So having a system for many, many years & thinking all is well is something to ponder. (I guess)
As we have those 2 PG&E bills. The home bill is high in winter (even though we keep the fireplace burning). Now days that home bill will start to drop a lot.
But the farm PG&E bill increases as we have now turned on the monthly drip irrigation.
Oh my, if only there was a way to beautify those solar panels. 
Thatâs like saying we need to Bell the cat. Everyone agrees itâs what is needed but no one knows how to do it at the energies needed for the power grid.
By the way you were quoting watts, a unit of power. energy is power times time and is measured in units like watt-hours. So you need to specify a time interval. For example itâs pretty easy to generate gigawatts of power over very short times like nanoseconds.
Yes but none of them are practical to store the energy delivered by the grid over even short times like an hour. And they all require huge amounts of other materials to scale up to grid levels. Btw, I think that the government should fund $billions into research into grid level energy storage. But we need to make sure they work and are not more destructive of the environment than our current system before we pump $trillions of dollars into systems that donât work.
And we should continue research into truly low carbon dioxide emissions power sources like nuclear power. We have long experience that nuclear power is safe and reliable and is available 24/7/365 and does not require battery storage.
Thereâs a finite amount of fossil fuels on earth as well.
Unlike fossil fuels, Lithium can be recovered from used batteries, as can nickel and cobalt.
Lithium is also in seawater: The worldâs oceans contain an estimated 180 billion tons of lithium. There are methods to extract it, not economical yet, but likely to be so eventually should they be developed.
In addition, there are materials where lithium is currently discarded as waste, e.g. lithium micas are mined for tin and tungsten but the lithium is discarded as waste. In addition, geothermal and oil well brines could be accessed for lithium.
There were people ten to twenty years ago who said there wasnât possibly enough lithium for laptops, cellphone, and batteries of all types. In the case of lithium, there are actually gigantic resources, like the sea.
Either there will be more lithium or there will be other substances used. Possibly, just recycling lithium from used batteries might be adequate for the industry.
I think itâs useful to look at all the facts because otherwise one might be dispensing misinformation. One needs to present the whole picture. There are ways to solve problems, which mankind has been doing for thousands of years.
Did you just predict the next global ecological disaster human beings will cause?
Sure, but it requires nuclear waste storage for 10,000 years. And nobody wants it in their back yard.
tiny amounts of nuclear waste are produced if we re-process the fuel rods. And no you cannot make nuclear weapons from reprocessed plutonium from power plants. The Pu 240 isotope produced in large quantities in power reactors stops that. The reactors used to make weapons grade plutonium are only run for short periods of time compared with power reactor
When plutonium is produced in a nuclear reactor, inevitably some 240 Pu (as well as heavier plutonium isotopes, including 241 Pu and 242 Pu) is produced along with the more desirable 239 Pu. The heavier isotope is not as readily fissionable, and it also decays by spontaneous fission, producing unwanted background neutrons.
itâs such a small amount that it doesnât have to be in anybodyâs backyard.
Not just the waste storage, the reactor itself. Go ahead and announce plans for a nuclear power plant, and see what the response is from area residentsâŚ
Not just the waste storage, the reactor itself. Go ahead and announce plans for a nuclear power plant, and see what the response is from area residentsâŚ
people can get used to it. France produces over 70% of its energy from nuclear power and Sweden produces over 40%.
How about the waste generated producing the huge number of windmills and solar panels required to generate grid level power because of the extremely low density of solar power. Itâs only about 1 kilowatt per square meter at the tropics.
And the noise and light pollution in the houses of people near the windmills.
Both France and Sweden are reducing the use of nuclear power and expanding renewables.
France plans to shut many of its nuclear reactors, 4-6 in the next 10 years, and 14 by 2035. France is building many large wind farms. France gets about 10% of current electricity from wind farms.
Sweden has shut down one nuclear reactor recently but is planning at the moment to keep existing reactors and possibly replace them but not build new ones. Sweden is building huge wind farms, some in the far North and some offshore. Swedenâs current wind power supplies over 20% of its electricity.
Nio has very comprehensive plans for EV infrastructure. Nio is making sure no one will be out of juice:
âNIOâs Power Network continues to expand, with over 200 Power swap stations and 142 supercharging Power stations⌠Battery swapping takes just under 3 minutes with the Power Swap 2.0âŚNIO also unveiled the 'Power Northâ plan, under which âit will deploy a total of 100 Power Swap stations, 120 Power Mobiles, 500 Power Charger stations with over 2,000 Power Chargers, and over 10,000 destination chargers in eight provinces and autonomous regionsâ by 2024.â
ââŚNIO also has a new charging solution called Power Mobile, where owners can request a charge on the spot. NIO is marketing this as âa flexible and convenient portable power bank to your car,â with one of over 300 charging vans sent to the vehicleâs location (just like hailing a rideshare would work) to recharge 100km range in 10 min. Other manufacturers do not offer something of this sort, and access to flexible and new charging solutions for NIOâs customers provides a competitive advantage. NIOâs worry-free plan includes 15 times/month of Power valet (pick-up, charge, and return vehicle), while typical ownership benefits include lifetime free out of town power service and battery swapping, once per month.â
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4423828-nio-navigating-chip-shortage-norway-and-reasons-to-buy
âNIOâŚOwners have access to lifetime free warranty and roadside assistance (no time/mileage limits) and lifetime free in-car connectivity up to 8GB cellular data per month. Door-to-door valet service assistance, similar to Power valet, and a worry-free service plan for RMB11,600 annually wrap up the offerings.â
Nio reported that half of car sales in the first quarter elected the Battery Swap option.
Do you know how much federal land there is in the middle of nowhere? The disposal of nuclear waste has to be one of the most easily handled âproblemsâ with nuclear power. The biggest problem with nuclear power plants is that they are all built uniquely and new ones are essentially cost prohibitive. We need a single design (like when localities built elementary schools in the 80s) that can be put in multiple places. Instead of spending billions to design a nuke plant from the ground up at every site, find sites that would accommodate the cookie cutter plant. Sadly, the media and the left have done too good a job scaring people away from nuke power that it will likely never happen.
Maybe we should put you in charge of worldwide nuclear waste, although I have a relative who works in the nuclear field and he says it isnât that easy. In fact, itâs very complicated, requiring very advanced and very expensive containment, high security, and constant monitoring by highly trained personnel in protective gear. Plus it is extremely dangerous if it leaks or otherwise has problems.
The fact of the matter is no company will build nuclear plants in the US without government loan guarantees and government guaranteeing their insurance. This is not a new thing. They demanded this in the 1950s before there was any environmental movement. Interested companies refused to build any reactors without a massive guaranteed insurance subsidy from the government. The Price-Anderson Act was passed in 1957.
The nuclear industry itself is an almost completely government developed and subsidized program, getting vastly more govt. support than renewables have in their entire history. An Act of Congress was passed giving the civilian nuclear power program access to nuclear technology in 1954.
They must like to pay high prices. As of 2020, France paid $.22 per kilowatt hour while Germany paid $0.36.
I think the investment opportunities more likely lie with the battery manufacturers than with the automakers. Whoever comes up with a 2x battery could be a 100x investment.
I guess they should get rid of their nuclear reactors if theyâre so expensive. Solar and wind are now cheaper.
?? Germany got rid of the reactors in a ridiculous overreaction to Fukushima and installed wind and solar with coal plants as backup. Germany pays .36 per kilowatt hour while France did not get rid of their nuclear power and they pay .22 per kilowatt hour
The companies that build nuke plants donât care where the loans come from, they just want competitive rates. They canât get them on the open market because of the endless red tape involved in the process to build the plants. There have been hundreds of millions spent on plants that were never completed. The fault for that can be spread around, but the local, state, and federal governments are not blameless in that issue. Like I said before, building new nuke plants is cost prohibitive for the main reason that every plant is built from the ground up with brand new plans unique to that plant that will never be used again. That cost prohibition includes loans. We donât have a free market in our country for electricity, so I donât see a problem with the government subsidizing the nuke program - IF there were a plan to make it not cost prohibitive. Might as well subsidize something that we know works and has low carbon emissions, right? But the only way to make them economical would be with cookie cutter plants and busting the NIMBY protests. I donât see that happening without a shift in public opinion on nuke power, so itâs pretty much a non-option in the US right now.
James Hansen, former NASA climate scientist, and three other prominent climate scientists are calling for an enlarged focus on nuclear energy in the ongoing Paris climate negotiations.
âNuclear, especially next-generation nuclear, has tremendous potential to be part of the solution to climate change,â Hansen said during a panel discussion yesterday. âThe dangers of fossil fuels are staring us in the face. So for us to say we wonât use all the tools [such as nuclear energy] to solve the problem is crazy.â
More from James Hansen on nuclear power:
What I find disturbing is that environmentalists who recognize that we have a problem with fossil fuels, that we are, if we donât find an alternative, that we are guaranteed that our children and grandchildren will suffer consequences. So we should be looking for alternatives for fossil fuels. And to turn down the potential of nuclear without looking at it⌠You have to agree, some countries some states may decide they can get along without nuclear power, and that is fine. But we should find out what itâs potential is. So why shut off the R&D, which was progressing very well, thatâs extremely irresponsible. And yet itâs really forced on the government by the strong preferences of a rather small number of strong anti-nuclear people, who manage to make a significant portion of the public believe that nuclear is just unacceptably dangerous. Thatâs a decision that should be made after scientific analysis. Itâs not something that you should have Jane Fonda or someone pushing the decision of a nation without objective analysis of what the potential is.
We do need authoritative scientific bodies that look at and discuss the relative merits of different approaches for energy. And the National Academy of Science and the Royal Society in Great Britain have done that and issued reports, and itâs generally concluded that we need to push the research and development and move toward even more effective and safe use of nuclear power. Itâs analogous â yeah there have been a couple of accidents that were significant over the last fifty years, but itâs like with airplanes. If you have an airplane crash, that doesnât mean that you decide: âoh, weâre not going to have airplanes anymoreâ. You find out what the problem was and you make the next one safer. Itâs very clear in the case of nuclear technology that there are approaches that are far superior to existing light water reactors and we should be persueing those, because we do not have any alternatives on the horizon that can come close to competing with that.