Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewables, CSIRO report finds

Some knowledgeable guy who can do math. One you have to cover your acreage with solar panels or build a 100 foot windmill, the other you have to dig a 100 foot well or two.

 

Careful. There's plenty of snakes in Australia too. They aren't just in the outback. Many of them are taught to whisper great things about these so called new technologies (some of them are abandoned old technologies) in order to line their coffers with profit from well intended gullible rubes.

Kind of like the idea that a Vanadium battery, a technology born in the 1970's, can be efficiently implemented at the scale of the national energy grid.

 

Looks to me like your link makes my point.

 

Also on the subject of grid level batteries.

Batteries are composed of cells. Each cell produces a certain amount of voltage and can supply a certain amount of current. Draw too much current from the cell, and the voltage drops. To make use of these properties the cells are wired together. Wired in series the voltage increases, but this has no effect on the ability to deliver current. Wired in parallel the voltage stays the same, and the current increases. So a high power battery, like the one in your Tesla, has these cells wired in both series and parallel to supply the required voltages and current in DC. If you crack a Tesla battery open, you're going to find a whole mess of what look like large AA batteries. To change the scale of the battery you don't increase the size of the cells within that battery. You have to add more cells. Doing this, however, drops the efficiency of the battery.

Part of this is due to the fact that large batteries have large internal resistance. When you push energy into them to recharge them, great care has to be taken to make sure that charge distributes evenly among the cells and enters slowly enough that the individual cells remain cool. When you discharge them great care has to be taken to ensure they don't get so hot that they explode. There's fairly complex circuitry dedicated to this task that also has to monitor the individual health of each cell and compensates for cells that are beginning to fail. The more cells you add to this system, the more difficult it is to manage this process. A grid level chemical battery would contain millions of these cells. In the event that the monitoring system fails and these batteries do catch fire, we do not have the technology to extinguish them.

A grid level battery fire would be Chernobyl x 9/11

 

I found a fellow Aussie with an opinion.

 

The United States Office of Nuclear Energy, a part of the DoE is "bad journalism"?

*shakes head as once again simply blanket dismissal at anything that is not agreed with and attack the source without discussing it at all*

 

Not to mention incredibly expensive, require a hell of a lot of carbon emissions in order to extract and process the materials used in it, and only have a certain shelf life. At the end of which have to be replaced, and in the end something would have to be done with the toxic chemicals it contains.

At this time, the only effective way of "storing" power is pumped hydro. But for some strange reason, all these New Age Green Energy zealots absolutely hate hydro and will avoid even discussing it like it was a plague carrier.

 

Pumped hydro requires special environmental features. You need a mountain to pump the water up. Not so great in the flyover states.

 

And once again, I am laughing at the bad levels of comprehension of a great many here.

If one really wants to "go green", you really have to get rid of every thought of "New Technology" solving your problems. Because that is always going to be a failure, guaranteed. Because the "newer the tech", the more "CO2 emissions" are going to be used in order to make it in the first place. It is kind of like trying to "borrow your way out of debt", it is simply not possible. Because the new and newer you get, the more investment in the raw materials is going to occur.

That is why things like solar cells are really not a solution. It requires a lot of heavy industrial mining (as well as the destruction of the environment and toxic waste created) in order to make the damned things. The cells themselves may be "100% green", until one considers what all was put in to make them in the first place, where they lose 99% or more of their "greenness". The same with electric cars. Where the vast majority are powering them from the power grids (which often use gas generators), all they are doing ultimately is putting a very "non-green" end on what is essentially a very complex and convoluted way to use natural gas to power their car. Ultimately, it would probably be better for the environment to simply convert their ICE to work off of natural gas. And at least that ICE conversion will not require the use of batteries that are incredibly expensive and have to be replaced every few years, and require a lot of industrial mining to make and once again the issues of toxic waste.

These are the kinds of things that those chasing the "high tech" solutions never seem to comprehend. As I already said, TANSTAAFL.



Because if one is to honestly look at the technology and what all was invested to make it, it turns out that any savings in the end are lost in the production. And for all those that push for such schemes, they absolutely never take into consideration what would be involved in making them a reality. Or that more and more they involve the use of "rare earth elements", that involves mining on a scale most would be disgusted at if they knew what was involved. They are incredibly destructive, and leave behind a wasteland in most cases.

 

Yes and no. It helps, yes, but is not absolutely required. Ultimately that depends on how much power storage is needed.

And in many areas it is a very workable solution. It will never be a 100% solution, but it is a solution that is proven workable and does not require all of those unrealistic things that do not even exist in order to make them work.

And there are other solutions, that are never discussed. Like in-flow hydro. Making hydro power does not need a large dam with a large reservoir. Many of the earliest ways to harness hydro power involved a dam that only raised water levels by a couple of feet. They simply harnessed the flow of the river without needing to make a huge catch basin behind it. I even know a prospector that made his own water wheel that he would stick in a river or stream to power the water pump for his highbacker.

 

Nope. You just have to put some solar panels on your roof for electricity and hot water and install a battery, which is just a small part of the cost of a house and contents.

 

Lols! Lols! Lols!

 

And battery tech is getting better and better. Why are so many so uninformed in the days of easy quick search capability

 

Try wanting to use that in a country where molehills ARE mountains lols!

 

Yes and……. Have there never been coal fires? Have there never been oil well fires?


Has a lithium battery ever caused a fire like this? Darvaza crater in Turkmenistan caused by oil drilling

Then there is the Centralia coal mine fire that has been burning since 1960s

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fire-in-the-hole-77895126/

To be honest I did not think it was that bad

((Sigh)). This is also why we want to transition to Sodium ion batteries plus

 

Yes, and? Anything to prove we are even close to creating batteries as you and many others dream of?

 

Flawed ? It doesn’t matter what the design is. The difference is even greater now in favor if renewables.

 

Do oil wells drive on our roads and in front of our houses and businesses?

 

Great, a propaganda blurb with absolutely nothing but your own opinion and not discussing the facts at all.

 

Okay….. so what about “redox flow batteries”?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

https://www.energy-storage.news/sdg...argest-vanadium-redox-flow-battery-in-the-us/
SAN Diego Vanadium flow battery

 

Of course….hybrids drive during the week and take 600 mile trips in the week end. Batteries don’t need to be big or different then now.

 

Read and weep..nukes too slow, too expensive.. now, you have nothing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1W909I/

 

And as we head towards winter our latest electricity bill is still $40.08 in credit, even though we don't have a battery and the solar feed in tariff has dropped to 5.5 cents per KWH.

 

And why we won't be building any nuclear reactors even though we have 25% of the world's uranium reserves.

 

Yup…l