| > CSP exists and is going down in price rapidly. Quite the contrary, CSP fell out of favor because PVs outcompeted it. What is making CSP better? Did mirrors suddenly improve? > 1kg of Uranium from inkai or husab uses 50-100kg of sulfuric acid. And this is high grade compared to the 600,000 tonnes per year you are proposing using. Doubling world sulfuric acid production is about the right magnitude. Did you just pick these figures out of thin air? Reduction of uranium in sulfuric acid is nowhere near 100 : 1 ratio. Unless you're talking about 600,000 tons after enrichment, in which case your figure for uranium consumption is off by an order of magnitude. A 1 GW reactor requires 27 tons of uranium per year [1]. The world uses an average of 2,500 GW of electricity meaning we'd need 68,000 tons of uranium fuel per year. The world produces 231 million tons of sulfuric acid annually [2], so even if we run with your un-sourced numbers this only requires an increase of 2-3%. > At ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few). Except unlike solar power, the nuclear fleet doesn't require vast amounts of energy storage. It produces the amount amount of electricity regardless of sunlight or wind speed. Here's the future of renewables: We keep building it opportunistically to displace natural gas. But once they saturate markets during peak production, they become far less effective at displacing carbon emissions because most of their energy is wasted.. After some time scratching our heads struggling to build energy storage at anywhere near relevant scales, we realize that dispatchable energy is necessary and we build it the only ways we know how: hydroelectricity where geography permits, and nuclear power. Or we can jump straight to the the last part and skip building a bunch of intermittent generation that will be made redundant in the end anyway. 1. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/how-is-uranium-... 2. https://www.essentialchemicalindustry.org/chemicals/sulfuric... |
Yes. Thanks for noticing: https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/csp-today/self-alig... I think the first projects using them are just about done. Heliostats now require much less foundation and are much cheaper to install. The remaining portion is almost identical to the cheap part of many of the SMR concepts, but on a stick instead of in a gigantic steel and concrete room.
But the main driver is actually that it is dispatchable. If you make the hot bit bigger and combine it 5:1 with PV with a little battery on the side you get a millisecond response, grid forming, 24/7 dispatchable power station that is presently about the same price as a NPP but is actually going down rather than up. They're only good in low clous regions, but there is enough good resource for it to make a contribution on the same order as nuclear.
> Did you just pick these figures out of thin air? Reduction of uranium in sulfuric acid is nowhere near 100 : 1 ratio. Unless you're talking about 600,000 tons after enrichment, in which case your figure for uranium consumption is off by an order of magnitude. A 1 GW reactor requires 27 tons of uranium per year [1]. The world uses an average of 2,500 GW of electricity meaning we'd need 68,000 tons of uranium fuel per year. The world produces 231 million tons of sulfuric acid annually [2], so even if we run with your un-sourced numbers this only requires an increase of 2-3%.
It's for getting it out of the ore at 1-3ppt. Do you not even understand that not all uranium resource is like cigar lake where you just find some yellow and green rocks, pour a bit of heavy water on them and call it good? Go look at the sulfuric acid consumption of rossing or inkai, realise those are high concentration compared to the other 7 million tonnes and lower concentration needs more, then come back and apologise.
Most of the ore you are proposing mining is no more energy dense than oil.
> Except unlike solar power, the nuclear fleet doesn't require vast amounts of energy storage.
One kg of natural uranium cannot produce enough energy to wear out an LFP battery made with 1kg of lithium -- and the lithium can be recycled. I think we're good.