Bill Gates' Nuclear Venture Plans Reactor To Complement Solar, Wind Power Boom 124
A nuclear energy venture founded by Bill Gates said Thursday it hopes to build small advanced nuclear power stations that can store electricity to supplement grids increasingly supplied by intermittent sources like solar and wind power. Reuters reports: The effort is part of the billionaire philanthropist's push to help fight climate change, and is targeted at helping utilities slash their emissions of planet-warming gases without undermining grid reliability. TerraPower LLC, which Gates founded 14 years ago, and its partner GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, plan to commercialize stations called Natrium in the United States later this decade, TerraPower's President and Chief Executive Chris Levesque said.
Levesque said the companies are seeking additional funding from private partners and the U.S. Energy Department, and that the project has the support of PacifiCorp, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, along with Energy Northwest and Duke Energy. If successful, the plan is to build the plants in the United States and abroad, Levesque said. By 2050 "we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs," Levesque said. The 345-megawatt plants would be cooled by liquid sodium and cost about $1 billion each.
The new plants [...] are designed to complement a renewable power because they will store the reactor power in tanks of molten salt during days when the grid is well supplied. The nuclear power could be used later when solar and wind power are low due to weather conditions. Molten salt power storage has been used at thermal solar plants in the past, but leaks have plagued some of the projects. Levesque said the Natrium design would provide more consistent temperatures than a solar plant, resulting in less wear and tear.
Levesque said the companies are seeking additional funding from private partners and the U.S. Energy Department, and that the project has the support of PacifiCorp, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, along with Energy Northwest and Duke Energy. If successful, the plan is to build the plants in the United States and abroad, Levesque said. By 2050 "we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs," Levesque said. The 345-megawatt plants would be cooled by liquid sodium and cost about $1 billion each.
The new plants [...] are designed to complement a renewable power because they will store the reactor power in tanks of molten salt during days when the grid is well supplied. The nuclear power could be used later when solar and wind power are low due to weather conditions. Molten salt power storage has been used at thermal solar plants in the past, but leaks have plagued some of the projects. Levesque said the Natrium design would provide more consistent temperatures than a solar plant, resulting in less wear and tear.
Does it run windows? (Score:5, Funny)
We're all doomed!
Liquid sodium? (Score:2)
Re:Liquid sodium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well just because something failed before doesn't mean it can't ever work. You didn't see Sikorsky saying Leonardo Da Vinci couldn't build a helicopter so it'll never work.
Re:Liquid sodium? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well just because something failed before doesn't mean it can't ever work. You didn't see Sikorsky saying Leonardo Da Vinci couldn't build a helicopter so it'll never work.
Not saying it cannot work,just there are some technical issues with liquid sodium that make it challenging. The greater efficiencies are nice but do they make up for the problems, such as corrosion, reactivity with water and need to keep it liquid?
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That's why this is an R&D project.
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Well just because something failed before doesn't mean it can't ever work. You didn't see Sikorsky saying Leonardo Da Vinci couldn't build a helicopter so it'll never work.
And for every such success, you have a million persistent failures. Your argument has no merit.
Re:Liquid sodium? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can come up with a better design, more compact, more portable and turn it up, turn it down, switch in on and switch it off.
Go on then. The world awaits the reactor design of Internet commenter rtb61 to put the trillion dollar energy market back in its place.
Put up or shut up.
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1:1 more like
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The suppressed sexual tension in this post is incredible.
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and the Soviets tried and abandoned it as wel
Some Soviet (and Russian) submarines use lead-bismuth reactors. They work really well, and lead-bismuth eutectic alloy is a fairly well-behaved material. The main problem is that bismuth gets slowly activated into some nasty isotopes.
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and the Soviets tried and abandoned it as wel
Some Soviet (and Russian) submarines use lead-bismuth reactors. They work really well, and lead-bismuth eutectic alloy is a fairly well-behaved material. The main problem is that bismuth gets slowly activated into some nasty isotopes.
Yes, better heat transfer is a plus if you can avoid nasty side effects.
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So I take it that this reactor doesn't exist then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Those appear to be Pwr plants, not liquid sodium.
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Use metal Fluorine salts [wikipedia.org] instead,
binds with Uranium, Thorium and all the other fuels used in fission reactors. Is stable to ridiculously high temperatures. Does not dissolve in water and when they cool down they are effectively inert. They are a bit corrosive when in liquid form though.
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They are a bit corrosive when in liquid form though.
And that is why they are not used. This is an absolute killer in a large industrial installation that is supposed to have a high uptime.
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Salt is not explosive when mixed with water. You can test this yourself at home.
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Salt is not explosive when mixed with water. You can test this yourself at home.
No, but H2 is.
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I don't see any mention of elemental hydrogen in the article, did I miss it? Or do you have another source?
and
Are you saying hydrogen explodes when mixed with water? That would require a whole new explanation for how a Hoffman's apparatus doesn't explode...
Either way, we have good storage mechanisms for hydrogen, I have some in my classroom right now.
Sounds to me like you are looking for anything that might be hazardous and using it to claim the technology is not feasible. If we took that approach we would
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I don't see any mention of elemental hydrogen in the article, did I miss it? Or do you have another source? and Are you saying hydrogen explodes when mixed with water? That would require a whole new explanation for how a Hoffman's apparatus doesn't explode...
Either way, we have good storage mechanisms for hydrogen, I have some in my classroom right now. Sounds to me like you are looking for anything that might be hazardous and using it to claim the technology is not feasible. If we took that approach we would have no technology at all.
A liquid sodium tractor uses metallic sodium, which becomes hydrogen and sodium hydroxide upon contact with water. The H2 will undergo a rapid burn; so unless they are not using metallic sodium that is the issue. NaCl would likely result in chloride stress corrosion.
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They are not using liquid sodium. With a little reading I found they usually use nitrate salts for these purposes. Those are strong oxidizing agents, so one wouldn't want it to come into contact with a combustible fuel, but the technology is tried tested and true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://large.stanford.edu/cour... [stanford.edu]
https://www.solarthermalworld.... [solarthermalworld.org]
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They are not using liquid sodium. With a little reading I found they usually use nitrate salts for these purposes. Those are strong oxidizing agents, so one wouldn't want it to come into contact with a combustible fuel, but the technology is tried tested and true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] http://large.stanford.edu/cour... [stanford.edu] https://www.solarthermalworld.... [solarthermalworld.org]
That's a storage mechanism, not a coolant source. Reuters reported the 345 MW plants would be cooled by liquid sodium: https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
I get why you'd want to use sodium - it's much more efficient than water for heat transfer and thus you can make. a plant smaller for a given power output. The US Navy originally wanted to use liquid sodium as a submarine propulsion plant and put one into the Seawolf, only to find it had serious maintenance and operational issues. They ripped it out and r
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Re:Costs? Regulatory issues? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the economic problem with nuclear isn't the $/kwh but the time-to-return on the capital. By the time a nuclear station has paid off enough of its construction financing to make any dollars for the financiers a coal plant has been raking in a solid return for three to five years.
Reducing the capital outlay and construction time by 2/3 almost regardless of thermal efficiency makes an enormous dent in the economic viability of new-nuclear.
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On paper. In the real world, no nuclear gets built, while PV and wind turbines are marching on.
This is because the numbers for everything but nuclear is actually real-world numbers (although perhaps a couple of years old) while the ones for nuclear are shat out of the arse of some dude^W^W^W^W carefully estimated. There's lots of risk in nuclear, and investors want a higher compensation because of that.
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You aren't comparing like-for-like though because battery storage is generally for very short term stability and peaking use. It's not a whole-country UPS system and not supposed to make up for lack of installed generation.
Looking at the costs from your Lazard link you can see that wind is already much cheaper than anything else. Yeah you might be paying a lot for a few minutes a day of peaking but the rest of the time you get cheap energy. In fact sometimes it's so cheap it's free or people get paid to use
Re: Costs? Regulatory issues? (Score:2)
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I don't live in a state. Even in the US though the wind is always blowing somewhere. Can't you get together with other states and share it out? That's what we do.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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What if you factor in the costs of dealing with nuclear waste and the costs of climate change?
Re: Costs? Regulatory issues? (Score:2)
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I meant factor climate change into the costs for coal and gas that plague911 quoted.
Factor the costs of nuclear waste into nuclear.
Seems only fair if you want to factor the costs of storage into solar and wind.
Sorry, I should have been more clear.
Re: Costs? Regulatory issues? (Score:2)
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I am in favour of nuclear, I was just saying in a cost comparison we should consider long term handling of the waste.
We should also consider environmental costs of solar and wind, like the environmental costs of mining neodymium for all the wind turbines.
I do think we will have better technology options for dealing with the nuclear waste in the future, recycling the waste to run new small scale nuclear power plants, so the cost of dealing with the waste may eventually be negative.
But if we are basing a cost
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Nuclear is cost competitive with coal and gas (118-190 $/kwh vs 150-199 and 66-152 $/kwh). While the energy storage costs alone would be triple the cost of either of those three options for Utility scale solar or wind($380-$895/kwh).
You're mixing and misinterpreting units here.
Nuclear is $118 - $192 per megawatt hour not kilowatt hour. That's $11-$19/kwh.
$380 - $895/kwh for lithium ion battery storage isn't production costs it's cost per kwh that can be stored. But that kwh is available every day.
That would be like saying "Gasoline costs $0.11/mile but a battery costs $25/mile! It's wildly more expensive!" while ignoring the fact that you can recharge a battery a thousand times but you can't recharge a gallon of gasoline.
Wind plus st
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Oops then I went and did a math mistake as well: $118/mwh = $0.18/kwh not $18.
Wind is $0.02-$0.05 subsidized per kwh + let's say $600kwh in storage.
So assuming nuclear was $0.18kwh /$0.05 kwh = 3.6x more expensive. And assuming a wind turbine costs $2M / MW of production capability. That means we could spend $2M on a wind turbine to supply power. $2M on a second turbine to charge batteries and $2M on batteries and still be cheaper than Nuclear.
$2M in batteries would buy 3.3MWh of storage. So if the win
TerraPower has failed (Score:4, Informative)
It all looked cool on paper and in simulations, but unfortunately, they got hit by the real world. In the real world they couldn't find a material that can tolerate the fast neutron fields over the reactor's lifetime (not because of activation, but because neutrons cause displacements in the crystalline structure of metal).
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Two of the richest men in the world are seeking taxpayer funding for this lark. Costs? Bah, humbug!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Storing electricity is misleading (Score:2)
I probably have read the most about Gen IV nuclear power plants and gotten pointed to the best articles by user Trog at CommonDreams.org (example https://commons.commondreams.o... [commondreams.org]). I'm not really familiar with Bill Gates's effort, I have seen more on Moltex, Elysium, and ThorCon (which all fall under the MSR category at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]).
These plants don't store electricity because the storage is before the electricity is produced from heat - they store heat (clear in the linked article).
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None of this requires nuclear energy and nuclear power plants have never been profitable or of any value in the US. In
MSRs are A FUCKING MEME (Score:2)
What's even worse, they provide no advantages over current PWRs and next-gen breeder reactors, while requiring hundreds of billions of investment into researching a totally new fuel cycle.
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MSRs are A FUCKING MEME. They are stupid from many, MANY angles. That's why no real nuclear program wants to touch them.
What's even worse, they provide no advantages over current PWRs and next-gen breeder reactors, while requiring hundreds of billions of investment into researching a totally new fuel cycle.
Indeed. People being stupid because they cannot see their fantasy is not reality. These things are the flying cars of the nuclear fanatics. Always right around the corner, never to materialize. Given that conventional nuclear is not cost-effective at all and not really that useful (can only do base-load, lots of downtime, waste storage unsolved, hugely expensive to decommission), nuclear can at best be seen as a historic technology at this time. It is time to correct that very expensive mistake.
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Re: MSRs are A FUCKING MEME (Score:2)
They work really well right up until the point where they explode.
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Re: MSRs are A FUCKING MEME (Score:2)
âoePWRs don't explode.â
Chernobyl was a PWR. It exploded pretty good.
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Curious (Score:2)
Are there limitations to buidling reactors deep beneath the surface? I know they need lots of water. And i know they need to vent steam. Supposing those problems could be easily solved it seems like the the ultimate win-win. Get incredible "clean" power output, with little risk of the elements or irradiating millions of people.
Blindseer , can we use nuclear underground?
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can we use nuclear underground?
Yes. https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org] https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org] https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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This one shouldn't need lots of water. Liquid Sodium is a lot hotter than the coolants used in common reactor designs. That's probably a lot of the problems with getting it working.
I'm less attracted to this design than to the molten Thorium Salt reactor designs, though. Those have people promising that they can eat spent reactor fuel. My real problem with fission reactors has usually been "What do they do with the spent fuel?". The waste problem is the main thing wrong with reactors. The British deco
Re: Curious (Score:2)
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The limitation is the heat produced. A reactor heats up a working fluid, steam or even helium and a turbine generator extracts some of that heat to make electricity..
The rest of the heat, usually about two thirds of the total, has to go somewhere, either the ocean, a river or even the atmosphere. Deep underground, none of those are readily available.
Interestingly enough, outer space would be very good, energy can be radiated away in infinite quantity, but other than a NASA workshop in the late 1980s there has been little work done afaik on the idea of power stations in space transmitting energy back to earth.
Yeah most electricity is produced by boiling water. sounds absurdly archaic but it's true. What about deep below the surface of the ocean?
Natrium as coolant never worked well (Score:2)
The engineering challenges are just too big and basically still unsolved. Sure, it can be done, but it is hugely expensive, results in frequent down times and is also quite dangerous on the non-nuclear side.
Correlation != causation (Score:4, Interesting)
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I had the exact same reaction. (No pun intended)
Nuclear needs non-political government control (Score:2)
In America there are two forces which when combined creates a disaster.
The Right wants Private Nuclear Power with basically no regulation.
The Left wants to Get rid of all nuclear power, and regulate them to a point that cannot opperate.
To keep nuclear power safe, it is going to need a long term investment, much longer than most companies will be around, and even longer than any government in history. As we will need to manage nuclear waste for thousands of years.
Nuclear Energy is a rather clean, and safe p
Waste? (Score:2)
What do they plan on doing with the waste that we have no current safe way of disposing? The rest of the engineering community has come to grips with the fact that they have to plan for disposal. When will the nuclear power industry advance from the 1960's. Note that I can't just say '60's any more because it's been over half a century!
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Don't put it in an area with tsunamis?
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AmiMoJo here to tell us that they're running open rather than sealed tanks on their energy batteries, and that those tanks will somehow not be isolated from energy generation unit as nuclear always is because of radiation in the primary circuit. And hey, that advice also applies to lithium batteries, I guess they can't be used anywhere where there's rain too.
Healer, heal thyself. Throw away every lithium battery powered device that you have a chance to use outside. Prove that you actually believe in your ow
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You do know that one of the biggest issues they have had with this system is leaks, right? Sodium is not an easy material to handle in such a system, it tends to damage the pumbing.
And yes, lithium cells don't work great underwater. There are videos on YouTube of them exploding when dumped in water. Thing is though they don't require nuclear material to be on the same site. Oh of course it will be separated by some distance, but not too much because it ain't easy to transport hundreds of megawatts of heat a
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Considering that you knew nothing about sodium salt last time we had this discussion, through it was going in opposite direction, and I literally had to walk you through it, yes I would know. Congratulations on doing something I've never seen you do before. Actually reading the material cited to you. That's a genuine change for a fanatical religious zealot such as yourself. Keep it up.
As for the rest, if you treated them equally, you'd have all the same problems with lithium in mass deployments. As bad as m
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Blah blah blah you haven't addressed the main issue which is having a volatile mass of high temperature sodium on the same site as a nuclear reactor, complete with all the trappings that go with it like fuel/waste storage.
Worst of all you need water to cool the reactor so you can't even avoid building it never a river or the sea.
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>Blah blah blah you haven't addressed the main issue which is having a volatile mass of high temperature sodium on the same site as a nuclear reactor
You mean like we have had volatile mass of easily combustible, highly explosives chemicals in the same building for decades with zero problems? As opposed to not having them in the same building, which was the case for circuit separation for... I actually can't tell how long it has been a thing in nuclear power generation. Longer than I've been alive.
>Wor
Re:What will happen when one detonates? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sodium and water react violently, but sodium *salts* are far less likely to have a problem. Which is why you don't get a column of flames when adding table salt (sodium chloride) to your soup.
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Your soup is probably not 500C though. It's a lot more volatile when heated up. For energy storage they usually us 60% sodium nitrate 40% potassium nitrate which behaves very differently to table salt.
There are many ways it can go wrong. The plumbing can get corroded or damaged and start leaking 500C liquid salt, meaning everything near it needs to be able to withstand 500C+ without catching fire, and over-temperature events are possible too. Once it starts to boil you are in real trouble. Remember that pre
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There are indeed corrosion issues with many molten salts, but I think you're overstating the rest.
As far as reaction with water is concerned, In general it doesn't matter how volatile things get at high temperature - the salt is still the preferred low-energy state rather than an oxide/hydroxide that would result from reacting with water, so getting hotter just increases the rate at which any oxides become salts. (Couldn't swear to these specific salts)
>Remember that pressure increases with temperature.
O
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I got some water in my salt shaker, strangely there was no boom. They actually mixed really well.
I have also heard about this place called 'the ocean', where apparently there is a great deal of sodium salts mixed with water, but perhaps you want to stay clear of such places...
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https://youtu.be/B3422Zk5tj4?t... [youtu.be]
That was a classic experiment when I was at school, sodium and water.
Of course it's much worse when you have sodium at hundreds of degrees and a confined space that is now filling up with hydrogen.
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I do this demo for my students every year. It uses elemental sodium.
But, if you RTFA you will find this proposed plant is using sodium salts. Sodium salts are stable. Try it yourself with some table salt at home, just add water, or do some casual reading about the salt in the ocean, and you will find sodium salts and water mixing are not so scary.
Elemental sodium would indeed be a terrible idea, it has a relatively low heat capacity, low melting point and low enthalpy of solidification all of which mean it
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They are more delicious than without salt, thank you!
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Molten salt can operate at a much higher temperature than a water-cooled device, and does not require the high pressure it takes to raise water's boiling point to a usable value. This means that a reactor using molten salt as the internal coolant does not have to use a large body of water as the heat sink for its thermal output. You can put them in deserts and have the heat sink be plain air.
Re: What will happen when one detonates? (Score:2)
Fukukushima detonated because itâ(TM)s explosion-prevention systems required active power and management. Obviously unsafe in an emergency.
More modern designs have passive safety mechanisms that are completely automatic and require no power or management.
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By the time any new nuclear plants are built, solar, wind and battery technology will have put the final nail in the coffin of this shitty power-production method...
Solar and wind will never produce anywhere near the amount of electricity that we currently need, to say nothing of finding a way to power all the electric cars and even tractor trailers.
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I'm always amazed, and a bit amused, at people who believe we're always going to need more power, or at least as much, to get the same results.
So let's play a little game. You pull out your 30 year old Ray-O-Vac lantern, and I'll pull out my LED flashlight, and we'll be given the same amount of battery power to keep them shining with about the same brightness for as long as possible.
Care to guess who wins...by a lot?
Re:The horse is dead, please stop flogging it... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm always amazed, and a bit amused, at people who believe we're always going to need more power, or at least as much, to get the same results.
It's a well known effect in economic theory called Jevon's Paradox. Increased efficiency leads to increased consumption. When gas/diesel vehicles become more efficient and therefore cheaper to run people use their cars more often, consumption goes up. Also businesses relying on vehicle fleets make more profit and can grow which means bigger fleets leading to more fuel used. The effect was first noticed with coal usage at the start of the industrial revolution.
Re:The horse is dead, please stop flogging it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is infinite in reality. Bill Gates has effectively infinite money, but I bet his personal consumption is way below his means. Even if he can buy the latest and greatest computer and cell phone every day, he almost certainly doesn't, because he's still human and at some point just the time investment in setting them up, and getting used to the differences makes it not worth it.
As a child, I would have bought more candy if I had more money. As an adult, I have enough money to buy enough candy to kill myself from eating that much sugar, but I just don't. Because my needs for candy are finite.
At some point it'll plateau.
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Thank you for making that argument more eloquently than I would have.
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But Gates could buy increasingly expensive computers and cell phones, cutting the frequency of his purchases. His desktop computer could be a fault-tolerant VM running on a server cluster tied to a NVMe storage array.
The relationship to the parent's vehicle/fuel consumption example is using larger vehicles, not just driving more miles.
Mostly I think consumption increases tend to be about multi-dimensional consumption increases. A rich person's house may top out in terms of square footage, but it likely gr
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Jevons had a point 150 years ago when he observed that effect with coal consumption, but it doesn't really hold up. For example it doesn't account for transitions to different types of energy, such as from fossil fuels to electricity.
A great example of the opposite happening is HVAC for buildings. As construction techniques and insulation get better they require less heating and cooling, and the heating and cooling systems get more efficient. The fuels change from gas to electricity and solar.
Having said th
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When gas/diesel vehicles become more efficient and therefore cheaper to run people use their cars more often, consumption goes up.
That only applies up to a point. If I upgrade to a more fuel-efficient car, I may start driving more miles in it, but only if driving more miles is something I actually want to do (and previously could not afford to do). I'm certainly not going to start driving my car more than I want to, just because I can.
Note that breathable air is effectively free, and yet people don't consume more breathable air than they need to. At some point, enough really is enough.
Re: The horse is dead, please stop flogging it... (Score:2)
I think the idea is to replace the rapidly expanding existing fossil power systems with something cleaner.
Re:The horse is dead, please stop flogging it... (Score:4, Informative)
Why not? Renewables already produce 50% of the electricity in Germany.
Re: The horse is dead, please stop flogging it... (Score:2)
On average the total production is under 30% even though they have sufficient plants to generate nearly 200% their usage. Ideal conditions donâ(TM)t exist 100% of the time.
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No, this were actual numbers from first half of 2020. Renewables produced more than 50% of electricity produced in Germany in the first half of 2020. In 2019 they produced 40%.
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Best I can find is this showing first half of 2020 being 48% (40% 2019) , https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
But further down, they show renewable for 2020 being 17%. and with the sources being in german, I can't really know what the metrics are really.
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
Oh, and burning biomas is renewable according to this.
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48% is correct. 50% was relative to electricity consumption not to electricity production. My bad. The 17% are relative to primary energy consumption.
In any case, the point is: If renewables generate 50% of the electricity consumption of a major industrial economy already today. So the claim that "they will never produce anywhere near the amount of electricity that we currently need" seems a bit dubious.
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Production, not consumption. Remember that Germany only produces 39% of its energy use. That major industrial economy still runs mostly on nuclear energy imported from France.
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In 2019, production (612 TWh) was much higher than consumption (580 TWh) . So please stop spreading nonsense, troll!
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Bullshit. Germany imports 61.4% of its electricity, most of it from France, i.e. - nuclear. You're fooling yourself.
If you're German, almost two thirds of your power is generated in nuclear power plants, you just hold up your noses at having them inside your own borders.
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In 2019, Germany imported 40 TWh and exported 72 TWh. (source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... [ag-energiebilanzen.de]). Now, please shut up, troll!
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By the time any new nuclear plants are built, solar, wind and battery technology will have put the final nail in the coffin of this shitty power-production method...
Solar and wind will never produce anywhere near the amount of electricity that we currently need, to say nothing of finding a way to power all the electric cars and even tractor trailers.
You say things, but you seem to be unaware what happens in the real world. Also, there is more than just solar and wind. There is water (well established, reliable tech), and there are other things like tide and wave that are in prototype states. Nuclear is not needed. Of course, those still making tons of money of this very expensive way to generate electricity do not want you to know that.
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The UK has around 20x the amount of wind capacity it currently uses. Japan could be as high as 40x.
There is huge room for expansion. A lot of consumption will be shifted to off-peak times as batteries become more common (e.g. in cars) to limit peaks.
Re: The horse is dead, please stop flogging it... (Score:2)
I think you misunderstand the scale of the problem. China, for example just built 50GW of new capacity in an 18 month period and has over 150GW coming online in the next couple of years. All fossil, mostly coal. India is in a similar situation. China is already the leader in solar deployment, but nothing near their requirements.
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Re: Finally (Score:2)
I think the whole idea is to build something that, unlike existing nuclear, is actually good for the environment.