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Nuclear technology (or at least the physics is behind it) is fascinating.
But to implement it fully in a place like Australia raises for me the following questions:- is it just a sop to avoid cutting emissions now?
- does it need to be near large populations (and bodies of water) and if so will locals know and accept it (before it is built)
- can we trust it to be developed on time and on price?
- can we trust whoever to build it and run it cleanly, efficiently, economically, and safely? (Australia even has trouble building subs).
- if nuclear waste is safe why is its current disposal issues so under the radar? (Terrorism might be the main answer but so could transport issues.. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-12/nuclear-waste-from-australias-only-reactor-needs-to-be-removed/9643428)
- will it, when built, be as or more efficient than rivals?
- for NZ more than for Australia: how can we guarantee it against natural disasters given the Japanese could not and their engineering, planning, and technical know-how is arguably superior...
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@nostrildamus said in Climate Change:
Nuclear technology (or at least the physics is behind it) is fascinating.
But to implement it fully in a place like Australia raises for me the following questions:- is it just a sop to avoid cutting emissions now?
Hopefully not. Nowhere has dependable low emissions electricity outside of geothermal, hydro and nuclear. Australia doesn't have much in the way of development opportunities for the first two.
- does it need to be near large populations (and bodies of water) and if so will locals know and accept it (before it is built)
Generally speaking yes to water sources, although developments like molten salt reactors make that unnecessary. I'd expect a big dose of NIMBYism, but jobs are jobs...
- can we trust it to be developed on time and on price?
No. But then nothing ever is here.
- can we trust whoever to build it and run it cleanly, efficiently, economically, and safely? (Australia even has trouble building subs).
Yes. We've had ANSTO and Lucas Heights running for decades.
- if nuclear waste is safe why is its current disposal issues so under the radar? (Terrorism might be the main answer but so could transport issues.. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-12/nuclear-waste-from-australias-only-reactor-needs-to-be-removed/9643428)
Because we currently don't have reprocessing ability here. That could change and disposal in Australia is generally the easiest solution.
- will it, when built, be as or more efficient than rivals?
More efficient than what?
- for NZ more than for Australia: how can we guarantee it against natural disasters given the Japanese could not and their engineering, planning, and technical know-how is arguably superior...
It took a magnitude 9 earthquake and a 15m tsunami. Everything at Fukushima Daiichi that could go wrong did and yet not a single life was lost in the meltdown. Just down the road Fukushima Daini achieved cold shutdown. Australia is the most unlikely place to have to deal with that type of issue and modern designs make them safe regardless.
Ultimately we can either trust science and become a 21st century civilisation or we can slowly go back to banging rocks together.
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@antipodean thanks for the detailed answers.
More efficient than...renewables...for example in India renewables have proven so far much cheaper than expected compared to nuclear but I don't know the context.
Here is an interesting article:
https://www.cnet.com/features/nuclear-power-is-clean-and-safe-why-arent-we-using-å-of-it/ -
@nostrildamus "efficient" is a piece of string in this discussion. There are a few things to consider.
The first thing is capacity factor (cf) - the ratio of how much output you get for how much capacity you install. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
Nuclear sits around the 80-90% if well managed - it can always operate except for downtime required for maintenance and refuelling.
Wind varies a bit depending on site. A good site you can get around 45% (offshore) but generally you're in the 20-40% bracket because wind starts and stops.
Solar at the commercial scale is highly variable because the site can have various factors - are your mounts static, 1-axis tracking, or 2-axis tracking? What's your cleaning routine? Was it a good season for clear skies? There are some that report as high as ~30%, but then you have others as low as 12%. Sun doesn't shine at night.
Hydro is a bit different than the above because in most systems it is used as a battery, so you're not trying to squeze it for everything you can all the time. Again anywhere between 20-50% depending on how it is used.
Gas is used as a peaker so cf isn't really relevant, while coal has varied a lot in the last few years in Australia, due to growing renewables and changing demand patterns from consumers. And the fact the plants are getting old and break down a lot.
Cost - construction, maintenance, generation, decommissioning - is then overlaid on that figure to see what your bang-for-buck is.
Nuclear = high capital cost but operating cost is usually OK. With a High cf and therefore very efficient generation, it beats pretty much everything once it is built because it has a long life (in theory 80-100 years if you want to add the cost of refit). However the strike price of each MWh takes all costs into account so you get high numbers on the first cut which is usually 40-50 years depending on the design.
Wind and solar = low capital cost and very low operating cost. There is still maintenance to perform and so it isn't free, but the cost of generation is so low as to be zero. This is why wind and solar always bid in very low to the market process - enough to cover their contracts + small profit, and use it while you got it.
Hydro = also big capital cost but low operating cost. There are growing environmental concerns over the effect of hydro as well https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/nov/14/hydroelectric-dams-emit-billion-tonnes-greenhouse-gas-methane-study-climate-change
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Capacity factor is going to be interesting to look at as market demand changes.
In theory, coal stations have a cf north of 70% but they've been operating at around 50% in the Australian market due to the growing share of renewables. Gas only chimes in when absolutely required, and at ridiculous prices (which ironically sets the price for the whole market and therefore raises the cost of renewables).
The issue for different technologies is how they're going to be profitable (or at least maintainable) in a user market with rapidly changing parameters.
User demand used to be a fairly steady requirement around the clock a few decades ago. It would go up during the day when big industry came online, and go a bit sleepy after dinner was finished. Coal stations could plan for these ups and downs and stay in a fairly good band for their operating equipment, without the need to ramp up or down quickly. Gas plants could come online if something broke or it was a particularly difficult day. Hydro would fill the gaps on demand.
Things have changed, of course. We've now got shitloads of air conditioners and other appliances. More solar and a bit of wind has changed the demand curve that big generators have to meet. Big industry is still there, but with variable generation in the market and solar eroding a chunk of the day's demand when the conditions are right. And this means in part that aging coal and gas infrastructure is under more pressure.
I saw a lecture from an engineer, and she was talking about the issues faced by gas peaker plants in the current market - they're actually designed to run all the time, not in short bursts. When you start making a Big Spinning Thing start and stop infrequently you get problems the design engineering didn't take into account.
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@nta interesting, and yes efficient is a difficult term, but I meant total energy and emissions over life of the plant, decommissioning, removing waste, the concrete to shield it, all have an environmental cost.
I think 15 years is an optimistic starting date for nuclear and in that time I think the alternatives will have advanced in leaps and bounds. Whether a country like Australia will have access to and good will for this technology is another question...
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@antipodean said in Climate Change:
Yes. We've had ANSTO and Lucas Heights running for decades.
Aren't they significantly smaller and less developed than what is proposed or would they scale up easily?
Have they been safe? Don't know, just asking.
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Lucas Heights is 20MW and dedicated to research, medical isotopes, and other stuff like semiconductor materials. It cycles on and off so they can manage the fuel load - no hope of that ever producing commercial scale power in the NEM while those other needs exist.
@nostrildamus said in Climate Change:
@nta interesting, and yes efficient is a difficult term, but I meant total energy and emissions over life of the plant, decommissioning, removing waste, the concrete to shield it, all have an environmental cost.
There is potentially a lot of waste product for wind and solar after their expected lifetime of 25ish years but there are advancements in the recylcing practices already.
The thing about that expected lifespan: nobody really knows for sure. That includes nuclear. Supporters of nuclear say 80 years + but you have to do major maintenance and refit during that time, and no reactor has yet run 80 years - the industry only being ~70 years old.
Wind and solar at 25 years seems a bit short BUT there are examples of wind turbines going far longer. And if you installed a 1.6MW turbine 20 years ago, you can install one nearly 5MW today - like smartphones, the advancement means turnover is likely, and not always a bad thing. However, we still don't know if they're going to go that long, or how much past 25 years.
Of course, the offshore stuff is even bigger - the Dutch are doing 15MW while the Chinese are planning 16MW+.
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@nostrildamus said in Climate Change:
@antipodean said in Climate Change:
Yes. We've had ANSTO and Lucas Heights running for decades.
Aren't they significantly smaller and less developed than what is proposed or would they scale up easily?
Yes they are significantly smaller. Lucas Heights is mainly a medical isotope producer. My point was that we aren't complete novices to running nuclear reactors (however small).
Have they been safe? Don't know, just asking.
Safe enough. Although that article isn't the shining light I'd like them to be, it's difficult to gauge how bad those transgressions are, especially if as I suspect they're based on the linear no threshold theory. And of course there's no reason we can't import expertise either.
Ultimately dealing with climate change comes down to the public. We elect the politicians and as long as we have the errant belief that the Greens care about the environment we'll always be doomed. trust the science they say, right up until you point out that nuclear reactors are mankind's only salvation. All of a sudden science goes out the window and is replaced by wishful thinking.
Perhaps we should spend a little more time at school teaching "energy density".
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And I might add that the Australian government's desire to equip itself with nuclear submarines will perversely make it harder, not easier to develop a domestic nuclear capability. The state of our education industry means we'll be flat out trying to upskill the thousands required for these submarines. That will leave very few who can ordinarily distinguish a neutron from a potato.
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@TeWaio It is a massive task.
I guess my first response to that article is against the first line: "Eighty-five percent of human energy usage comes from burning things"
Cool. We're at 15% which is a good start. Long way to go but we can at least start arresting the worst of it.
At least the article is more realistic than the one I saw published on a conservative "think" tank site that used primary energy in fossil fuels to explain how Renewables are impossible.
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I've separated the climate change aspect of the political discussion to here.
@gibbon-rib said in Aussie Politics:
Coal exports are going to decline drastically whatever, so we around be planning for that. Yes there will always be a need for coal to make steel and busts of shitty PMs, but thermal coal for power will die.
According to the Global Energy Monitor: 'There are 432 new mine developments and expansion projects currently announced or under development worldwide, amounting to 2,277 mtpa of new capacity.' China has added an average of 34.0 GW of new coal power a year since 2016. To which you can add countries like India, Indonesia, Turkey, Philippines, Mongolia...
Coal is relatively cheap, abundant and energy dense. For poor countries it isn't going anywhere. Australia has a clear competitive advantage in its expertise mining coal and the quality of it.
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A good article from the Daily Telegraph. Interesting that the UK is going large scale on renewables and the technology is cool. Good to see private companies coming up with innovative tech-led solutions in the background while the narcissists are busy gluing their hands to paintings.
Today’s electricity price shock is the last crisis of the old order. Britain will soon have far more power at times of peak production than it can absorb. The logistical headache will be abundance.
Wind and solar provided almost 60pc of the UK’s power for substantial stretches last weekend, briefly peaking at 66pc. This is not to make a propaganda point about green energy, although this home-made power is self-evidently displacing liquefied natural gas (LNG) imported right now at nosebleed prices.
It is a point about the mathematical implications of the UK’s gargantuan push for renewables. Offshore wind capacity is going to increase from 11 to 50 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 under the Government’s latest fast-track plans.
RenewableUK says this country currently has a total of 86GW in the project pipeline. This the most ambitious rollout of offshore wind in the world, ahead of China at 78GW, and the US at 48GW.
The giant hi-tech turbines to be erected on the Dogger Bank, where wind conditions are superb, bear no resemblance to the low-tech, low-yield dwarves of yesteryear. The “capacity factor” is approaching 60pc, which entirely changes the energy equation.
There will be a further rise in onshore wind and solar as well, leaving aside nuclear expansion. The scale is breathtaking. So what will be done at night or at weekends when renewable power generation is 200pc or more of UK demand?
Much can be exported to the Continent through interconnectors for a fat revenue stream, helping to plug the UK’s trade deficit, and helping to rescue Germany from the double folly of nuclear closures and the Putin pact. But there are limits since weather patterns in Britain and Northwest Europe overlap – partially.
Some of the power can be turned into green hydrogen: either to replace fossil-based “grey” hydrogen in fertilisers, chemicals, and refineries, and to make steel. It can also be used to store in salt caverns as an alternative to natural gas or to turn into green ammonia for fuels, trains and shipping. But this will not be competitive at scale until the cost of electrolysis is slashed (circa 2030).
Much of the power will have to be stored for days or weeks at a time. Lithium batteries cannot do the job: their sweet spot is two hours, and they are expensive. You need “long duration” storage at a cost that must ultimately fall below $100 (£82) per megawatt hour (MWh), the global benchmark of commercial viability.
That is now in sight, and one of the world leaders is a British start-up. Highview Power has refined a beautifully simple technology using liquid air stored in insulated steel towers at low pressure.
This cryogenic process cools air to minus 196 degrees using the standard kit for LNG. It compresses the volume 700-fold. The liquid re-expands with a blast of force when heated and drives a turbine, providing dispatchable power with the help of a flywheel.
Fresh tanks can be added to cover several days or even weeks of energy storage. The efficiency loss or “boil off” rate from storage vats is 0.1pc each day, and much of this is recaptured by the closed system.
“Think of us as pumped-hydro in a box. We can store for very long periods, and discharge over long periods,” said Rupert Pearce, Highview’s chief executive and ex-head of the satellite company Inmarsat.
“We can take power when the grid can’t handle it, and fill our tanks with wasted wind (curtailment). At the moment the grid has to pay companies £1bn a year not to produce, which is grotesque.”
Highview is well beyond the pilot phase and is developing its first large UK plant in Humberside, today Britain’s top hub for North Sea wind. It will offer 2.5GW for over 12 hours, or 0.5GW for over 60 hours, and so forth, and should be up and running by late 2024.
Further projects will be built at a breakneck speed of two to three a year during the 2020s, with a target of 20 sites able to provide almost 6GW of back-up electricity for four days at a time, or whatever time/power mix is optimal.
Most North Sea wind lulls last less than 24 hours. Research by Delft University found that the longer Dunkelflaute events – caused by cold high-pressure weather systems – tend to range from 50-100 hours. They typically occur in November, December, and January.
Occasionally they can be longer. Every 20 years or so there is a giant Dunkelflaute. Obviously you need other forms of power for safety of supply, and that too is coming. The Xlinks wind and solar project from the Sahara should provide a tenth of the UK’s electricity demand with baseload consistency at a strike of £48 per MWh as soon as 2028, and that is just for starters.
Small modular reactors being developed by Rolls Royce promise further ballast. The Government has pencilled in 5GW of green hydrogen by 2030 in its Energy Security Strategy. Some of that can be burnt in peaker plants for back-up power, if need be - not a good way to use it.
Mr Pearce said Highview’s levelised cost of energy (LCOE) would start at $140-$150, below lithium, and then slide on a “glide path” to $100 with over time. The company has parallel projects in Spain and Australia but Britain is the showroom.
“The UK is a fantastic place to do this. It has one of the most innovative grids in the world and an open, fair, liquid, market mechanism with absolute visibility,” he said.
The latest wind auctions in the UK came in at a low of £37.35 MWh, and averaged £48. Carbon Brief calculates that this is a quarter of the cost of running a gas-powered plant at current prices in the gas spot market – admittedly an anomaly. New wind married with sub-$100 (£82) storage will win the horse race even when gas returns to normal.
Battery technology is in global ferment. The US Energy Department is all over it, working with the likes of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. It is the new darling of Big Money and the hedge funds, and they are pulling forward the process.
Form Energy in Boston – backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates – is working on an iron-air “rust” battery based on the reversible oxidation of iron pellets. It does not require rare and polluting minerals such as vanadium, and will have a 100-hour range.
“The modules will produce electricity for one-tenth the cost of any technology available today for grid storage,” the company told Recharge.
Form Energy has been working with National Grid to map out the economics of UK renewables with storage, and how to cope with future curtailment. And it too praises the UK as a global trailblazer, though its pilot project next year will be in Minnesota.
The company is making large claims, and there is many a slip twixt cup and lip. But what is clear is that some of the countless moonshot ventures under development – be they iron-air, zinc-air, molten salts, or organic flow-batteries (using rhubarb) – are going to cut storage costs low enough to shatter outdated Treasury models.
They will combine with solar and wind to produce quasi-baseload power locally for most of mankind at a cost that progressively renders the energy infrastructure of the 20th Century obsolete on pure economics.
It is irrelevant where you stand on the hypothesis of man-made global warming. It is free market capitalism that is solving the energy problem, though neither Extinction Rebels nor denialists seem to have noticed. In that respect they are twins.
It does require political support and the right signals from governments. The UK has managed this mix surprisingly well. It has done better than most in resisting capture by vested interests.
This country stands to enjoy the first rewards as the 2020s unfold, and probably a surplus in the energy balance of payments by the 2030s. It is the UK’s greatest economic and diplomatic success story this century. It would be nice if the Tory candidates celebrated the achievement rather than looking embarrassed.
The Telegraph’s latest poll found that 71pc of Tory members back the expansion of renewable power. They are not the stupid party that some seem to think. -
@JC Sounds remarkably like what I've been pushing Sunak to do ....
So where to store this abundance of power generated through the quiet parts of the night? I have literally no idea. It's not like half the population won't have a massive battery parked on their driveway soon or anything ....
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Funnily enough I was talking to guys in the UK yesterday doing battery storage with "2nd life" batteries
Ie ones coming out of E buses that have reached the end of their useful life there but still have way big enough charge capacity for other uses.
Really clever stuff. At this stage plug and play commercial solutions but the tech will only get better
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@MajorRage said in Climate Change:
So where to store this abundance of power generated through the quiet parts of the night? I have literally no idea. It's not like half the population won't have a massive battery parked on their driveway soon or anything ....
Solve that storage problem, and you solve so much of the energy intermittency issue and drive electrification.
Not sure if it was in the article above, but the UK are playing with insulated liquid gasses for storage - store them, then drive a turbine to generate power as needed. SOmeone will crack it, and when they do it's on like kong... reasons to feel optimistic.
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@nzzp I'm not sure exactly how it'll work out but I hope that in amongst the propriety stuff there is some generic or common interface standards. So it doesn't all become niche systems that can't easily connect with other systems. Like the EU's recent laws on phone chargers. It's kind of funny but I find it super interesting how different Sci-fi authors describe energy use and storage in their worlds - in lots of cases the tech level means infinite energy, but lots of authors still play with the energy scarcity trope.
@mariner4life do you recall some of those other uses for those bus batteries?
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@Paekakboyz I guess the drum I keep banging is we are one good battery away from cracking the energy crisis. Good means cheap, scalable and by inference not incredibly high tech.
Hell, if we had simple machines to convert air into hydrocarbons (suck out C from CO2 and H and O from water), we'd start incentivising solar/wind at any time. Not sure what the efficiency numbers are ( @NTA ) will have an opinion I'm sure, but shifts the problem from 'generating power when we need it' to 'just generate power'.
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That article led me to this one about organic flow batteries. Just think of the problems we could solve if some of the people studying generic soft arts and sciences would focus on stuff like this instead.
https://www.science.org/content/article/rhubarb-battery-could-store-energy-future
Flow batteries are another option. Unlike conventional batteries, which pack the chemical reactants and electrodes together, flow batteries keep their reactants in separate tanks. Energy can be extracted, or fed into the reactants, simply by flowing the materials past two electrodes separated by a membrane. A full-scale pilot project of the leading flow battery contender, based on vanadium ions dissolved in water, is due to be completed next year in Japan for grid storage. But vanadium is expensive. The vanadium alone in a flow battery with the storage capacity to provide a kilowatt-hour of electricity now costs $81. Adding the other components raises the price to between $350 and $700 per kilowatt-hour. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the cost target for a viable grid storage technology is about $100 per kilowatt-hour.
Hoping to get closer to that mark, a team led by Michael Aziz, a physicist at Harvard University, decided to explore organic molecules called quinones. The compounds have long been known for being adept at grabbing and releasing electrons, a key requirement for a battery material. And they are plentiful in plants and even crude oil, making them potentially cheap. So Aziz says he and his students started testing a few different types of quinones in a flow battery and got fair results. That prompted them to team up with theoretical chemists led by Alán Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules. That's where they hit upon the rhubarblike compound.
Aziz and his team incorporated it into their flow battery setup. In one tank they place the quinone, abbreviated AQDSH2, dissolved in water. In a separate tank they place Br2, or bromine liquid. To get electricity out, they pump the two liquids past adjoining electrodes separated by a thin proton-conducting membrane. At one electrode, each quinone molecule gives up two electrons and two protons. The electrons zip through an outside circuit to the opposite electrode, where they meet up with the protons that passed through the membrane. The partners then combine with a bromine atom to make molecules of HBr. To store energy, the researchers simply run the pumps in reverse and provide energetic electrons. That coaxes the hydrogens to break away from bromine atoms and reattach themselves to the quinone at the opposite electrode. In a paper published online today in Nature, Aziz and his colleagues show that the quinone flow battery not only works, but also appears stable in early testing and provides considerable power. And perhaps best of all, Aziz notes that the cost of the quinones and bromine is about one-third the cost of vanadium, making it potentially a far cheaper option.
Climate Change