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Comment by partingshots | Hacker News Reader

Batteries are also getting cheaper and improving in capacity at immense rates too no? It seems like a double whammy against nuclear, unless there’s something I’m missing?

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Triple whammy if you include the larger and larger capacity factor of ever growing wind turbines (and offshore). Even if you're overprovisioning 2x and fill in with battery capacity for some of the shrinking holes inbetween, you'll end up cheaper than nuclear.

Which, on the other hand also still does not factor in the externalities of the still-not-solved issues of final deposition of nuclear waste (some quote 38 billion still outstanding for just getting rid of the current ones that haven't been factored into historic electricity prices), defending against proliferation and antitrust issues due to the massive capital investment and minimum size of nuclear power plants.

I used to be pro-nuclear at some point, but just looking at the current wholesale prices and trends, it's basically game over for nuclear.

Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.

So cost, lifecycle and externalised environmental damage is what I would say is missing here.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-tr...

Late edit: Batteries certainly have their place in smoothing out the grid inputs, I don't want to come across as saying they are not useful when they certainly are. In South Australia the newly installed grid scale batteries have paid themselves off within a few years.

The article linked makes clear the engineering tradeoffs involved, and as a society we should always base these decisions on the numbers over emotion. Think there is a bright future for small modular reactors in remote and rural areas if communities are willing to accept them.

> Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

The significance of this is a function of our ability to recycle them.

I happened to read an article a few weeks back regarding Aluminum-Air batteries, and a potential use in EVs, yet while they might not be ideal for EVs, a potential ability for use in the grid might be convenient.

> Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

Based on what?

> Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.

Ah, you're one of those people.

Never mind, carry on.

We just spent 2 decades saying this.

I suppose we’re going to say it for another.

that’s 30 years of emissions that could have been avoided.

We've also spent 30+ years trying to build nuclear plants on time and on budget and we've been unable to do that.

Even with that, 20% of US electricity is still from nuclear.

We managed to build these before the industry became expensive.

Now Germany and the United States are rushing to close the operating plants.

I’m not sure why we can’t figure out how to build a standard design and replicate it

Because we can't build anything larger than an office building on time and on budget.

Perhaps because that standard design didn't work out?

Even Switzerland is shutting down nuclear plants and they managed to build the longest railroad tunnel of the world without budget overruns and half a year before due date.

In Switzerland it's a political decision same as Germany it has nothing todo with cost or the ability to run the plants.

That's not so clear cut. Mühleberg near Berne has said that 2019 they didn't make profit, however the operator company BKW never published gains with that plant.

https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/kanton-bern/das-akw-mueh... (paywalled)

And we've failed doing that with software for longer, yet we still keep building software.

That's fine, but show your work. Nuclear gives us 24/7 reliable power. What is the cost comparison for renewables for the same product?

It's obvious that energy sources based on local meteo conditions don't have 24/7 reliability. The question is: how much of that reliability do we need? What would be possible if we did forgo some? Most of our industrial processes are optimized for pure efficiency (optimizing asymptotic behavior with no regard to constants), which is biased towards high-energy, constantly running chains and immense infrastructure. These need reliability. If we optimize for more smaller workloads, which can start/stop depending on local conditions (and power source), then we loose some efficiency in the process but gain a lot in the simplicity of the energy supply chain (which may in the end translate in lower/comparable overall energy consumption).

Electricity production in the U.S. is only about 2% of GDP, but basically every economic activity relies on electricity to function. Having very much of the electric supply be truly intermittent would create enormous costs elsewhere in the economy. If you're going to power the U.S. on renewables, you're going to need a lot of storage to get the needed reliability, so if you're comparing costs, you need to compare an equivalent end product.

> how much of that reliability do we need?

There are two guiding clues for that. One is to look at https://www.electricitymap.org/ranking and see how Germany is doing. One can derive the weather based on how brown the color is.

The second clue is energy prices swings more heavier as a country replaces nuclear with renewable. Heavy energy using industries can't double production when prices shrink by 50%, but they will stop production when costs exceed profits. This is already happening in Sweden when prices jumped by +70% this winter. It will be interesting to see what happens when the steel industry is becoming even more dependent on energy prices and will have to stop for weeks during the winter, and the effect that will have on employment contracts.

There’s no prospect of batteries acting as base load supply anytime in the foreseeable future. Batteries aren’t even great for peak supply yet. Those big grid-scale battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilisation and a limited amount of useful arbitrage.

That is if, not only can we keep making them, we produce them at massive scales without inciting coups around the world for Lithium [1]. Because let us be honest with ourselves, the CIA has staged coups around the world many-a-times [2], and iirc but can't locate that some of said instances were done to support private entities.

[1] https://www.indepthnews.net/index.php/opinion/3735-we-will-c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Lithium for energy storage is not the only option. Pumped water already has been a thing for decades. Additionally other avenues are being explored like [1] pumped air and [2] lifting concrete weights.

[1] https://www.planete-energies.com/en/medias/close/what-compre...

[2] https://profittrends.com/energy-investing/renewable-energy/s...

Interesting solutions, especially the latter, absolutely brilliant, despite the reduction in efficiency, it probably trumps batteries wrt to first materials used.

> improving in capacity at immense rates There is almost no increase in capacity at least not without making the batteries bigger.

Just curious where we are we at in terms of the environmental aspects of mass scale heavy duty battery production?

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