I meant "not practical" in that all components must be solid or liquid and that the reaction yields charge movement and can be driven by applying a charge. AFIAK carbon meets none of these.
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Climate Change(d)?
- Thread starter Jimmy Higgins
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Jimmy Higgins
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NOAA has a great resource that plots statewide average temps over periods of time, and you can set whatever measured baseline you'd like. It is great at weeding out the noise in daily weather and predictably shows the warming trend we've been seeing.
Bill Gates' nuclear project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, breaks ground - Marketplace
TerraPower's plant will be smaller, safer, cheaper and more climate-friendly — in theory. Meanwhile, the town's coal mine closed for good.
Could this be the way to go.
Let's see how fast the regulators move.
bilby
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Sodium cooled designs have been around for a while. It's good to see a move away from pressurised water designs, which have dominated for decades mostly because they are what the Navy use - the Navy likes them because they can be made compact, and because spare coolant is readily obtained anywhere an operational Naval vessel is likely to be; And the commercial power plants like them because there are loads of qualified PWR techs being produced by the Navy free of charge, so their staff training budgets are massively less than they would otherwise be.Sodium cooled!Bill Gates' nuclear project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, breaks ground - Marketplace
TerraPower's plant will be smaller, safer, cheaper and more climate-friendly — in theory. Meanwhile, the town's coal mine closed for good.www.marketplace.org
Could this be the way to go.
Let's see how fast the regulators move.
Personally I suspect that the optimum commercial reactor design is one that uses molten salt as both fuel and primary coolant; Liquid fuels are far superior to ceramic fuel, in a vast number of ways.
One need not be too concerned about meltdowns, when the entire reactor is intended to be molten in normal operation
The fact is that, despite the many benefits new reactor designs can bring to the table, the fastest and cheapest way to eliminate as much carbon dioxide emission as possible is to just build more of our existing large Gen III and Gen III+ PWR designs.
SMRs, fast spectrum reactors (that can burn the "waste" from our current PWR fleet), molten salt or sodium cooled designs, and liquid fuel designs all have characteristics that are very nice to have, but as long as we get the majority of fossil fuel burning replaced ASAP, those things can afford to be developed at a steady and measured pace.
The idea that we need a new idea, a new paradigm, a completely new technology, in order to combat climate change is a furphy. We developed a new technology to do that in the 1950s and '60s. What we need now is not ideas, it's construction.
The world is full of people who are convinced that large PWRs are dangerous, expensive, and produce huge amounts of problematic waste that we have no idea how to handle.
Literally every part of that belief is false; But what TerraPower and similar SMR advocates are doing is basically writing off the old technology, so that they can say to people "This isn't your grandad's nuclear reactor; This is a completely new tecnology, that is clean, safe, cheap, and reliable".
The fact that grandad's nuclear reactors beat literally every other way of making electricity on cleanliness, safety, cost, and reliability, is neither here nor there.
The problem with current reactor designs is unpopularity. The Gen IV promoters are hoping to eliminate that by pretending to be different, instead of challenging the underlying falsehoods from the anti-nuclear lobby. I suspect that they will fail; Propaganda is apparently far more powerful than fact, and new technologies always have teething problems that propagandists can seize upon as excuses to scare the general public.
Jimmy Higgins
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The problem with current reactors isn't even the nuclear part. Suggest building any type of power generation facility in an area, and there will be complaints. Perhaps the solution is a Carbon Tax on electricity, and weigh it on the type of energy source in the region, averaged over a 24-hr period, with bonus discounts for nuclear plants within the region. Make the presence of the nuclear plant a net benefit to property value, instead of the perceived negative.
So many moving parts to initiating the change necessary to keep our Earth from getting warmer.
So many moving parts to initiating the change necessary to keep our Earth from getting warmer.
bilby
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When France was doing their big nuclear build-up, they deliberately chose sites in regions with high unemployment. It became a big vote winner for local officials to be in favour of a local power plant, because of all the jobs it would bring to the area.
TSwizzle
I am unburdened by what has been.
Nothing like a good tax to fix disagreeable weather.
It’s a catastrophic 82 degrees in Santa Monica. Oh the humanity!!
It’s a catastrophic 82 degrees in Santa Monica. Oh the humanity!!
The military has another reason for a PWR design: Military stuff is meant to go in harms way. Somehow I think they would prefer when that line catches some shrapnel that it spills steam rather than liquid sodium. Our navy is obsessive about damage control. (And clearly the Russians are not--otherwise they would not have lost the Moskova. It sank long enough after the hit that it had to be a damage control failure.)Sodium cooled designs have been around for a while. It's good to see a move away from pressurised water designs, which have dominated for decades mostly because they are what the Navy use - the Navy likes them because they can be made compact, and because spare coolant is readily obtained anywhere an operational Naval vessel is likely to be; And the commercial power plants like them because there are loads of qualified PWR techs being produced by the Navy free of charge, so their staff training budgets are massively less than they would otherwise be.Sodium cooled!Bill Gates' nuclear project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, breaks ground - Marketplace
TerraPower's plant will be smaller, safer, cheaper and more climate-friendly — in theory. Meanwhile, the town's coal mine closed for good.
Could this be the way to go.
Let's see how fast the regulators move.
Disagree.
The problem is so many such facilities tend to put too much weight on the economics of the site. Big shit should be remote and the use of the land around it limited.
pood
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Santa Monica pier underwater.
NASA on climate change.
From NASA.
But what do you care, right? You’ll be dead when the shit really hits the fan.
Elixir
Made in America
If Santa Monica temperatures rise 1 degree in a century, that will be its “unprecedented rate”. So yeah, why bother? And they can just put in a layer on top of the existing pier if the ocean come up too far. In fact it’ll be okay unless the whole thing slides into the channel in a biggie earthquake. Nobody is trying to prevent that!
pood
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Do you see this, Swizzle, from NASA? Can you really not process the meaning of this? Or do you think this is “fake news” because NASA is part of the “deep state”?
View attachment IMG_1205.webp
View attachment IMG_1205.webp
Jimmy Higgins
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Remote is where the Trumpers live. And they don't want anything in their counties.
bilby
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Yeah, maybe. I rather doubt that a live steam leak in a confined space is particularly fun to try to deal with.The military has another reason for a PWR design: Military stuff is meant to go in harms way. Somehow I think they would prefer when that line catches some shrapnel that it spills steam rather than liquid sodium. Our navy is obsessive about damage control. (And clearly the Russians are not--otherwise they would not have lost the Moskova. It sank long enough after the hit that it had to be a damage control failure.)Sodium cooled designs have been around for a while. It's good to see a move away from pressurised water designs, which have dominated for decades mostly because they are what the Navy use - the Navy likes them because they can be made compact, and because spare coolant is readily obtained anywhere an operational Naval vessel is likely to be; And the commercial power plants like them because there are loads of qualified PWR techs being produced by the Navy free of charge, so their staff training budgets are massively less than they would otherwise be.Sodium cooled!Bill Gates' nuclear project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, breaks ground - Marketplace
TerraPower's plant will be smaller, safer, cheaper and more climate-friendly — in theory. Meanwhile, the town's coal mine closed for good.
Could this be the way to go.
Let's see how fast the regulators move.
TV and credit cards
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A big boost for a climate solution: electricity made from the heat of the Earth
One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and just hit a milestone.
apnews.com
It complements wind and solar for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine because word has it the earth is always hot.
Technology - Fervo Energy
Our breakthrough technology leverages over a decade of innovation in drilling and production from modern oil and gas development, leading to major
fervoenergy.com
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
People keep pestering Mr. Swizzle with questions. Let me help him out. I've already set the YouTube to start at the relevant explanation.
Jimmy Higgins
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Horizontal drilling for geothermal.
A big boost for a climate solution: electricity made from the heat of the Earth
One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and just hit a milestone.
It complements wind and solar for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine because word has it the earth is always hot.
Technology - Fervo Energy
Our breakthrough technology leverages over a decade of innovation in drilling and production from modern oil and gas development, leading to major
Geothermal does not complement wind and solar. It is a 24/7 energy source. Be great if they can up scale it. We certainly have some warm places underground in the west. They also happen to be large National Parks as well.article said:
bilby
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Yeah, geothermal is pretty good. It certainly beats burning coal.Horizontal drilling for geothermal.A big boost for a climate solution: electricity made from the heat of the Earth
One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and just hit a milestone.
It complements wind and solar for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine because word has it the earth is always hot.
Technology - Fervo Energy
Our breakthrough technology leverages over a decade of innovation in drilling and production from modern oil and gas development, leading to majorGeothermal does not complement wind and solar. It is a 24/7 energy source. Be great if they can up scale it. We certainly have some warm places underground in the west. They also happen to be large National Parks as well.article said:
It's not very clean though - it often releases a lot of highly corrosive, toxic, and/or smelly chemicals, particularly sulphur compounds, and it tends to be limited (like hydropower) by the small amount of really suitable terrain.
It also suffers from the corrosiveness and other issues with the working fluid - all those dissolved minerals tend to clog up the works, or eat holes in the equipment, so the maintainence costs (and associated environmental loads) are high.
And, as you point out, there's nothing that "complements" wind and solar, except storage systems - and yhey aren't so much "complementary" as they are "an essential component whose costs are so eye-wateringly high that we would like to pretend they aren't part of our proposed system".
