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in a well actually posted:
Don’t both nuclear and renewable power generation share the feature that they require about that much excess power generation capacity to meet demand peaks?
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Mar 21, 2023 10:35
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I think we had a discussion a while ago about how much of an impact the anit-nuclear green movement had. I just came across this story which doesn't really prove anything, but mostly it's just funny now. In 1982 a guy attacked a French reactor with smuggled soviet RPG because he thought the fast neutrons would explode everything:  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.215.4533.641.a Apparently they didn't find who did it at the time so wikipedia has the follow-up: quote:Against a background of ongoing protest and low-level sabotage, on the night of January 18, 1982 an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade attack was launched against the unfinished plant. Five rockets were fired across the Rhône at the incomplete containment building. Two rockets hit and caused minor damage to the reinforced concrete outer shell, missing the reactor's empty core. Initially there were no claims of responsibility.[16] radmonger posted:Don’t both nuclear and renewable power generation share the feature that they require about that much excess power generation capacity to meet demand peaks? Any power generation source would need to have capacity in excess of average if there's significant variance. like if you average 50GW but when it's hot/cold need 60GW, of course you'd need a bit over 60GW of generation capacity. I'm not sure that's at all related, unless I'm completely misunderstanding.
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Mar 21, 2023 11:03
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LeastActionHero posted:Most of the CO2 emissions from steelmaking are due to reducing the iron oxide to iron (smelting). Carbon can grab the oxygen off the iron, and hydrogen can also do that. Making steel usually starts with iron at like 4-5% carbon, and then you remove most of it to get mild steel. Interesting, thanks. I'm still not sure where the carbon comes from. I (vaguely and broadly) understand that when you melt down the iron oxide with carbon, some of the carbon turns the iron ore/oxide into just iron (and forming carbon dioxide), and then there's a bunch of carbon left over in the iron, resulting in very high carbon cast-iron esque metal. Then you can reduce the carbon as needed for the steel you want. If instead you smelt the iron oxide with hydrogen, presumably you get a bunch of water vapour coming off, but there's no carbon at all in that chemical reaction - so you would the result be pure iron (rather than cast iron) - and you'd need to add carbon at the end to get the steel you want? Or is it all vastly more complex than this? I did try looking it up but couldn't get much out of the combination of serious business metallurgy and marketing press release nonsense.
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Mar 21, 2023 12:47
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Maybe try adding reddit to your search query. Only half joking.
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Mar 21, 2023 12:48
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His Divine Shadow posted:Maybe try adding reddit to your search query. Only half joking. lol fantastic advice, that did the trick thanks. (If anyone else is curious, yes they just add the carbon at the end. They have a bunch of ways to do it including straight up adding coke, or adding high carbon scrap, etc etc. Apparently they already do this sometimes, for when they're using electric arc furnaces). the posts I read are here
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Mar 21, 2023 12:52
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mobby_6kl posted:
So that system would have 10GW available 50% of the time. other systems would have different amounts, most of them larger. The point is that it macroeconomic terms, that excess power is, for both nuclear and renewables: - on the same scale as overall world energy consumption - very nearly free, as a marginal cost of production The difference for fossil fuels is they can’t go below the cost of the stuff you burn. This is, incidentally, a key reason nuclear is not a safe and profitable investment. Even if you are confident in your own engineering. You can never be sure the overall market won’t price half of the stuff you produce at zero. What’s more, you can’t really take advantage of that potential for zero-cost energy as a private actor in a market system, because by using it you are creating demand, which means you are no longer getting it for free. But a government can just build carbon capture plants and pass a law saying they pay only a nominal fee for electricity. And that doesn’t break the economics or profitability of existing power producers. Even 20% of the world’s electricity production, at low efficiency,, would capture a lot of gigatons of carbon.
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Mar 22, 2023 12:30
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radmonger posted:So that system would have 10GW available 50% of the time. other systems would have different amounts, most of them larger. I have literally no idea what you're saying here. "Excess power is for nuclear on the same scale as overall world energy consumption." That sentence reads like gibberish. quote:The difference for fossil fuels is they can’t go below the cost of the stuff you burn. This is, incidentally, a key reason nuclear is not a safe and profitable investment. Even if you are confident in your own engineering. You can never be sure the overall market won’t price half of the stuff you produce at zero. This reads even more like gibberish. Nuclear isn't safe and profitable investment because the market might price your electricity at zero? When the wind blows Germany has had to pay other countries to take its excess power off its hands. Unrelated: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290 quote:The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems. Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again. With obvious importance to our planet and the research community alike, COMSOL simulation demonstrates and proves the solution proposed herein, to bring vast amounts of green, emission-free energy to the planet’s surface for utilization. Well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy generated over the course of one full year, to meet the current and future needs of the USA is shown to be practical. I love this plan.
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Mar 23, 2023 03:58
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It would definitely cool the earth and solve energy requirements when drilling an 8km deep hole sets the whole thing off I also enjoy the guesstimated cost of 3.5T and not worrying about transmission losses or seismic activity. But what the hell, it looks like a fun idea
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Mar 23, 2023 04:32
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Phanatic posted:I have literally no idea what you're saying here. "Excess power is for nuclear on the same scale as overall world energy consumption." That sentence reads like gibberish. Ok I’ll take it slowly. If excess capacity in a system is anything above 10%, you have an amount of unused energy generation capacity that is of the same order of magnitude of the energy production of the system If that system is ‘the world’, then that is a large amount. Hence segment of the form ‘you can’t do that, it would require a massive amount of energy’ are at best suspect.
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Mar 23, 2023 10:06
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mastershakeman posted:It would definitely cool the earth and solve energy requirements when drilling an 8km deep hole sets the whole thing off I think if you have spent 3.5T and got Yellowstone behind you, transmission losses are probably just rounding error.
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Mar 23, 2023 10:24
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Pretty good overview of big project construction budget/deadline overruns, he doesn't mention any energy related projects at all but I think it's fair to say that all of the issues he says also affect large scale nuclear and probably hydro projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s That's definitely one thing inherently in favor of wind/solar since poo poo is mostly factory-built and risk is diversified over hundreds of turbines, so even if a few sites turn out to be impossible to make work because of endangered frogs or whatever, it's nbd. Hopefully SMRs will help in this aspect.
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Mar 26, 2023 14:02
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Watch his video about the texas bridge debacle from a few months back to get a good feel for how risky one-off custom mega projects can be to design and build. Millions of dollars going poof because a simple shortcut was taken during a load calculation.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:19
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Probably not news news if anyone's been following, but Germany is going to order 25GW worth of new gas plants: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-use-tenders-build-25-gigawatts-new-gas-power-plants-2030-econ-min Basically this would replace the capacity that is currently generated with coal. Which is a good thing, I guess, though I'm a bit concerned where that gas is going to come from now.
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Mar 28, 2023 14:54
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mobby_6kl posted:Probably not news news if anyone's been following, but Germany is going to order 25GW worth of new gas plants: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-use-tenders-build-25-gigawatts-new-gas-power-plants-2030-econ-min 
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Mar 28, 2023 14:56
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mobby_6kl posted:Probably not news news if anyone's been following, but Germany is going to order 25GW worth of new gas plants: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-use-tenders-build-25-gigawatts-new-gas-power-plants-2030-econ-min
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Mar 28, 2023 15:25
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Some countries in the EU are pushing the block for more nuclear power: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/eu-countries-stand-off-over-nuclear-role-in-renewable-energy-goals/ar-AA19aOTQ Are there any good articles or discussion on the previous pages re:hydrogen? I think this thread doesn't talk about it while it's in the news constantly, presented as the future with a lot of backing from European states. One particular claim that's odd is the EU wanting to use the current gas pipes for hydrogen in the future which seems unreasonable, isn't hydrogen an order of magnitude or two leakier than natural gas?
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Mar 28, 2023 15:45
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The only green hydrogen is from nuclear though... Still better than rolling coal I guess? Shame we're wasting so much capital investment though. You could just invest more and roll out 50GW of nuclear by 2029 instead.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:46
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M_Gargantua posted:You could just invest more and roll out 50GW of nuclear by 2029 instead. How? It's 2023 right now.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:52
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Dante80 posted:How? It's 2023 right now.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:55
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Well they're talking about this new EU energy directive which is making people livid here. They want Finland to reduce its total electricity consumption by 50GWh until 2030. Which people here are pissed about, since electrification will increase how much power is used and there are several plans to increase electricity usage massively in sectors like fossil free steel production and also hydrogen production from wind surplus.
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Mar 28, 2023 16:14
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Somaen posted:Are there any good articles or discussion on the previous pages re:hydrogen? I think this thread doesn't talk about it while it's in the news constantly, presented as the future with a lot of backing from European states. One particular claim that's odd is the EU wanting to use the current gas pipes for hydrogen in the future which seems unreasonable, isn't hydrogen an order of magnitude or two leakier than natural gas? Yes but not in a way that matters. Hydrogen leaking is not an environmental hazard. Its non-toxic and dissipates quickly, and will eventually react into water molecules. Creating H2 from solar or nuclear is inefficient and expensive but still better than natural gas considering the cost of externalities and global climate. Which gives me a starting point to talk about my favorite upcoming tech! Hydrogen Reforming! Specifically for maritime shipping: Shipping is a huge source of global pollution. Boats require a lot of power to move through the water, and to maintain current shipping speed you need an energy dense fuel. You could reduce speed to improve efficiency, but what ends up happening is fast logistics then shifts to airborne transport, which is even worse. So you need your ships to be fast in order to efficiency move as much cargo as possible to maximize market share and steal that from air freight and trucking. What that means is that while wind power or solar power freight is technically possible, and will improve per ship emissions, they end up increasing overall global logistic emissions. Right now the power comes from bunker fuel, the absolute worst miserable long chain hydrocarbon tar. Natural gas turbines are better, but more expensive, and still a fossil source. Option 1? Nuclear ships? Not happening sadly, and even as someone who's worked on reactors, sailed on nuclear ships, and teabagged reactor control rods I can agree that the safety risk of 100's of mobile maritime reactors under corporate control is something unacceptable until we get portable fusion sometime around 2500. Option 2? Hydrogen. The immediate problem being that the huge volume of hydrogen required eats up your cargo capacity and you are no longer economically viable. Cryogenic hydrogen fixes this but is a massive engineering and maintenance problem, but still less of one than trying superfreighter with reactors. How can we solve it? There is this 1900's process called steam cracking and reforming. Thanks to more modern research we've managed to miniaturize the systems so you can get a huge amount of hydrogen from a small reactor, Megawatts worth from something the size of a standard FEU container. Your feed stock is is injected into superheated steam in a catalytic reactor, where its broken down into H2 and CO. The next stage is a water-gas shift reactor, where the CO combines with more O2 to create CO2, and finally you have some stages to remove any residual CO as well as residual hydrocarbons and sulfers. The H2 is fed into fuel cells which make power for hybrid electric drive trains. The net efficiency is about 20% better than if you just burnt the hydrocarbon in a reciprocating engine normally. Fuel Cells have come a long way in the past few decades. The miniaturization is important because previously these were just standard mutli-story building sized industrial equipment you'd see in petrochem. For feed stock you still need any hydrogen rich hydrocarbon - ideally this comes from a biofuel. Ethanol from fermentation is a good choice. Unlike automotive grade ethanol you don't need a whole lot of purity, because you aren't using it directly in a sensitive combustion process. The steam plant will eat up just about anything. So you can use cheap corn and sugar slurry or similar sources. It is still a CO2 emitter, but with only biological feedstock the system can be made net zero emissions. The other benefit is that the reformer and fuel cell system has almost no moving parts. Almost no maintenance. And pretty much everything inside of them is a fully recyclable metal. As for scale the cost of a lower power system starts far above a similar diesel or natural gas, but cost scales linearly, as you just add more reaction sites, which as you get huge is cheaper than building bigger and bigger engines or turbines. Mostly due to the sensitivity of dealing with bigger rotating machinery, tolerances, and higher pressures and inertias and all the other things we've mastered about engines. So right now that's the best you can do without going nuclear. And its achievable with existing ready technologies without changing the overall shipbuilding and operation cost by a meaningful amount.
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Mar 28, 2023 16:18
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That's cool, thank you for sharing Is it already being rolled out for new fleets similarly to electric cars, but for ships, or is it more of a future technology?
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Mar 28, 2023 17:22
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Its something that's been demonstrated in large tech demos but never deployed as far as I know. Diesel and bunker oil remain cheep and there is very little pressure on ship owners to go green. It's what would be considered TRL7/TRL8 level technology. The next step would be to put it on a useful ship, and then scale up production.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:04
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Might have got lost in the news but the latest cost of Hinkey Point is 40 billion for 3.2 GW. And it's a decade overdue. When you see numbers like that you understand the lack of enthusiasm.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:22
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Somaen posted:Are there any good articles or discussion on the previous pages re:hydrogen? I think this thread doesn't talk about it while it's in the news constantly, presented as the future with a lot of backing from European states. One particular claim that's odd is the EU wanting to use the current gas pipes for hydrogen in the future which seems unreasonable, isn't hydrogen an order of magnitude or two leakier than natural gas? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3505076&pagenumber=290&perpage=40#post525000419 And here (it takes several posts to go into storage and using existing natural gas infrastructure) https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3505076&pagenumber=306&perpage=40#post528051319
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Mar 28, 2023 19:50
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M_Gargantua posted:Its something that's been demonstrated in large tech demos but never deployed as far as I know. Diesel and bunker oil remain cheep and there is very little pressure on ship owners to go green. It's what would be considered TRL7/TRL8 level technology. The next step would be to put it on a useful ship, and then scale up production. Though bunker fuel is mostly hydrocarbons I assume the contaminating sulphur and metals in it are kind of bad for the reactors then?
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Mar 30, 2023 16:31
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Yes, it's goopy poo poo, and also importantly it's a non renewable fossil fuel. You could still do it I guess, just more steps. Every hydrocarbon can be processed into something given enough steam and platinum. Someone around here probably knows the industrial chemistry.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:38
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I've never heard of a liquid being used as a feed to a steam reformer. I've seen naphtha range boiling points (basically gasoline) up to methane as a feed stock but bunker fuel won't vaporize entirely at reactor pressures so I don't think it would be a viable feedstock. You'd need to remove the contaminants too as Zudgemud mentioned.
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Mar 31, 2023 02:15
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Is there a climate job thread?
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Apr 9, 2023 18:43
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Finally the finally final final test is finally done for OL3 and it's now complete. Been running for a while but on monday it's officially up. Finally.
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Apr 13, 2023 09:34
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Electric Wrigglies posted:I think if you have spent 3.5T and got Yellowstone behind you, transmission losses are probably just rounding error. A feasible amount of energy extraction on a timescale of a thousand years could also reduce the likelihood of catastrophy from a natural eruption too. You are ultimately extracting energy from the volcano - better to have it come out gradually than all at once.
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Apr 17, 2023 03:09
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Arglebargle III posted:Is there a climate job thread?
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Apr 17, 2023 16:28
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cat botherer posted:There aren’t climate jobs. Sure there are! https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Jobs/Vogtle-Nuclear
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Apr 17, 2023 17:08
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Pander posted:Sure there are! https://climatebase.org/job/46109948/midsenior-product-designer?source=jobs_directory&queryID=a011673e8a0115098778c80b97167f19 quote:Granular is a fast-growing climate tech startup developing a platform to help electricity consumers, producers and suppliers move towards 24/7 clean energy. Our SaaS platform gives our clients visibility over how electricity was produced on each hour using hourly energy certificates and allow them to trade clean energy with each other. You can find out more about the 24/7 energy space in this article.
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Apr 17, 2023 17:41
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cat botherer posted:Good point. When I see a phrase like "climate jobs" it's usually something more like this: "We are accountants who will help you find new ways to save on taxes."
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Apr 17, 2023 17:46
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The BLM just issued approval for a 732-mile transmission line to carry power from a wind farm in south Wyoming to Las Vegas. https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-approves-construction-transwest-express-transmission-project https://www.eenews.net/articles/interior-oks-massive-power-line-key-for-wests-renewables/ The application to build that line was filed in 2007.
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Apr 18, 2023 04:04
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Phanatic posted:The BLM just issued approval for a 732-mile transmission line to carry power from a wind farm in south Wyoming to Las Vegas. I gotta say, as much as I like the idea of environmental regulations and making sure people in communities that'll be impacted are consulted and trying to mitigate harms, this feels like too much. This feels like it should only really take a year; especially for projects that are intrinsically green in nature.
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Apr 18, 2023 04:33
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Raenir Salazar posted:I gotta say, as much as I like the idea of environmental regulations and making sure people in communities that'll be impacted are consulted and trying to mitigate harms, this feels like too much. This feels like it should only really take a year; especially for projects that are intrinsically green in nature. "The project also hit several roadblocks from private landowners who did not want power lines crossing their property. The final holdout, the Cross Mountain Ranch in the northwest corner of Colorado, did not reach a deal with TransWest until the end of 2021."
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Apr 18, 2023 05:11
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So Germany now shut down its last remaining three nuclear powerplants. To everyones surprise some energy producers announced a mild increase in the price of electricity. “In parts of NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia], the new price is 49.44 cents gross per kilowatt hour, which means an adjustment of around 45 percent for an average consumption,” said a spokesman for Eon Energie in German."   https://thedeepdive.ca/e-on-hikes-energy-prices-45-as-germany-winds-down-its-last-nuclear-plants/
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Apr 18, 2023 08:19
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That's mostly just price gouging though. It's not like production of energy became that much more expensive. The energy cooperations just have a vaguely plausible reason to increase their prices now. Mind you, they were already paid horendous sums by the government for the losses of their nuclear profits.
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Apr 18, 2023 09:20
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