@Mining_Atoms asked me to write a little thread on why thermal energy storage is better than battery storage for the grid. The problem is energy storage wasn't a problem I was trying to solve. I took a deeper look at the issue, beyond storage.
In 2010, fresh out of the Navy, I went to work at the TVA to be a Senior Reactor Operator At Sequoyah. There was a huge push at the time to limit GHG emissions. This movie , an inconvenient truth, profoundly impacted me, but I couldn't understand why there was no mention of nuclear energy.
Problems are like catnip. They call to be solved, so I tried to solve the policy problem of how to decarbonize our economy, with the biggest, baddest, most energy dense source of power around,
Nuclear.
I started just outright replacing all existing electricity generation with nuclear and renewables. This is what people were talking about and TBH still are. But there are some problems with this approach.
-1. The price of power is not constrained. Just ask the Germans. I made the graph in 2010 before Energiewende. Turns out I wasn't too far off from what the German's managed to achieve
2. GHG go down, but then rebound, even with nuclear. Also something Energiewende proved out.
3. All those Renewables take up a lot of land. Keep in mind this is just for electricity
.4. Wind is variable. While I knew this back in 2010 I didn't appreciate it.
This is the distribution of wind output from the Bonnevile Power Administration that I did in 2016. The horizontal axis is the capacity factor, 1.0 = Full power, 0 = no power
This means that all of that VRE on the grid, requires a 100% capacity back up. Because VRE is carbon free you have to take their energy, you can't have them modulate. Thus you have to install even more carbon free backup power sitting idle ~80% of the time
If your backup isn't carbon free, you don't get your reductions and you rebound GHG much much sooner.
This is exactly what happened in Germany. These 4 points alone are why VRE is flawed. VRE simply doesn’t work.
Young engineers are taught that the first step to solve any problem is to define the boundary conditions. I didn't realize that this is what I was doing instinctively in 2010. These are the boundary conditions of the problem. There're two fundamental constraints:
1. Energy is conserved, this is the concept of replacing capacity, we know this intuitively.
2. Entropy ALWAYS increases. This is the second law. It is present in any stochastic/random process. What people forget is that grid generation IS a stochastic process, which we ignore
It's not that VRE is wholly inadequate, it's the belief that they can meet the needs of the grid. Even with energy storage, they cannot. Disagree with me all you want. I will tell you now you have not properly bounded the problem if you think VRE will work. It's a child's fantasy.
I have many friends in nuclear who think that to be successful nuclear has to be tied with VRE. If your goal is GHG reductions that is an utter falsehood. We can talk about this but what I presented is why I think VRE is a scam a parasite on the grid.
So what does the electric grid look like without VRE, to begin we have to look at what the grid is now. There is a massive amount of value decades of accumulated capital assets that our grandparents built for us. We have a choice to throw this away or embrace it
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Estimates that I've seen state that there is about $1 trillion in existing fossil fuel infrastructure. So how can we reuse as much of that as possible, replacing only what needs to be replaced to suit our needs. So, what about re-powering the coal plants?
The problem with coal is that we just burn it. But we can replace the coal boiler with a nuclear boiler, fortunately there is a drop in replacement
@gehnuclear
PRISM.
Yes, I am a SFR fanboy, I go into that here in this thread:
Great thread on the potential of #nuclear energy. We already mine enough uranium annually to power the world >6x over. Just let that sink in for a minute.
Only nuclear is sustainable, just ask @Mining_Atoms why "renewables" aren't.
Don't believe me? Energy density matters
Thread from Nick Touran, find him at @whatisnuclear
Almost unbelievably, there are 3500 exajoules of nuclear energy in these 48.3K tonnes of uranium, accessible using breeder reactor tech we demo'd in 1952. The world uses about 600 EJ of primary energy per year (including everything!!), so that's about 6 years of world energy
Rather than breeder reactors, we use non-breeder reactors today, which get about 1% of the energy from the mined uranium. Our earlier attempts at deploying more breeder reactors were thwarted by anti-nuclear activism and minor technology complexities.
Like, the Germans build a top-notch breeder reactor called SNR-300. It was world-class. It was completed and fueled. Right before they turned it on, protests broke out and they never operated it. Now it's a goofy theme park. �
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And the Americans had the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, which was pretty awesome too. Lots of equipment was made. But the antis got into it and delayed it to death. It boondoggled and was canned. We continued to burn fossil fuels instead.
The French, bless them, actually went ahead and build a large commercial breeder, the SuperPhenix. Anti's hit it with an RPG 🤡. It shut down with less than 10% capacity factor
Japan built two breeder reactors, Joyo and Monju. They're decomissioning Monju as we speak, after a series of technical problems caused them to decide they just couldn't run it anymore.
Nowadays, India, China, and Russia all have operating breeder-type reactors, and are building more. I think the main thing needed to get more breeders is for more people to truly understand that we can generate 6 years of world energy from 48.3K tonnes of fuel and demand them. - NT
We should add to this list EBR-II which in its current incarnation is the PRISM module in http://natriumpower.com. The issue in scaling nuclear is not in the obtaining of enough uranium, it is in building a large enough fissile inventory.
I would also add in the strategic importance of adding throium into the mix as it is a very important thermal fuel allowing existing LWR's to become breeders, e.g. Shippingport (also not on your list).
Thorium is a thermal fuel uranium is a fast fuel. I love fast reactors and have operated thermal. We need both to scale globally!
