrough will happen.

1. https://www.climatecentral.org/news/first-commercial-co2-cap...

[ncmncm]

It would take until well after 2050 to build those, and they would cost many, many times as much as renewables + storage, and produce zero kWh in the meantime. Just the money spent on coal, in the meantime, not counting nuke construction, would be more than the cost of building out enough renewables.

No "breakthroughs" are needed for storage. Everything works already. All that is unknown is which will end up cheapest.

But you already knew all of this.

[socialdemocrat]

It is worth pursuing solutions like Moltex though because eventually we need to find a replacement for the gas power plants which will be backing up wind and solar.

Pumped hydro, cryogenic storage, thermal storage, batteries, green hydrogen etc may tackle a lot of that but we simply don’t know what solution will end of working best.

Wind and solar has to be primary focus for the next 10-15 years but once we reach 60-70% of the grid being renewable you cannot really go much further. Solutions which can deliver power on demand will be crucial. If MSR guys can get stuff going within 10 years then they may be part of the solution.

[ncmncm]

Existing peaker plants will burn synthetic ammonia or hydrogen, once there is enough spare renewable generating capacity to synthesize that. In the meantime, we build out the renewable generating capacity. Then we build out hydrogen and ammonia synthesis.

There is no place for nukes in the inner solar system. Out Jupiter and beyond, ok.

[mlyle]

> In the meantime, we build out the renewable generating capacity.

We're already dipping into times of negative electric power cost in places with high renewable penetration... and a whole lot of the rest of the day where storage is needed, and a whole lot of usages that are not electric yet which will increase demand.

Yes, more renewable build out is necessary and helpful. But it won't get us low enough in carbon intensity soon enough alone.

[ncmncm]

Diverting money from renewable build-out for contraptions that will not deliver any energy at all year after year would, then, be strictly worse.

[mlyle]

I'm not proposing diverting money from renewable build-out. But surely we can also build a few conventional plants for nuclear base load for all the additional heating, industrial, etc, demand we'll have as things electrify... and try a prototype design or two to gain information.

It's not like there's one purely fungible pool of resources to build all things and solve all human problems.

Diversity in approaches is way better than your all-eggs-in-one-basket strategy.

[ncmncm]

But money really is fungible. Each dollar tied up in building nukes is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out renewables. Furthermore, during each year waiting for the nuke to come online (if indeed it ever does, and is not cancelled after years of delays and cost overruns) all the dollars spent on coal are also unavailable to build out renewables.

Since each dollar spent on renewables produces several times the watt-hours produced by a dollar's worth of the nuke, diverting that dollar to the nuke has brought climate catastrophe that much nearer.

[credit_guy]

History does not end in 20 years though. Humanity will continue to exist for hundreds, thousands of years, probably more.

I agree with you that we don't need nuclear power to solve the climate change problem. But once we are done with that, we will continue to live. Research in new types of nuclear power will yield benefits, even if on a timeline that is beyond the target date for net zero emissions (2050 or so).

[ncmncm]

There is long-term value in nukes for operations in the outer solar system, but design criteria for operation there are very different. No need for containment; minimal, directional shielding if any; 100% automated operation.

pB11 fusion, ultimately.

[matt_the_bass]

I came across this topic when I read about a proposed MSR powered ship. I’ve yet to see a solution for powering ships via renewables. Ships also require a relatively small reactor (since they are only powering the ship) compared to a land based reactor which will power a region. So this could be the use case needed to bring such tech to fruition.

[socialdemocrat]

Ships are not that complex to solve. You could use a combination of batteries, green hydrogen and/or synthetic fuels.

Ships with reactors will not work. That will turn into a paperwork nightmare in every harbor it enters.

[jabl]

While I'm slightly bullish on MSR's in general, I think a MSR on a ship is not a good idea. A thin-skinned reactor vessel (one of the big advantages of MSR's as they operate at atmospheric pressure) with a fuel salt that is(?) water-soluble sounds like a disaster in case of a ship sinking.

At least with a traditional water-cooled reactor there's very thick walls for the seawater to corrode through, and then the fuel itself is in a relatively inert oxide form. Similarly for a lead-cooled reactor, when the ship sinks the lead would solidify creating a big radiation protection armor around the fuel elements.

[ncmncm]

Ships will be retrofitted to tank and burn ammonia in existing engines. Ammonia liquifies at room temperature under low pressure.

The conversion will be accelerated by restrictions on docking bunker-oil burners.

[omega3]

There are countries where neither solar nor wind are a viable options.

[ZeroGravitas]

Not many people live in such regions. And building enough solar and wind for the billions of people who do live in the good locations for it will drastically reduce the price of energy due to scale.

This will effectively render the issue moot, the few people in those regions could burn fossils and it wouldn't really matter. But it would be cheaper for them to import green energy.

[omega3]

Millions of people live in such regions and importing energy also creates issues that are visible in the events today.

[ncmncm]

There are not enough of them to be a big problem. Numbers matter.

They are importing fuel now, and may continue. In the future the fuel they import will be cheaper if synthetic. Or they may rely more on transmission lines, and stockpile synthetic fuel for backup in case of outages.

People everywhere will do what works best for them where they are. As synthetic fuel cost drops below extracted and refined hydrocarbons, people will simply stop buying the latter. Forward-looking sunny tropical countries will do well exporting synthetic fuel to places where the wind or sun flags.

[cmurf]

What's an example of a synthetic fuel suitable for this purpose? I wouldn't call methane synthetic, for example.

[ncmncm]

Anhydrous ammonia stores liquid at room temperature under light pressure, stores energy per unit volume close to hydrocarbons, and can be burned where they can.

But in the near future, synthetic methane will be cheaper than mined natural gas. More expensive than ammonia, necessarily, because it needs carbon.

[ncmncm]

They can ship in synthetic ammonia from the tropics to burn, as they do oil and gas now, or get power via transmission lines and synthesize and bank it locally; or some of both.

[pydry]

Where?

[ncmncm]

Usually Finland is mentioned. Norway has hydro, anyway. Archangelsk, Kamchatka, Siberia, Fairbanks. McMurdo Station. There are places.

They seem to do OK importing liquid fuel. Dunno why they would have to stop.

[a9h74j]

This just released: How Finland can plan to phase out fossil fuels

https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/18_2022.pdf

[ncmncm]

Shame they waste attention on biomass.

[acidburnNSA]

Or water cooled reactors!

[ncmncm]

One or two, anyway. Eventually, if not cancelled.