[outworlder]

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology

It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we can ever make fusion work.

We should be deploying more reactors. There are small reactors (shipping container-sized) that could be used to power small towns and are pretty safe. Good luck getting one approved and installed in your neighborhood. It's not the tech that's being held back, it's people.

Look, I love batteries, I drive EVs since 2015. But if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to provide cheap and reliable baseline power 24/7. There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.

[derriz]

The electricity from small modular reactors is far more expensive than that from large reactors - about twice as expensive by some estimates[1]. They also produce more waste per MWh generated.

The industry has been pushing in the opposite direction with larger reactors like the EPR[2] to reduce costs.

When measured by LCOE, a MWh from a new conventionally sized nuclear plant is 4 to 7 times as expensive as a MWh from solar PV, then SMR are simply out of the question from a cost point of view.

[1] https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIcsi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

[trashtester]

Solar is great in deserts, where the sun always shines and were the main use of electricity is air conditioning during the hottest parts of the day.

Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

If you include the storage + grid expansion needed to compensate for the intermittent nature of most renewables (especially if you don't want to rely on fossil fuels when the wind is not blowing), the LCOE of many of them will be many times higher than just the production cost.

Meanwhile, Korea claims to be able to construct Nuclear capacity at prices down to $0.03/kwh with their APR1400 reactors:

https://www.kns.org/files/pre_paper/34/15A-435%EC%9D%B4%EA%B...

That's at least an order of magnitude lower than the cost of renewables when constant output is required.

[Gwypaas]

Awesome then that on-shore wind is even cheaper than solar, and exists at night. Then for some more, still less than 1/3 to 1/4 of nuclear you get off-shore wind with higher capacity factors.

[trashtester]

When the wind is not blowing, the cost of wind per kwh is infinite.

[freemint]

> Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home. Yes you need capacity for that but heat pumps well a lot with that.

[trashtester]

> Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home.

Sounds like you're not speaking from experience. Actually, houses are pretty lousy batteries. Most people have a range of only a few degrees that they find comfortable indoors. They will tend to set the thermostat to about the middle of that range. If they turn off the head, the temperature will go the lower end of that range after a few hours. Very few hours if it's really cold outside, and that's when it matters most.

Admittedly, my house is old and not super-well isolated, but during the coldest days of winter (around -20C), it can easily require 10kw, constantly, to keep it warm enough to prevent my wife from becoming agressive.

If we turn off the power for 2 hours, it's already pretty cold.

Heat pumps would reduce overall energy consumption, but not the need for constant use, and more isloation would reduce both, but it would still likely take several kw constantly on days like that.

[freemint]

If your house gets cold after 2 hours you do have a bad isolation.

[trashtester]

The house is 70 years old. 1 wall was renovated, and got modern insulation, but the other 3 have not received that treatment yet. If it's -20C outside, the temperature drops perhaps 2 degrees per hour, if all power is shut off. That means 20C goes to 16C in 2 hours.

[epistasis]

> There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.

I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you have them exactly reversed.

We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every five years. This could be accelerated if there was government investment as is done for every single nuclear reactor. At current rates we expect to produce 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other chemistries that could be used for stationary storage but not mobile applications.

Currently in the US we are only building 2GW of reactors, but we have ~100GW of reactors quickly reaching retirement age. Even if we scale our current nuclear construction capacity 10x every five years like we do for batteries, and add in the 10 year construction time, we are going to see a big decrease in nuclear before we see an increase.

[ncmncm]

Anyway only the tiniest fraction of utility storage will ever be batteries.

[epistasis]

Your comment conveys cynicism, but I'm not sure what you're saying.

So you're proposing 100s to 1000s of TWh of utility storage in what form, exactly?

Or are you saying that there will be almost not utility storage?

Are you counting EV batteries as part of utility storage? How about if the batteries take part in vehicle to grid transmission?

People have been skeptical of batteries for decades, claiming that they are never going to be ready for EVs. Then they were ready. You can still find absolutely ridiculous videos on YouTube only a few years old of people going through all sorts of numerical arguments about volume and size to say that EVs will never work on lithium ion batteries. Millions of Tesla owners are proving them wrong on their bad "physics" every single day.

I have a feeling that utility battery storage skepticism is even less rational. Batteries are being deployed extremely effective on the grid right now, disproving the faith.

[ncmncm]

Batteries just cost more than alternatives. They are excellent for load smoothing, because they can vary power intake and output very quickly, at any wattage out, but they are an expensive place to keep energy. For home use, batteries are the only practical storage we have, which is why off-grid power is much costlier than utility scale need be.

Battery cost is per Wh of total capacity, with typically a very high limit of W in or out. Alternatives mostly cost, instead, per W of power in or out, with an increase of total Wh stored costing relatively little, mainly limited by convenience.

For example, pumped hydro. The expensive part is the turbine. (You often don't even need a dam.) Want more watts, you need another turbine; but you can usually pump up way more water than you will need.

Likewise, synthetic ammonia or hydrogen, or liquified nitrogen or compressed air. Tankage is super-cheap, but electrolysers, cryo units, and compressors cost, as do turbines. More watts out means more turbines, again.

For buoyancy storage, the floats, sea-floor pulleys, cable reels, and clutches are cheap, the size or number of winch motor / generators determines how many watts you can put in or get out. Similarly for mineshaft gravity storage: The 10,000 ton weight is cheap, and the mineshaft has plenty of depth. Wattage is in the winch.

Producing enough lithium batteries for both cars and utilities would put a serious strain on world capacity to mine lithium. It is better reserved mainly for cars, where its light weight matters. Where you do want batteries, other chemistries are likely better for utilities than fought-over lithium. I expect molten metal batteries to be competitive soon.

It is strange that most people who talk about storage seem to have no conception of what makes a thing more, or even prohibitively, expensive. Thus, Energy Vault has a $2B market cap for a system that is very obviously totally useless. People propose putting expensive electromechanical equipment on the sea floor. The storage that will be used will be the storage that is cheap to buy and cheap to use.

[epistasis]

Batteries are getting cheaper all the time as we get better at manufacturing them, and we haven't hit the inflection point on cost decreases yet, and we haven't scaled lithium production yet. And we haven't fully developed other chemistries such as iron-air that promise to be even cheaper than lithium ion and have far higher capacity/power ratios.

Chemical storage of energy is highly inefficient, which is fine when we have super super cheap energy, but the capital costs of conversion and storage will probably require nearly continuous usage of the, say, electrolyzers in order to make the storage project feasible.

Perhaps you are right, and I really appreciate you laying out your reasoning, but I would bet otherwise about grid storage! None of the players for doing alternatives are anywhere near market ready, and batteries are being deployed today. As they get cheaper they will be deployed even more.

[ncmncm]

Batteries are also chemical storage, but I guess you mean synthetic fuels. Their cheap tankage, easy transportability, and ready sale value forgive a great deal of inefficiency. If not drawn down every night, efficiency hardly matters. Overnight storage wants efficiency and unlimited cycles. But transmission lines will probably end up preferred where available.

Buoyancy storage, where deep water is ready to hand, and mineshaft storage, where you have one, will be very, very cheap and efficient. Transmission lines mean such conveniences need not be especially nearby. But Europe is absolutely perforated with mineshafts.

Besides smoothing, there is very little use for storage yet, because we haven't got enough to charge it from. Charging storage from NG turbines would be worse than silly. So, we build out generating capacity first, then storage.

[epistasis]

Argh, there's a typo there, we expect 20-30TWh/year in 2031.

[samstave]

I have long thought there should be a global nuclear consortium and have that organization build and run and manage and secure all the nuclear power plants in the world.

Earth/Humanity needs electricity FOREVER. Its bizarre that we cant come together over this expressly universal need. This and water.

[ncmncm]

A global nuclear consortium would have as its first goal its own continuance and its continued hegemony over energy policy. It would be catastrophic. Fortunately there is no such possibility.

[freemint]

> But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things.

Patently false. The sun shines 24/7. This (besides power satellites) offers other possibilities like a world wide connected grid. Even if you are a proponent of nuclear you will also need that, as i assume you do not want to put reactors in every country.

[bozhark]

Had to delete my one line response because you embodied everything I meant. Cheers