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What is the latest in replacing generators for portable power with solar/battery? I am responsible for looking after about 16 portable generators from 20 to 650 kva in size and the resources required (supervision/people/vehicles/tooling) for fueling / maintaining them shits me. Also it would probably be good for the environment if all the portable ICE generators went the way of the dodo. For our power house (6 x 4 MVA HFO fueled), looking at solar but capex / land take for that is not going to happen anytime soon - thinking if is possible to have a few wins on the portable sets, helps build a case for supplementation/replacement of the power house. Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Oct 30, 2019 |
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Oct 30, 2019 14:16
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angryrobots posted:That's a lot of power. Even your smallest genset will be expensive to replace with something renewable/battery powered. What's the run time for whatever it is you are powering? It is basically the power generation for a mid sized isolated mine. The large sets (6 x 4 MVA MAKs) supply the plant (97% runtime) and core infrastructure (admin, workshops, clinic, workers camp, water treatment, etc). The mobile gen sets are for all the satellite stuff - local gendarme barracks, isolated offices, intersection/flagman lighting, pumps, local village construction team, etc. Most run around the clock (variable load depending on work / air cons) except the 650 kva sets which are standby for the camp and operate <1% of the year. In reality the 650's are going to be left alone but driving a vehicle out to every other mobile generator once or twice a day is what I am trying to reduce. I had a look online following the prompt from this thread at hybrid power and I need to educate myself some more but it doesn't look to be a no-brainer (all the generators already exist and will not be due for replacement soon). We are looking at building/opening another mine site in the next couple of years so maybe build the knowledge to first fill the requirement with hybrids from the start would be the goal.
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Oct 31, 2019 12:51
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CommieGIR posted:But lets throw all that progress away for a natural gas drilling spree, right? BHP is in the process of deciding which LNG powered iron ore freight ship is going to be purchased - using LNG versus HFO is estimated as a 25% reduction in greenhouse gases (also reduction in Sulphur and other pollutants). Natural gas has its place. Sure, the industry contains greedy self serving people that are in it for themselves at the expense of others - but cutting off your nose to spite your face is not the basis of grown up policy. If LNG is the best answer to a problem, then you suck it up regarding having to deal with corrupt greedy people and work to minimize their impact.
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Nov 14, 2019 08:29
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Trabisnikof posted:Do you have a link to the analysis that came up with that number? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/04/reuters-america-bhp-weighing-lng-power-for-iron-ore-ships.html Your guess is probably correct. But for BHP, the LNG for fueling their iron ore fleet will almost certainly come from the one of the massive LNG facilities in the North West of Aus and I honestly don't think there would be too much in the way of fugitive emissions from that source. You will probably find BHP want to have fugitive emissions included as it helps BHPs competitive edge to have it included.
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Nov 14, 2019 19:47
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Infinite Karma posted:I've got to ask where these guys are getting their info, because I buy and sell lithium-ion batteries at wholesale prices and they are way, way, way higher than this. Much closer to $800-1000/kWh. Obviously megacorporations can buy and manufacture them at a discount in bulk before packaging them for sale, but does it make sense to talk about the costs somewhere in the middle of the manufacturing chain, instead of at the end of the chain when they're available to purchase and use? Costs are coming down but it's hilarious when industry "insiders" project double digit percentage price drops year-over-year for technology like this. I would love to see those sorts of prices as well. We utilize HFO sets for power and run an extra one just for redundancy - hurting fuel efficiency and running up maintenance hours. I have organized PLC/SCADA gurus to implement a powerstation wide SCADA control linked into the process plant SCADA so that load shedding can be implemented such that large loads such as a 4MW mill can be dropped off in the event of a generator trip but obviously that comes with process interruption and wear and tear costs. Instead of load shedding, if 4MW could be provided for 20 mins, it would give enough time to run up another generator in the event of a power trip and also allow for the generators to be operated all the way up to 100% average continuous power output (with the battery being the spinning reserve). Is there a rule of thumb for how much power output Li ion can give for a given amount of storage? eg, does 4 mWh of storage allow for 2 mW instantaneous output (and therefore I have to capex 8 mMh @ $800/kWh = $6.4 million to achieve 4 mW spinning reserve). If wiring it up so I only need just the absolute storage and the cheaper price it means 1.35 mWh @ $100/kwh = $135k so pretty much a no brainer.
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Nov 18, 2019 13:12
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CombatInformatiker posted:So, naive questions: Why does China build so much coal power capacity, instead of nuclear? I know they have nuclear plants under construction, so why the mix? Why not just one kind of power generation, whichever is cheaper for them? From what I understand, it is t least partly due to their own assessment on how quickly the institutional knowledge can be increased to the scale required. Slapping down a few dozen reactors to 1960's French spec over a decade or so is one thing, throwing down hundreds of gen 2 reactors in half the time is quite another. The capacity for design, construction, parts procurement and operations personnel at such a consistently high QAQC standard that was not expected in the 60's and 70's is no mean feat. China kills thousands of coal workers a year and that is the price of doing business - the CCP can't afford for nuclear accidents potentially impacting Beijing to be normalized. Maybe as they gain confidence in the ability to cookie cutter the plants and support services, they might lean more and more heavily in that direction but for the CCP to survive, they need to expand the electricity network to a program that requires building out coal now. Also, I have started assembling knowledge on local providers for battery storage (as well as reputable suppliers like ABB) for assessing the potential here - going to be a slow process I am sure but will update as we receive the proposals - at the very least it is a good learning experience for one of my local grad engineers. Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 21, 2019 10:56
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Pander posted:Could you please define base loading please? I'm very curious about what you think it means. Baseload usually implies being a significant portion of the power mix. Nuclear in China is less than 5% of electrical generation - just above mild curiosity into useful demonstration/feasibility plant scale level.
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Jan 20, 2020 11:12
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:If you google the term, or just ask, you'll find that a base load power plant is used to describe any plant that mostly operates at a constant rate. These are your hydro electric dams, you big coal power plants, and your nuclear power stations. Base load plants are ones made to run as close to 100% capacity as possible. There are specific definitions of base load that all get confused with each other - but in general terms it is the minimum level (ie, MW, not MWhrs) of power consumed over a reasonable period of time. So you can use wind power by itself for base load power if you have enough capacity such that even when it (the wind generation system as a whole, not individual units) is generating at its minimum the wind power system would still be providing that minimum "baseload" of power.
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Jan 20, 2020 14:30
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I think the confusion ends up being the difference between the base load, and a base load power plant, whos meaning can be confusingly contradictory. I imagine if China's nuclear reactors stopped tomorrow, the idle capacity in its coal fleet, plus hydro / wind etc would make up the difference. In France if the nuclear was shut off, it is brown out time. That is the difference in the usage that Tab was using it as (my understanding of the context anyway). Baseload power is the power source that you use to provide the baseload (ie, approximately all of it). In France it is Nuclear, China it is coal+hydro. In any event outside the delicious taste of language semantics, the point remains that the scale of China's nuclear power is interesting but otherwise unimportant for the Chinese power system except in terms of potential. 35 GW currently installed and only another 945 GW to go to replace coal (assuming no increasing electrical demand). Australia installed 0.1 GW of battery storage good for four hours and it made international news, imagine how much noise it is going to make when Elon does a 100 GW in a 100 days deal for China? It would still take years to cover off what is required there.
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Jan 21, 2020 07:35
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silence_kit posted:Yeah, I'm confused too. Earlier in this thread, it was commonly posted that China is more committed to nuclear power than the US. And that the US is ignorant & backwards when compared to China & other Asian countries for not learning to love the atom. To be fair, negligible/minor for China is enough to now make it third world wide in nuclear electrical generation fleet and without really thinking about it has enough in construction and planning to make it the worlds largest nuclear power generator.
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Jan 22, 2020 14:12
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Awesome installation costs, in line with large reciprocating HFO units on upfront capex with the obviously far lower ongoing costs. How often does an otherwise good well end up not being a goer based upon pollutants? Obvious one being SO2 but as with fracking, it is disturbing a wide variety of geological strata.
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Jan 28, 2020 12:07
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That $20 number is not the cost of solar plus the cost of storing it before distribution, that is the cost from the averaged costs inclusive of solar power that was fed directly to the grid which makes up the majority of power distributed from the combined facility. You had me very excited as we generate power onsite between 10c/kwhr and 20c/kwhr depending on fuel price so this would have been amazing. In light of the Covid enforced economic retraction, are batteries really likely to get cheaper now? Fuel prices are tanking and are gong to be tanked for next five years or so, so I imagine it is going to gut the non-stop number go up expansion of the renewable industry that was evident before covid.
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Mar 24, 2020 18:29
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suck my woke dick posted:Extraction cost is like $5/barrel iirc so if you assume you may eventually have to leave oil in the ground the economically rational thing to do is to flood the world in oil as long as the price is >$5/barrel. And if the price is below $5/barrel? What makes shutting down extra hard is that with the travel restrictions, the old standby of undertaking that huuuuge and long delayed maintenance rebuild of your plant is likely not possible with the current world travel situation. If you shutdown for weeks now, it is still likely you will have that lengthy shut maintenance task still hanging over your head after starting up again. Glad I am in gold, no problems selling that product at the moment.
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Apr 26, 2020 09:11
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Phanatic posted:https://grist.org/climate/the-world-is-on-lockdown-so-where-are-all-the-carbon-emissions-coming-from/ and concrete/construction materials. A lot of people honestly believe a big chunk of the economy is being directly consumed by the worlds billionaires (because paper wealth gets confused with consumption) and that dialing back the economy enough to protect the environment would mainly affect the billionaires. If you went into the climate change thread and asked how their suggested changes are going to affect Africa, you would be shouted down as concern trolling. Well, here we are with a 5% reduction in emissions, billionaires still paper rich and Americans are out of work and going hungry in their millions not six months in. Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 18:43
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MomJeans420 posted:Sorry, I forgot about this thread. Is this thread still as autistic as ever? Do we think renewables are going to skyrocket during a depression? It is doing surprisingly well - O&G investment money (which needs multi billion dollar projects to get them out of bed) is for some reason not excited about O&G as much it was only last year and wants to move into different energy so things like; https://www.boilingcold.com.au/pilbara-wind-solar-farm-gets-environmental-tick/ ($22 billion AUD wind and solar to supply NW Australia and Indo) are getting a lot more interest than used to be the case. Rime posted that projects he is with are still trucking and Australian projects have not stopped.
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May 13, 2020 07:33
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My feels is if the green movement can't help support the development, knocking down of hurdles and general roll out of a serious nuclear expansion, they don't think climate change is all that serious either. Obviously the green movement is a big house and GND is only a part of it but I have to think they are thought leaders and this could be the beginning or portent of greater embracement of nuclear* by the broader green movement. *In combination with other improving technologies such as wind/solar/storage/etc because for nuclear to have done all the heavy lifting (if even possible), it need nurturing and support from the 70's/80's. Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 10:12 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 09:58
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Yeah, there's a whole institutional knowledge (that's perishable) that goes into creating, nurturing and utilizing the scale of artisans required for something like a scaled up nuclear build out. You are talking thousands upon thousands of people that are basically the equivalent of writing computer code without a back space button - only a throw away the work and materials of the previous days work button if there is a mistake and multibillion dollar write-off if your artisan manages to hide his mistake. Then there is the operations side that you need to train people how to utilize complex systems, on auditors and QAQC people to keep the systems robust and the management and supervision that has to work in a much different area of the consequence likelihood risk chart than most industrial people are used to. The US developed the knowledge in the 50's - 60's during a time when the number of casualties you created along the way was just a metric. I would hazard a guess that a lot of the American knowhow that is being used in various plants around the world under construction are people created out of the tail end of that build out. IIRC China specifically reduced their nuclear build out ambitions on account of the scalability of skilled labor (for both construction and operation) and China knows a lot about scaling and does not mind an accident or two more than the US would tolerate.
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Aug 22, 2020 07:50
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CommieGIR posted:In the US case, its pretty much all about profit. If they wanted to they could easily scale up training and resources. The US is willing to dump nearly endless resources into "profitable" Fossil Fuel industry ventures through lobbying, and thanks to a lack of regulation and oversight, companies can keep their money. I disagree that what is preventing the US from converting to nuclear by 2035 is profit for the point I was alluding to earlier and simplified by Phantic - China is not afraid to spend the environment, money or lives on nuclear and they have scaled back their plans due to their lack of ability to scale - it is not a case of well the US just should just pay everyone willing to be a nuclear worker 1 million dollars each a year and then we will have all the suitably trained and experienced nuclear architects, welders, auditors, operators and maintainers we need in the next five years. The original US and French nuclear industries cost a bomb to set up over decades and come at the cost of lives harmed and sites environmentally wrecked in ways not tolerable now. The institutional knowledge that completed the build outs are mostly retired or deceased now so you are not starting from 1980 we just finished 50 reactors lets keep going but from 2020 we just finished one reactor lets think how to build hundreds more. When you see the word "cost" when it comes to problems the scale of climate change - think in terms of lives, culture and environment - not dollars, cents and profit. You want a centralized all powerful and effective unlimited budget solution well then you give Curtis LeMay the orders to increase the use of nuclear and by golly he will achieve it but at what cost? None of this is to say that I think the US couldn't or shouldn't go hard in on nuclear - it will take many solutions to the problem and I strongly believe nuclear is a big part of the long term answer (along with renewables and storage). Just that the environmental agitation against nuclear was very effective and is going to take the industry decades to spin back up.
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Aug 22, 2020 17:27
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CommieGIR posted:And now the Natural Gas lobby is going hard on Natural Gas as a "Green" Energy. 12 under construction is not even close to going to cut it to change all US construction away from carbon emission by 2035 and anther half dozen is scheduled to start does not sound like getting towards the multiples of 12 that are needed. The reason the Chinese are not going faster is not lack of money or lack of willingness to harm communities or the environment or even lack of centralized control - it is simply not feasible for the size of their industry and the Chinese nuclear construction industry is significantly larger and more mature (as a whole) than the US industry. You just plainly don't understand the importance of institutional knowledge when it comes to complex systems and large organizational skills. The Chinese do and consequently have only sized their (by US standards) large build out to not be close to replacing fossil fuel anytime soon. LeMay was chosen specifically because of course you don't want LeMay, but with a centralized all eggs in one basket organization that you propose, a very possible outcome is that the leadership chosen is not suitable but will not be able to be changed without wrecking the schedule. Manhatten was allowed to bop along like it did because there was no pressure on the Manhattan project as far as ending the war. They had the luxury of working in secret with just scientists doing scientist things with a large budget at their own pace with the possibility of it all being for naught or maybe unveiling an awesome new weapon. LeMay had pressure to be constantly and at whatever cost to be working towards ending the war with no option of being for naught and consequently his actions had a lot more collateral damage associated with it than Manhatten. Lemay was publicly solving large world political problems as they evolved within the realms of technical possibility, Manhattan was secretly solving technical ones in the fullness of time. Out of the two, Lemay is the fellow that would win the interview process for leading the US organistion for massive application of nuclear power in the US nearly every time. Again, I will restate that I believe the US should go hard in on nuclear (along with other methods concurrently) but that even if it was a cultural revolution great leap forward, the US is not capable of scaling nuclear to the extent you believe possible.
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Aug 23, 2020 10:01
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Harold Fjord posted:If we are caring about cost effectiveness we are doomed as a species. Cost is not just dollars but also a measure of social damage, health impacts and environmental degradation. If you don't look at what your proposed solution is going to cost in terms of unintended consequences than you are not really agitating for preventing climate change, you are just agitating for change for its own sake.
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Sep 1, 2020 07:34
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CommieGIR posted:Again, this argument makes little to no sense in the face of Global Warming, and considering that the most costliest of energy solutions under the terms you are highlighting are already the most used. Global warming is a problem, it is not the only problem. Feeding India's and China's billions is also a problem. Going to global thermonuclear war with China and India to enforce no use of hydrocarbons there would certainly work towards global warming far more effectively than modular nuclear reactors. The cost of doing so is so high that it is not on the table. Cost is not just dollars and cents and the argument that any mention of the word "cost" is automatically countered by the words "gently caress capitalists" is just displaying an ignorance of how economics apply to more than capitalism or money. For instance, the lives wasted and years (decades?) delay trying to build a nuclear only/dominate solution to global warming is likely a far greater cost than using (reducing levels of) carbon and renewables to bridge the gap from the current high ratio of carbon in energy generation to low/nil carbon nuclear & renewables energy generation. What sort of policy or technology that encourages the world as a whole to transition to no carbon electricity is interesting - another round of woke broke brain main mud chud "if bezzoz money was used, we could feed and power the world without carbon so all we have to do is  " or "this problem is too big a problem to think about, just go ahead and start doing the first thing that comes to mind " is not so interesting.
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Sep 1, 2020 15:35
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CommieGIR posted:The lives/years wasted when Global Warming gets worse will directly impact all other problems, especially food related supply issues. The social cost is already a debt on the balance sheet regardless. Ok, well if your argument is that nuclear and renewables is good and we need to get there as quick as possible than that's fine and agreed. It was highlighted however that nuclear is already being built as fast as possible in China, that the US is far behind China in building capacity and France is de-nuclearizing its power generation so don't expect the world mix to change much anytime soon. It was also discussed that the cost of small modular nuclear does not stack up against other power generation except diesel which while useful for sure, is not going to provide the power to replace jet planes.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:11
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CommieGIR posted:France is denuclearizing not for an rational reason, they are doing so because they put an anti-nuclear advocate in charge of their power infrastructure who is lobbying on behalf of the natural gas industry. To be honest, the renewable industry has lobbied more successfully and more damagingly against French Nuclear. Natural gas peakers support French nuclear (increases its capacity factor assuming the expanded capacity goes into increased peak demand as over electricity consumption increases) whereas wind/solar capacity that does not match up with peak use instead dials back use of nuclear reducing the economics of said nuclear. Gas looks to have increased a little in France, non-hydro renewable has increased a lot more and better accounts for the reduction in total nuclear power generation.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:31
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MomJeans420 posted:If you're fine with conventional oil and gas wells but just don't like fracking, you're the anti-vaxxer of the energy world. China building out a magnitude more than the US of nuclear, wind, solar and hydro is not a great argument for why the US should decrease use of the same and revert to oil/NG. We were talking grid power generation so oil can be and is irrelevant to that discussion for most developed countries. Maybe a good use for small modular nuclear is places like African mines where we need about 15-40 MW around the clock generation instead of the HFO reciprocating engines we use. I'm not sure ad hominem arguments add to the discussion. Agreed that fracking is similar to conventional O&G.
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Sep 2, 2020 07:49
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The other thing about NG vs coal is that coal (generally) releases a lot more nasty particulates including toxic and nucleonic than gas. Even if it was similar in carbon emissions to NG, NG makes sense over coal. Similar to how diesel engines are now out of favor even though they cause less carbon emissions than an equivalent petrol car. VVVAgreed, I really enjoyed it and it highlights that we can yell "THERE IS NO CHOICE BUT TO BUILD OUT NUCLEAR NOW" all we want but yelling don't give you a 15,000 t press VVV Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 07:56
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MightyBigMinus posted:what churlish and childish tripe. gently caress you chud we're doing this without you. To be fair, I immediately thought of Germany as well when I read the post his post referred to. Let's be real, your post was mainly in reference to the political headwinds that nuclear face against political and environmental opposition. Nuclear did not have that opposition in the early days either (France finished off converting to nuclear for instance) and now wind and solar will face increasing environmental and NIMBY organized opposition as well - as evidenced in Germany.
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Sep 4, 2020 15:05
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Dante80 posted:Hello. Nuclear marine propulsion is not going to become mainstream. Ever. And thanks god for that. Emissions are irrelevant when in the last ten years alone, more than a thousand ships have gone to the bottom of the sea. Awesome article you linked. Nuclear fuel is like a lot of other toxic chemical substances - you don't want to spill it but you can do a lot of engineering to prevent it leaching if it goes the wrong place. In the article it mentions the large number of containers lost at sea each year. I have no doubt that the combined tonnage of seriously toxic chemicals released from those containers is more than the 20 or so unrecoverable ships engines a year (assuming you would be willing to go to more effort to recover a nuclear core) that is implied from the report in recent history. Nuclear shipping is likely not going to go ahead as has been said multiple times but I don't really think a few hundred solid cores dropping to the bottom of the ocean over the next century is worse than what radioactive materials comes out of HFO even now. Proliferation and cost are more intransigent issues from what I can see.
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Sep 7, 2020 14:48
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Harold Fjord posted:Since none of us have any actual control over energy policy, your argument still seems to go nowhere except what you prefer people post about. What do you intend us to do with this great wisdom you bestow? We needs lots of nuclear but it is just absolutely not even close to possible to build a fraction of the nuclear we need. China has itself assessed that it is building as much nuclear as it can (without the greentape of the US) and it has something like thirty reactors under construction. The US has far less nuclear construction and expansion of operation capacity than China. The US nuclear industry stopped developing in the 80s and it shows in the capacity that exists now. Thinking about how big the US got during WWII is to think it really got big. It got big compared to horses and steam train Germany but compared to todays world output, its industrial output was laughably tiny. China poured more concrete in the three years at the start of the last decade than the US did for the entirety of the 20th century. The US built ~27 million DWT of liberty ships over five years - AMAZING. A single Brazilian iron ore company was responsible for the building of ~26 million DWT of valemax iron ships over five years (two batches) in the 2010s and you probably have never heard of it. You didn't hear of it because it was a bog standard decision made just to sharpen the pencil on delivered iron pricing into China by a few bucks a tonne. This is not to say we should not build nuclear or that climate change is too hard to not do anything. We indeed should build nuclear and we have to do all we can for climate change. But "40 fold renewables and replace the rest with nuclear in the next 20 years" is as sensible as "finish off developing fusion power in 30 years and we will have enough surplus energy to build out carbon capture from air infrastructure to suck atmospheric carbon back down to 1920's levels in the 20 years after that".
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Sep 8, 2020 07:49
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Dante80 posted:We have to agree to disagree then. I vastly prefer pursuing re-newables + smart grids that would make base load even more moot than it is today, than talking about things that are not going to happen whether I like it or not. I assume you are keen and as excited about the winding up of the germen wind energy buildout then? They don't want anymore and they do vote people out so I guess we should give up working on changing their minds on wind and stick with gas and more PV I guess.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:07
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That’s a really good point. For instance in Australia the bulk of energy generation was built by state governments and as government employees did not give the first care for the environment (my sister was the enviro at Muja power station and struggled with the culture there). Their priorities were keeping the lighting on and that’s what they did. Private power was required to follow environmental laws that public organizations were exempt from. Thousands of more employees than needed on very good salaries but try and get them to simply do fly ash tail dam inspections at half the frequency of the law applied to the private generator across town was a bridge too far.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:48
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Trabisnikof posted:They're already starting to replace some specific peaker plants with batteries in California: Providing stability services is not the same as providing peaking power. Batteries are still not remotely close to providing energy storage except in minute fringe cases. For eg I have a six HFO fueled genset powerhouse generally putting out about 14 MW. We run four of the sets to achieve N+1 which obviously reduces the efficiency of the sets (engines are more efficient at higher load) and I reckon 3+battery would be awesome. I was hitting up ABB for quotes but covid put it all on hold. However my own look shows it’s still far off even in this case which you would think would be a stronger case than normal.
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Sep 23, 2020 10:27
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The whole point of saving the environment groups efforts towards nuclear has been to drag out permitting, construction, commissioning etc of on-lining nuclear power to make it more uneconomical and therefore not worth doing. China has the same pressures but to a far lessor extant so it should not be surprising that their turnaround time is is closer to the technical time (as was experienced say during France's nuclear buildout) than the dragged out time the latest US or British efforts. Also worth noting is that China actually has a reasonably mature nuclear construction industry at the moment (unlike UK, US, etc) and that also confers benefits.
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Oct 14, 2020 23:05
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mediaphage posted:in that vein: yeah that's a lot of bad noise. It would have been nice if the green movement had some smarts and didn't oppose the nuclear industry in the 70's 80's when it had a chance of digging us out of this mess.
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Oct 16, 2020 21:11
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VideoGameVet posted:The US Nuclear industry is its own worse enemy. We should have this run by the Navy and/or followed France’s example. US Navy done its thing essentially without a budget - alright spending multiple billions on construction and upkeep for a smallish (<100 MW) reactor good for 13 voyages (say for a SSN) before it is time to spend another billion or so for decommissioning but that's not gonna compete with solar, wind or especially coal in the 80's*. France is a lot more interesting a question but I think energy self-sufficiency pushed France to over-ride the heeby jeebies that were around at that time before the anti-nuclear movement took hold worldwide. *Cost for a few dozen reactors is mere money and insignificant societal change, to convert an entire power system to nuclear with US Navy methods and overheads of the 80's would have required WWII British empire Indian famine levels of input.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:06
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I am not suggesting to use smallish reactors either, but if you spend billions on each of the series production 10's of MW reactor with low availability (relative to civilian powerstation standards) even without land usage issues or non-stop interference from production and commissioning from NIMBY types and far cheaper labor for operation, how do you think they would have gone with the civilian scale problems and constraints. Essentially the USN didn't have to worry about budget or availability - belt and braces approach to problems, manual everything with harsh/unreasonable working conditions which is fine for navy boats and carriers, not sustainable for multi-decade civilian grid generation.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:36
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Realistically batteries have yet to be installed for storage in any quantity. I feel safe in saying the vast majority of battery capacity installation has been towards stabilizing services discussed above. Even the 100WM installation in South Australia bought at the height of lack of capacity panic was actually bought for stabilizing the increasing amounts of wind on that grid.
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Oct 27, 2020 21:17
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Reminds me of a statement about oil I heard I think some 20 years ago - The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:02
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We need to decarbonise more than just mains electricity and nationalising everything is not the answer. Pricing carbon is a way to let things like cheaper batteries making cheaper to run overtake ICE for the predominate mode of portable power (mainly transport but there are a lot of portable gen sets) while still allowing for all the edge cases where ICE are indeed the better solution without a rule for each and every single minor and major edge case. And if they can create liquid fuel from direct carbon capture and get it cheap enough - then batteries could become the less preferred tech again as everyone swaps back to ICE without another round of legislation to make it so.
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Dec 4, 2020 14:12
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MomJeans420 posted:I wouldn't think I'd need to spell out the obvious conclusion that building new coal plants right now doesn't really jive with ending carbon emissions in 40 years, but I guess I have to consider what thread I'm in. Nothing I posted had anything to do with the US? They need the power now so you build the power plant you can now. You turn it off and decommission when you don't need it and 30 years out of a coal fired powerstation is likely fine anyway. The Chinese are not here to gently caress spiders and they will be hosed by their populace if they don't add more power. Nuclear and renewables cannot be built fast enough (in their estimation) to keep up with the need and as they probably don't want to be tied to Australian LNG exports, then coal it is.
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Dec 7, 2020 17:51
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FreeKillB posted:If you mean 'fine' in the sense that you can fully depreciate the capital costs, maybe. If you mean 'fine' in the sense of climate change, hard disagree. Definitely I meant from a depreciation point of view.
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Dec 7, 2020 20:27
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