Have i Not Just calculated that the storage for one day for berlin would be like a few soccer fields? How many days do you think is necessary to be prepared for completely no power input? 10? That’s 100ish soccer fields with 2020s battery technology. Stop spreading that bullshit.
Your tldr does not follow from any of the things you wrote above. Considering current energy densities it doesn’t seem unfeasible to me to build that storage. And I was honestly surprised how little space this would have taken back in 2020, not to mention that, again, this has been reduced by about 4x today. And it’s going to go down further. Your only argument here seems to be space and I don’t see that as a big problem. A few soccer fields worth of land distributed in the vicinity of each bigger city doesn’t seem like a lot to me.
I do see your point that it is in the interest of fossil fuel to stop nuclear power from replacing them. But I don’t agree that we won’t be able to build an energy grid without fossile fuels. I believe we can have a grid without both of these technologies.
You seem to be influenced by the “well we won’t do anything until we are already burning” mentality which is coincidentally pushed heavily by the fossil industry. It’s meant to defer people from believing that change is possible and taking action so we all stay at home and bicker about how cool it would have been if we started change 20 years ago.
Okay so your comparison has a few flaws there. The square meters I calculated were just a reference. The important thing is the volume taken up. If you stack your batteries only 1m high that’s gonna cover a lot of ground. You also completely failed to take into account that energy density has apparently 4x since 2020 which shrinks the required volume significantly.
I’m gonna argue that 4000 of these facilities distributed around the whole USA isn’t that much. Spacewise the USA is in a very comfortable position compared to European countries.
As for the price: taking the price for a pilot project and assuming that every facility is going to cost that is very wrong. If you’re going to build 4000 of them, cost is going to go way down.
But if we are talking numbers here I too have a question. How much land would nuclear plants (and the intermediary storage and final storage for the waste) use to fulfill those 12TWh per year? And how much would those cost to build and maintain? I imagine that a battery facility is way cheaper to operate than a nuclear plant.
I did the calculation for you in a different answer, it isn’t as unreasonable as you seem to think. Aside from that:
It’s extremely uncommon for the whole powergrid to experience zero wind. That’s not happening.
What pro-nuclear people are just waving away is so much more though. Space for storage is nothing in comparison.
For the fun of it I did do the calculation. Berlin uses about 12TWh per year. That’s about 33GWh per day.
Assuming an energy density of 450Wh/l (a number car batteries apparently were able to reach 2020) that’s about 80.000 m³.
A soccer field is about 4000 m². So a space of 10 soccer fields with 20m high battery stacks would do that.
Now assume that energy density will have improved in the last 4,5 years and that maybe storage batteries can be different from batteries in cars and that can go down by a lot. Seems reasonable enough for the biggest city in Germany.
The premise of powering a complete city just from one singular facility is a false one. It’s unnecessary to build such a facility. You can build multiple smaller ones to supply sectors of a city according to the needs of that sector. The answer also depends on how smart the usage of the power is. Are people using power when it’s available? Are people trying to use a lot of power when it’s not available but must come from storage? There are so many factors your scenario doesn’t take into account. The answer has to be: it depends.
This also feels a lot like a gotcha question not posed in good faith. Because again: you won’t need to power anything solely from storage. Wind and sun will always supply a base level of energy.
Why would you want to do that? Do you fear that there might be absolutely pitch black days with absolutely zero wind?
Or they would have known that they don’t work. Thats the thing. It is very much possible that further operation of these reactores would have been economically insensible. Maybe the repairs would have been so expensive and timeintensive that it would be easier to build new ones. The point is noone knows.
We can argue all day if what the CDU decided together with the owners of the plants was a good decision or a bad one. Nothing productive for the discussion around renewable energy will come out of that discussion. The plants are closed and they wont be able to get up and running in the forseeable future.
Because Germany decommissioned their Nuclear plants before they did so with coal plants (or gas plants, which they keep building)
Yeah but that is done. There is no way to reverse that. The thing we need to talk about now are options to coal based plants which are nuclear and renewables. So if anything we need to discuss the pros and cons of those two. Noone here is saying that the coal plants are a good thing.
Unless we move manufacturing back (which we should do, but that’s a decades long process we can’t possibly rely upon) we are still reliant on an external state to undergo the ecological transition.
Germany had one of the biggest sectors for photovoltaic cells. They are closing and I agree we should be moving production back to europe. Right now there might be enough knowhow left so it does not take decades to do so.
Using spent fuel should shorten the estimated containment time from tens of thousands of years to 300 years, which should be enough to just say, bury them and leave.
If we can actually use spent fuel. That’s a big if I don’t want to gamble on. Also 300 years is still a very long time. 300 years eralier society was so much different than now, we can’t possibly predict what’s going to happen in the next ~10 Generations of humans.
This is an issue we might be able to fix without hoping for magical technology. Also because it doesn’t touch only this argument, but pretty much everything happening in the country. We can’t just say “Germany can’t make any big project” and leave.
My point isn’t “do nothing instead of nuclear power” though. My point is that many smaller projects seem way more likely to succeed in the bigger picture even if some of them fail or are delayed, which is what reneweable energies are suited to. The success of the transition is also about people being able to trust into the success of the project. And I don’t think many people have a lot of trust into germanies ability to bring big projects to a successful end. I’d like that to be different, I do, but that’s just not what I have experienced in my lifetime.
That’s functionally the same thing.
It’s not. Not knowing if something works is far removed from knowing something does in fact still work. Discussing this again and again with the same arguments on both sides is not fruitful. And it doesn’t help making any of the current decisions around our enery supply for the forseeable future.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
As I already said I do have a lot of concerns around nuclear power as a long term strategy that I do not see or at least see as less of a problem with renewable energy sources.
I don’t know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
And I’ll repeat again: discussing if this was a mistake is such a moot point it literally doesn’t matter now. It’s done. Discussing this again and again just takes up everyone’s time and energy without any productive outcome.
I’m not sure why you are spending so much time comparing nuclear to coal based plants. If you wanted to make a compelling argument there you’d need to compare it to renewable energy sources. I totally agree that we need to phase our coal based plants as fast as possible.
The price for the fuel isn’t so much the issue but availability or rather dependency on outside powers. I didn’t say that we would depend on Russia directly. But the way the world is changing right now you never know which nation goes haywire next. I’d much prefer the option with less reliance on other states for our power sources.
The delay and cost is definitely subject to policy and policy changes. But today no-one can guarantee that we wont do those and in effect have a delayed and very expensive project on our hands. I’ll remind you of Stuttgart 21 or the BER or any other bigger projects Germany has been dealing with as long as I can remember. I have no faith that a reactor would magically be built without any of the issues those projects have.
I have yet to see a convincing strategy to explain humans in a few thousand years what we buried in these tombs. It just doesn’t seem plausible. And even if we find a few suitable places are we sure we will find more when those have filled up?
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Yeah I’m not convinced that just burying the stuff deep in a hole will do what I think is responsible. That shit stays dangerous for multiple thousands of years. That’s such a long timeframe that we cannot predict what’s going to happen to our society. It is very realistic that we lose the knowledge of the location or even the dangerousness of that stuff. Imagine future people stumbling into this and actually getting something like a curse from an old pharao by weird invisible forces that make you sick.
Another thing about this is that locations that are “good” candidates for this kind of storage are extremely rare. Germany has been looking for a suitable place for the last few decades and didn’t find any yet afaik. And the few places we might have are booked to be filled with all the old waste still sitting in intermediary storage.
Unless we have a reliable way of finding suitable storage places before we start producing more waste it will put us in the same situation we are in now, just worse.
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
Answering from a German perspective:
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
Huh that might actually be an issue with your client, mine renders those as two dots
No I didn’t miss that but taking an explorative pilot project as the defacto standard and then rejecting that it might be possible to build something more space efficient is not how the world works