rolling blackouts this winter??

[Lampert]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

Long term, we need to shift to a mix of HydroQuebec, nukes, solar, and wind.

We could start by forcing municipal light departments to do net metering. Just saying

BTW, it's impossible to do gas pipelines...do you really think building nuclear power plants is on the table in New England? Specifically MA.

[Msats]

Nuclear is the cleanest way forward. If as an expected move to plugin cars and high capacity happens how can power cuts and high metering during the night as California planning going to work? . People cannot plugin to charge cars in the night by metering consumption .

Natural gas is one of the cleanest source, plus those batteries use mineral from congo which is another major source of slave labor camps and then made in china buring coal.

seems this is a localized solution and nothing global as slaves mine it and coal buring power plants power the factories that produce it.

[r_p]

Originally Posted by OutdoorLover

Did some googling and thought I'd share re nuclear power plants. Canada's Ontario Power Generation utility has selected the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 Generation III+ small modular light water reactor design for its Darlington site. This will be the first new nuclear reactor built in Canada in over 30 years, and so the selection of this design is significant.

This system is considerably simpler, cheaper, and safer than existing light water reactors deployed in the USA currently, which are considered Generation II designs, while this is as noted a Gen III+ design. Passive cooling systems are able to keep the system safe for 7 days following a loss of electrical power to pumps and/or a break in the piping. The BWRX-300 design is derived from the GE-Hitachi ESBWR, which was certified by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission back in 2014, and now the BWRX-300 is under regulatory review by the NRC. Regulatory risk should be pretty low since its an improvement on an approved design. Capital cost per megawatt is claimed to be 60% less than earlier designs and construction time is greatly reduced.

It is not the plant but the waste disposal/management which is the main issue. Nuclear waste remains toxic (to life) for centuries, beyond the lifespan of your typical nation state. They are usually stored underground but there's no guarantee that it won't leak and contaminate aquifers.

Oil and coal are actually much safer than nuclear. Even if you were to burn the entire ~2 trillion barrels of known oil reserves, the CO2 in the atmosphere will only increase by 25% (BTW, atmospheric CO2 is a tenth of what's stored in the oceans and all of that is a minuscule fraction of the carbon stored in rocks such as limestones/carbonates etc.)

Studies have shown that excess CO2 in the atmosphere had led to more greenery, e.g., see https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004.epdf

Highly radioactive waste is detrimental to life, CO2 is not. In fact, it's quickly captured back by plants and trees. Just don't mow your lawn for a few weeks in summer and see for yourself

[OutdoorLover]

Originally Posted by r_p

It is not the plant but the waste disposal/management which is the main issue. Nuclear waste remains toxic (to life) for centuries, beyond the lifespan of your typical nation state. They are usually stored underground but there's no guarantee that it won't leak and contaminate aquifers.

Oil and coal are actually much safer than nuclear. Even if you were to burn the entire ~2 trillion barrels of known oil reserves, the CO2 in the atmosphere will only increase by 25% (BTW, atmospheric CO2 is a tenth of what's stored in the oceans and all of that is a minuscule fraction of the carbon stored in rocks such as limestones/carbonates etc.)

Studies have shown that excess CO2 in the atmosphere had led to more greenery, e.g., see https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004.epdf

Highly radioactive waste is detrimental to life, CO2 is not. In fact, it's quickly captured back by plants and trees. Just don't mow your lawn for a few weeks in summer and see for yourself

Yes, nuclear waste disposal is an unsolved problem. That said, we have many aging nuclear plants that use old technology and are physically beyond their design lifetimes in many cases. Replacing them with Gen III+ light water plants would be a significant upgrade. And the bottom line is, if we want to make a big impact in reducing greenhouses gases, which I think we do and most people think we do, nuclear is pretty much a must-have now and for decades into the future. Europe is also going to be building Gen III+ and Gen IV nuke plants, along with Russia and China. Solar and wind power are great and should be expanded, but until we come up with practical, cost-effective energy storage solutions and/or build makeup plants of other designs to compensate for the times that the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, their total percentage contribution is necessarily limited.

Whether or not it's led to more greenery, CO2 is the leading gas impacting climate change. This has affected diverse species like polar bears in the Arctic, penguins in the Antarctic, and coral in the Great Barrier Reef. Thermal energy drives violent storms and so we can expect more frequent and more violent hurricanes and tornadoes. Climate change is altering precipitation patterns, causing damaging droughts out west - affecting agriculture as well as wildlife, and increasing the severity of forest fires. And all this and more are only going to get worse on our current trajectory. The cost to the natural world and the dollar cost to our activities will be enormous.

[wolfgang239]

Natural gas will be part of the generation mix for the foreseeable future. Intermittent renewable energy sources are not there yet at generation scale. The biggest hurdle here isn't a lack of money, it is nimbys and politics. This will be a slow transition.

We overbuilt natgas generation without securing an abundant fuel supply. We also have allowed numerous important generation facilities to close without a well thought plan for replacement megawatts. Nukes will take years to build out at this point, and battery tech just isn't widespread or cheap enough to implement for peak periods.

That being said, we will not see rolling blackouts. Just much higher electricity costs.

[OutdoorLover]

Originally Posted by wolfgang239

Natural gas will be part of the generation mix for the foreseeable future. Intermittent renewable energy sources are not there yet at generation scale. The biggest hurdle here isn't a lack of money, it is nimbys and politics. This will be a slow transition.

We overbuilt natgas generation without securing an abundant fuel supply. We also have allowed numerous important generation facilities to close without a well thought plan for replacement megawatts. Nukes will take years to build out at this point, and battery tech just isn't widespread or cheap enough to implement for peak periods.

That being said, we will not see rolling blackouts. Just much higher electricity costs.

Agreed on both these counts - about the fastest thing to implement right now are going to be those GE-Hitachi Gen III+ light water plants - the ESBWR (Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor) puts out 1500MW, and is already approved by the NRC. They are already being built in foreign nations and there are actually two installations under consideration in the US right now - in MS and VA. The small modular variation, the BWRX-300, puts out 300MW per module and should be approved before long. Although it's faster to build, the BWRX-300 system in Ontario is planned to be operational in 2028, basically 6+ years off.

Regarding energy storage, the idea of of pumping water uphill into a reservoir and then letting it flow back downhill through a turbine will 100% work, and the system would be very durable. But it will cost a good deal of money and take up a lot of land. I've seen that Tesla has done some utility scale battery installations at commercial solar installations in Australia, and it's reported to work very well, but that can't be cheap, and we're talking an enormous number of batteries if that's going to be replicated all over the world.

The other thing you can certainly do with technical success is to add a natural gas plant to solar/wind installations. The natural gas power output can be easily ramped up when the sun or wind power ebbs, that will absolutely work and is called a makeup plant. But then you basically need to build double the needed capacity, which isn't cheap again.

[porterhouse]

Solar and wind are good supplemental technologies to keep developing. However, if you follow the entire lifecycle they can arguably be higher impact than fossil fuels, and not without significant environmental impacts.