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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

If it was the best, the entire US commercial generator fleet wouldn't be on death's door due to the economics.

If you want to subsidize the last 59 US nuclear plants based on their low CO2 emissions, extending their operating license (if it can be done safely) until cleaner base load arrives, that's a sound decision. Building more nuclear is not. I question if we even have the fortitude to fund safe cleanup of existing decommissioned plants (spent rod casks have been sitting onsite in Zion, IL 19 years after that nuclear generator has been shut down, with nowhere to go [1]).

Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear ever will, considering every automaker is moving to electric vehicles [2].

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/resizer/8tYxXLAlIOkm61zbZmVII...

[2] https://about.bnef.com/blog/energy-storage-investments-boom-... (Energy Storage Investments Boom As Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade)

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> Batteries will get cheaper faster than nuclear ever will

That's a bold claim. Batteries could also suffer from law of diminishing returns. It might not be physically possible to store energy much more densely, without catastrophic failures.

> That's a bold claim.

I don't think it is [1] [2]. Regardless of cell and pack density, there's plenty of open land to install outdoor enclosures. Utility storage isn't cars, where density is terribly important.

[1] https://i2.wp.com/evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/09/100-kwh-tesla-battery-c...

I fear you do not sufficiently appreciate the gravitas of the energy storage problem.

The big Hornsdale power reserve in Australia is 130 MWh. Say you want to store 6 hours of US average energy consumption. That's 1 500 000 MWh, or 11 000 Hornsdale stations. Just for 6 hours of electricity storage.

It's ~6000 Tesla Megapack stations [1], along with HVDC transmission lines (if we're upgrading transmission lines from AC->DC, drop those aerial lines underground while you're at it for reliability and to stave off the NIMBYs). I entirely appreciate the scale of the problem we're facing regarding energy storage (climate change keeps my up at night), hence my arguments for solutions available today, not those that might (might!) start producing power in a decade. You can buy these battery stations today (Tesla quotes a 3 month deployment cycle). You can recycle their battery cells today.

There are over 7,000 power plants in the United States run by over 3,000 companies. There are over 55,000 substations and over 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. I don't believe what I'm proposing is unreasonable. Hard? Sure. But unreasonable? Absolutely not. Going to the Moon was hard, and we still went to the Moon.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-megapack-utility-scal...

Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries? Economies of scale can result in far greater cost reductions than are possible simply by reducing the amount of needed materials for a given capacity.

> Why is energy density necessary for cheap batteries?

So you can put them in cars, boats, planes, and other things.

Yeah, I know, we have Teslas. But do you know it's twice the weight of an ICE alternative? Weight matters a lot. While we've made a lot of progress in the last few decades, the best research batteries are still 100x below any fossil fuel in terms of energy density.

Which Tesla is twice the weight of an equivalent ICE car?

The Model S (2019) appears to look roughly the same and appears to be roughly the same size as the Audi A7 (2019), and is just a bit heavier (Tesla curb weight 4883 lbs, Audi 4332 lbs).

https://www.cars.com/research/compare/?acodes=USC90TSC024F0,...

I was comparing with ranges, sorry should have specified. Equivalent cars with ranges. Though maybe this isn't the best because a model S is a sports car (I guess they are heavier than I thought). To better compare I think that Audi is a good comparison (price, style, luxury).

So though they're weights are similar the Audi has a range of 424.6/559.9 and the Tesla has 285. That's 50.1%-67.2% of the range (let's say 60%).

Yes, ~300mi is a mostly comfortable range, but it's the same weight for 60% the range (and 5k more). To get the same range we'd have to add a ton of weight, which would probably push us to 2x (maybe the original comparison was decent enough?).

Model S and X range is close to 370 miles with the long range battery and Raven drivetrain (in production for several months), not 300.

With Supercharger stations being no more than 150 miles apart (and that distance shrinking as more stations keep coming online), home charging, and per mile costs half that of internal combustion vehicles you mentioned, it’s a no brainer even considering the vehicle is somewhat (but not outrageously) heavier.

https://supercharge.info/map

> If it was the best, the entire US commercial generator fleet wouldn't be on death's door due to the economics.

This is an extreme oversimplification of the issues in nuclear. I'll suggest it's as extreme of an oversimplification as saying "the only reason we don't have nuclear is because public FUD".

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