I went to the Dominican Republic in the 1990s when the power grid was overloaded. They'd have rolling blackouts in the capitol, first the lights would go out, but the generators would kick in and the hotel you are in would light up, and the houses of rich people, everybody else would be in the dark.
The glass factories, the microchip factories, infrastructure that runs aviation, etc. are a different business which cannot start and stop production around supply interruptions.
The good news (e.g. "gospel") is that U238 + n => Pu239 and that we've mined enough uranium that is sitting above ground (so called "waste") that we've got 200 years of carbon-free fuel to run our civilization.
It can't possibly be economically competitive if it is driving a steam turbine, a huge and precision-engineered power conversion device that dwarfs the reactor and often the heat exchangers. With higher temperature materials (liquid metal or salt coolant) and this kind of turbine
That will be interesting to watch. I've read of supercritical CO2 as a working fluid before. But as far as I could understand from a laymans point of view, in that state it is supercorrosive to the materials, similar to the atmosphere of Venus on the ground. So I'm exited for the results of something as delicate as turbines operating under conditions which made space probes last only a few hours long :)
people use stainless steel, fiberglass, teflon and other common materials. The most notorious problem is that sCO2 dissolves in hydrocarbon oils, even very heavy hydrocarbons so keeping the CO2 from exiting through the turboshaft seals is challenging, but a solved problem.
The one obnoxious thing for nuclear use is that CO2 reacts with liquid sodium! It's not that hard to contain the effects of a CO2/sodium leak because the volume of the 1500 psi section is small, so that if the coolant loop bursts the overpressure in the (still not very big) confinement structure is more like 15 psi.
> It can't possibly be economically competitive if it is driving a steam turbine
What do you mean by "economic competition"? Generally speaking with current technology there is no power cheaper than nuclear power. In that sense it is the most competitive power there is.
But not for private investment funds looking to own power generation and secure huge returns in relatively short term. They'd rather see more expensive inferior dirtier climate-changing power generation they can profit from, not government owned nuclear they can't ever compete with. And in that sense no project with long term investments in science, education, infrastructure will ever be competitive for capitalists. So does it really matter then?
Luckily not everyone is fond of capitalists. Ukraine, for example, recently decided to go against certain capitalist run countries pushing it to limit nuclear and finish building new reactors, because other power is not actually economically competitive. If Ukraine can, surely most of the world can do it too.
Not economically competitive with a gas-turbine power plant powered by methane. (almost the same thing as the power plant on a jet airplane)
The real hazard of the current "renewable energy" economy that is when the sun doesn't shine the backup power is generated from methane (aka 'natural gas') which has very high power density and very low capital cost compared to the steam turbine either in a coal or nuclear plant. (If the airplane was propelled by a steam turbine, the turbine would be the size of the fuselage)
Almost no coal plants have been built in the period in which no nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. for pretty much the same reason. The steam turbine is so expensive it wouldn't be worth it even if the heat was free.
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If a new power source can beat fossil fuels in direct economics it saves the planet. The job is done.
With anything that involves forcing somebody to pay somebody else to make something that is allegedly sustainable the one thing you do know is somebody will get rich on the friction, if the earth is saved is beside the point.
If you love your children's grandchildren choose wisely.
>the backup power is generated from methane (aka 'natural gas') which has very high power density and very low capital cost compared to the steam turbine either in a coal or nuclear plant.
Doesn't natural gas power plants also use turbines to generate electricity? How can it be cheaper than the steam turbine portion of a coal/nuclear power plant?
Combined cycle gas turbine generators use a steam turbine as a second, downstream method to recover exergy from the exhaust of the main gas turbine.
CCGTs are expensive. Simple gas turbines that are used to meet daily demand peaks are relatively cheap; as GP said they're basically stationary jet engines.
To me it's kind of bizarre that money is so cheap at present, but somehow it's still too costly to use it to invest in things with a delayed payback.
I don’t understand why people keep proposing these ideas that we must sacrifice and do without electricity. There are 7 billion people on the planet. Even if you organized to have enough Americans self sacrifice (needlessly) why would you ever expect the rest of the world, in particular the developing world who are trying to raise their living standards, to do the same?
This is not a solution. It’s dead on arrival but it keeps getting rolled out. End this distraction. The year is 2020. Forty years ago France decarbonized its grid in a decade using serialized production of nuclear power. We know how to do this. There is a solution that we have done. We know how it works. It doesn’t require some impossible utopia of self sacrificing humans. Everyone can keep turning on the lights and running their heaters.
Counter to this is the persistent myth that we can just increase capacity to meet demand. That growth will continue and that this can be sustained. The global population is double what it was fifty years ago and fifteen percent of the entire lived collective consciousness of humans is walking the earth right now. Aside from our theoretical ability to meet increased energy demand, our biosphere doesn’t support the entire population of earth living at the American level of consumption.
Even putting aside that, that standard of living fundamentally depends on the labour output of developing nations. Without it the economics look very different. Could France have fully de-carbonised it’s grid without international trade to less developed nations producing many things it consumes? Doubtful. High tech sustainable energy is the privilege of stable, developed nations which leverage a significant portion of their living standards from the labour of other, less developed nations.
So you keep hearing this notion because the current notion doesn’t scale to the current earth population let alone where it will be in another fifty years. Both are little more than flights of fancy and their main use is as thought experiments to hopefully come up with something that will actually work. The current trajectory can’t be sustained, and the self-sacrifice utopia will never be reached. In between are scenarios where we’re screwed, but hopefully also ones where we’re not. The search continues.
I completely agree that the concept of a global population of self sacrificing humans is not foreseeable or realistic. But I think that must be tempered with the equal improbability of an energy abundant utopia as you foresee. If it was going to happen we at least need a clear actionable means of making it so, and either outcome seems to have the same foil: human behaviour and self interest.
As someone who, due to disability, needs an assistive device this is asking me to give up the ability to participate in society, and probably an early grave.
What's the author proposing? That we voluntarily abstain from using electricity during certain times, or the government shut down electricity usage to households during certain times? The former is the equivalent of the government telling people to "turn down your thermostat" or "don't drive SUVs". That's basically useless because most people don't care. The latter wouldn't work because most people place high value on continuous electricity, so such a proposal will be political suicide. In the unlikely event that such a proposal does get implemented, most people will either run their own generators or power storage systems (as evidenced by PaulHoule's comment), which will be much less efficient than a large scale solution and therefore be a net-negative.
Anecdata, but some people do listen. My grandmother still keeps her thermostat at 65 - explicitly because Jimmy Carter asked her to in 1977.
I think institutional appeals from a conservation and energy-independence mindset can work on some people, though they are surely ignored by many more.
Another example of relative success: I don't know how it started but I and many others still remember to cut the plastic rings on six-packs before throwing them out to avoid turtles from getting stuck in them if they end up in the ocean.
Your grandmother's actions have been more consequential than mine, my discarded plastic is extremely unlikely to end up in the ocean and if it did, it would still look like a jellyfish that a creature would try to eat.
Most people don't even use "continuous electricity": other than a few choice appliances (refridgerators, HVAC systems), the vast majority of consumer electricity demand waxes and wanes with their waking hours almost exactly as you would expect.
It feels like yet another case of trying to blame consumers for industrial problems. If there are places that have high demand load on a continuous basis, it would be large industrial applications running three+ shifts.
The latter is called rolling brownouts and happens regularly in countries like the Philippines where corrupt government officials grant power distribution monopolies to foreign companies.
What system do you propose that will implement wise unpopular and unpleasant decisions and not foolish ones ... at least more than electoral systems do?
Dictatorship of the proletariat, of course. You see left wing ideas rising in the discourse, media, and world - the fire burns within, Capitalism will fall soon
Jimmy Carter requested Americans to turn down their thermostats for the Winter and Americans balked (I was alive at that time - he asked to turn it down from 72F to 68F). I can't imagine Americans balking at turning down their thermostats being happy to give up the constant delivery of electricity to their homes. If you're going to ask people to make significant lifestyle changes then you should ask them to make those changes where it would provide the biggest benefit - and that's not the utility sector, it's the transportation sector. Not only is transportation the 2nd largest producer of CO2 (not too far behind electricity) but it also leads to poor local air quality and tens of thousands of vehicle-related deaths. Moreover, I think more Americans would be amenable to a change in transportation over a change in their electric supply.
It is a source of great anxiety for me that our power will go out on a -40 day and take our furnace with it. I suppose that a battery, problematic as they are, could help some of that, but really for most of winter it's just not an option for the northern areas of the world.
This is my big worry about the move towards renewable power: it seems to involve simultaneously making everyone entirely reliant on electricity for critical needs like heating, cooking and transport which were often powered by at least partially grid-independent (but CO2-emitting) sources, at the same time as making grid power less reliable. A battery might be enough to keep a primarily fossil-fueled furnace up and running but they're meant to be going away. Also, peak power demand is absolutely going to be in the middle of a really nasty cold snap in parts of the world that require heavy use of heating.
> Hospitals certainly need 100 percent reliable equipment—
Hang on there, are we so sure about that? Our present-day obsession with reliable technology in healthcare is a very recent development, but it's something that has largely been sold to us by industrialists and the oil industry, and we consume it, increasingly, at the cost of the living standards, even the lives, of the poor and those in developing countries. Society has conditioned us to believe that reliable power for safety-critical life-sustaining applications is something that we can't live without, but a measured examination of the evidence of climate change means that we must urgently reimagine a future without the growth or even the maintenance of healthy human lifespans for those in the developed world.
A modest proposal of my own would be for western governments to introduce climate-safeguarding social credit systems that normalise and enforce the migration to a new intermittency economy, while forestalling the dangers of any dissidence or skepticism that would hold out against the new economic model that this would create. It would help to prepare us for a new society and a new economy that wasn't reliant on the old and unsustainable paradigms of food, resource and energy security.
> Society has conditioned us to believe that reliable power for ... life-sustaining applications is something that we can't live without
> A modest proposal
Oh yes, I was taken aback by the sleight-of-hand tricks in the article, and I was keen to take some of the ideas to their logical conclusions while using a similar form of argumentation. I notice that there was a link to a Jonathan Swift article posted earlier, as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683397.
The first step is to have people realize how much power they are consuming. Maybe sell power in blocks that have to be refilled.
I had a shed built on some cheap off grid land as my office. Bought 100ah 12v battery and 300w of solar. It’s surprising how little power use I can manage when I see the power draw and battery level. I’m not in the greatest place for solar.
It’s also given me an appreciation for how much power different devices can draw.
My grandparents paid attention to how much electricity they were consuming with classic electricity meters (and careful study of their electric utility bills). The information in kWh already exists and is at the fingertips of almost every electricity consumer, there's just currently not a lot of incentive to study it (given low energy costs). The information is even getting richer as meter technology has improved since the big classic mechanical meters of my grandparents' generation and energy companies are often more than happy to provide as much information as the collect if you ask for it.
I don't have a link at hand, but I remember a study for Germany that the difference between production at night and at day wasn't the biggest issue, but the production in summer was so much greater than in winter. If you would just produce enough renewable energy for 100% of the yearly energy consumption, you wouldn't only have to store the energy for the night in batteries, but you would need to store several months' energy consumption in batteries to make it through winter.
The glass factories, the microchip factories, infrastructure that runs aviation, etc. are a different business which cannot start and stop production around supply interruptions.
The good news (e.g. "gospel") is that U238 + n => Pu239 and that we've mined enough uranium that is sitting above ground (so called "waste") that we've got 200 years of carbon-free fuel to run our civilization.
It can't possibly be economically competitive if it is driving a steam turbine, a huge and precision-engineered power conversion device that dwarfs the reactor and often the heat exchangers. With higher temperature materials (liquid metal or salt coolant) and this kind of turbine
https://www.powermag.com/supercritical-co2-pilot-power-plant...
we would never lack for carbon free power.