What we have isn’t close to enough for a single city, let alone the whole country!

It’s in every hydro dam that’s already built in between Arizona and New York. If we even do need more, there is plenty of land to use.

This is the key factor I’m talking about. There is not “plenty of land” for hydro storage, and flooding the amount of land required to provide grid level storage is an ecological disaster. Plus your analysis of mega-project like nuclear plants going over budget and over-time absolutely applies to any grid-level storage project you would need to go 100% solar/wind.

But just for fun, how much space would the grid level storage projects take up? I’ll let you use Hydro because it’s the best case scenario that exists today as far as energy density.

But beyond that what is your point, that humans shouldn’t build big projects, and any attempt to do so is “boneheaded?” Capitalism can’t build big projects I agree, but the problem isn’t the projects themselves it’s the profit-motive.

Do the math, how much grid-level storage do you need to power a city like chicago assuming zero baseload generation.

I can dismiss the the other solutions that are worse then pumped hydro because pumped hydro is actually the best case scenario for grid-level storage and it requires A LOT of space. Anything else, batteries, pneumatic mines etc etc are going to be worse in terms of space by orders of magnitude, not to mention the actual costs. Hand waving the need for grid-level storage by saying we would us hydro shows you don’t understand the scale of the problem.

That excerpt from that engineer is great, but WHERE IS THE STORAGE? Show it to me on a map. You can’t because it does not exist. New Nuclear plants are being built, finally, but there is a reason that no grid-level storage exists. It’s literally not possible today. There exists a pilot battery plant in Australia, and there exists a few megawatts of storage in Scotland, but these are few and far between and none of them are suitable for massive deployment.

You can use whatever moon-units you want. I prefer to use people-centric units.

Show it. Tell me where the grid-level storage exists for a city like Tokyo, or NYC, or Chicago, or Mexico City, or Paris, or London. Hell pick your own city, show me where it exists right now today.

I guess if you don’t understand units of water per area, then there is no reason to expect you to be able to do any kind of critical analysis about why “pumped hydro” is a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre-foot

The solution to nuclear waste is recycling it, which was something France has done quite successfully. The US can’t do it because of cold-war era treaties, but realistically it’s because Nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy in our society and obviously there are trillions of dollars in the fossil fuel status quo.
As an aside, the aftermath of Chernobyl shows exactly how eco-friendly massive radiation events are, Prypiat is a lush nature reserve now. Human activity is much worse for any given area then radiation is.

Non recycled radioactive waste could be incinerated like we do with Coal and no one seems to be upset about it. /s

Yes if you ignore all externalities the “economics” means that you can use Natural Gas “peaking” plants instead. But one of the main advantages of nuclear power is zero green-house gas emissions.

If fossil fuels were taxed appropriately, the economics of them wouldn’t be viable anymore. A modest tax of a $million USD per ton of CO2 would fix up that price discrepancy.

Yes mining still exists. Unlike how Solar Panels and Wind Turbines grow like plants and replenish year over year with no other industrial process required right?

But again, you don’t appreciate the energy density that is contained in a reactor fuel. The volume of material is minuscule compared to coal. While oil/gas are a lot better then coal energy density-wise, they have the significant downside of greenhouse gases and causing global warming.

Do some quick math. How much pumped hydro in terms of acre-feet would be required to power a hypothetical city like Chicago at night? Where would this theoretical reservoir be built?

The new tack is to conflate nuclear energy with fossil fuels. As in assuming that nuclear energy is “legacy” power generation, and that obviously we need to use modern gernation like solar and wind, and magical grid-level storage technologies that don’t exist. Also ignore that baseload power is still required, and is currently fulfilled with Natural Gas and Coal.

Again, i’m talking energy density. All those other wacky ideas aren’t viable at all. Yes I know that the hoover dam is for generation, but the idea of pumped reserve power is literally identical to hydroelectric generation. The only difference is we would have a man-made solar/wind powered pump fill the resevoir, instead a natural source of solar power fill the resevoir. Either way, it’s a huge amount of land use for it to be considered “green.”

Additionally I never claimed nuclear power should be used as a peak generation, it should 100% used for baseload replacing all of our fossil fuel generators, with huge taxes being applied to carbon generators.

As an aside:

A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.

This idea is trash and as far as I can tell the hypothetical existence of this is an oil industry fud campaign. The only viable version of this is pumped hydro, which has the land use problem I’ve already described.

Yikes. If words have no meaning, then sure. But there is no world where radioactive elements that come from stars have anything to do with fossil fuels that come from decayed biomass.

Another myth is that hydroelectric is “green.” It’s absolutely not. The huge amount of land required to build something like the hoover dam or the three-gorges dam is massively destructive to the existing ecology. It’s often overlooked, but land use has to be part of any environmentally sound analysis.

I would say that while the Hoover Dam, or the Three-gorges dam by themselves are acceptable, they are wholly impossible solutions for grid level storage for the entire united states/China. How practical do you think it would be to build thousands of hoover dams?

Other options like kinetic batteries etc, all come down to energy density. The highest energy density options that humans can harness are nuclear Isotopes like Uranium 238, or Plutonium 239 (what powers the voyager probes) After that is lithium batteries at ~<1% density of a nuclear battery. Everything else is fractions of a percent as efficient. Sure there are some specific use cases where a huge fly-wheel makes sense to build (data centers for example) but those cases are highly specific, and cannot be scaled out to “grid-level.” The amount of resources required per kilowatt is way too high, and you’d be better off just building some more power-plants.

Something very important that anti-nuclear but otherwise environmental minded people should realize is this sentence: " There’s no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025."
Also applies to grid storage. There does not exist a chemical energy storage solution that can substitute for “baseload” power. It’s purely theoretical much like fusion power. Sure maybe in 50 years, but right now IT DOESN’T EXIST. Economically, practically, or even theoretically.

Why do I bring this up? Because I’ve seen too many people think that solar and wind can replace all traditional power plants. But if you are anti-nuclear, you are just advocating for more fossil fuels. Every megawatt of wind or solar, has a megawatt of coal or gas behind it and thus we are increasing our greenhouse gas emission everytime we build “green” generation unless we also build Nuclear power plants. /soapbox

What lack of theory does to a mfer.

lmao. Defederate immediately, just on principal. Let Lemmy.world know that once they stop being capitalist stoogies they can reapply for federation.