2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward
It's my understanding that nuclear power performs very favorably in these metrics as well. Living near a coal-fired plant isn't very healthy, and probably exposes you to more radiation anyways[1].
I don't really follow the alternative power source news, but I don't think anybody's argument actually stops at "it's better than the worst." Most people seem to think that nuclear power makes a good choice because it's a consistent source of power and has a proven track record (see: France).
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
(Developing countries are still using it, and China is still acting as if it were a developing country. But coal simply isn't the alternative to nuclear any more in any developed country. Even natural gas is better for the environment than coal.)
I don't think anybody disagrees with that. The claim is only that there are lots of sufficient reasons for nuclear power that don't stop at "it's not the worst."
Granted, you would also need to do the same for whatever you're comparing it against. Fossil fuels have profound negative impact beyond fatalities, like pollution, supporting cruel regimes, environmental spills, and more. And also climate change.
Dams exacerbate water evaporation and disrupt ecosystems. Solar panels require vast amounts of land to generate significant power.
> 2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward
And what are those alternatives? Renewables need to be backed by a dispatchable source to deal with intermittency. If your country already gets 30-50% of its power from hydroelectricity that's great. But for most places, this means fossil fuels. The reality is that the alternatives like wind and solar are really wind and solar plus fossil fuels.
So, burning LNG continues for a while because the equipment is already in place, and nobody wants to invest immediately in what might not end up the cheapest storage, or anyway is not yet nearly so cheap as it will shortly be when volume balloons.
Underground compressed air is compatible with existing LNG turbines. Liquified-air storage has useful side products. Fuel you will make anyway is a good storage medium too.
We are going to be in this markedly temporary situation until we experience a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage that yields several orders-of-magnitude improvement. Breakthrough technology that's 10-20 years away often stays 10-20 years away for a lot longer than that.
There are plenty of known viable storage methods, which you oddly omit all of except compressed air. There are no impediments to their implementation beyond simply scaling up; no new materials science, no new physics or chemistry, or industrial process barriers need to be solved. It is just not clear which will end up cheapest in each use environment.
Other, less mature technologies, e.g. electrically synthesizing ammonia and hydrogen efficiently, need to be developed anyway, and once developed, will also be incidentally useful for storage. Their independent industrial demand will drive fast improvement, so they may come to displace the others.
Until one of those storage methods actually becomes viable at scale, rather than in laboratories, we'll be burning fossil fuels.
Will some technological breakthrough not only make these alternatives viable, but superior to existing storage by multiple orders of magnitude? Maybe, but a massive leap like that is not something we can depend on happening.
A GW-scale liquified air plant is now under construction in UK, after 100% successful pilot projects. Numerous underground compressed-air projects are running, successfully. Neither depends on even a single breakthrough.
Pumped hydro works, but only in certain places. Batteries work, but are expensive and compete with other uses. Alternatives cheaper than batteries are being fielded today. Until they are ready for full-scale use, NG generation is temporarily adequate. Its temporary use in no way invalidates wind-and-solar, backed by storage of a form to be determined, as a primary long-term energy source.
Multiple orders of magnitude is absolutely the norm for scale-up of mature technology, newly useful, like the examples cited. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Who do you imagine you are fooling?
What do you mean? I addressed the shortcomings of the alternatives you cited: Hydrogen has difficulties with large scale electrolysis. Ammonia is just the storage mechanisms for hydrogen, so it suffers from the same problem. You referenced hydrogen and ammonia here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696690), so accusing me of diverting attention is rather strange. Compressed air can only achieve good efficiency if the compressed air is not allowed to cool down, which needs good insulation. Can you provide a source for the GW-scale compressed air project? Because all of the ones I can find are in the hundreds of megawatt hours [1]. Again, we need tens of TWh.
I think you're making the grave mistake of assuming semiconductor scaling applies to large infrastructure projects. This is very rarely the case for machinery and big physical engineering projects. Are we able to build dams for 1/1,000th the price as in the 1930s? Are we able to build jet turbines for 1/1,000th the cost? Or cars? We've had plenty of time to optimize and achieve the vast gains we supposedly achieve. Cars did see a sharp decline in cost, but it took a breakthrough to achieve that: assembly line manufacturing. And even then it was more like a factor of 20x improvement, not 1,000x.
Ultimately, we fundamentally disagree on whether is safe to assume that technologies in either the prototyping or demonstrator phase will become 1,000 times cheaper than the present options. I think it's unsafe to assume they will become viable at all let alone orders of magnitude better than the present options. Clearly you think otherwise, and believe in it with such conviction you accuse those who say otherwise of acting in bad faith. I don't think there's anything more productive to say here other that time will tell.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storag...
I specifically cited ammonia and hydrogen as examples that may someday take over the storage load from the immediately viable alternatives I listed. (BTW, Ammonia is, in fact, not "just the storage mechanism for hydrogen", but is rather the heir apparent to bunker fuel for shipping. An industrial-scale electric ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need just 1000 more of them to fuel all shipping.)
Underground compressed air does, in fact, get excellent insulation from the earth packed around it. Underwater compressed air does not, in fact, need insulation, because it may absorb heat from the water on its way out.
There is no need for air compression to become 1000x cheaper than at present. Air compression is mature technology. It only needs 1000x bigger capacity, achieved simply by scaling up well-understood technology. There is no need for air liquification to become 1000x cheaper. It is already mature, and efficient. It just needs to be scaled up, as we see occurring.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
He claimed, with this link as backing, that all nuclear waste would fit in a small space, when in fact the link overlooks the vast majority of nuclear waste and considers only a minuscule though important subset, the spent fuel. We don’t even know if the source article is playing more tricks with words, but the mistake with gullibility here is already bad enough.
To give some credit where (malicious) credit is due, I do believe that the creators of the web page may have been striving for the goal of fooling such gullible people in exactly this way on exactly this matter. While technically honest, the site is dishonest and disingenuous in spirit, because it’s promoting such a misunderstanding, with a clear agenda and a not-so-innocent reason for doing so.
2) How about "it's better than other power sources that can consistently service base load"?
It's a situation where both intermittent renewable sources and nuclear plants would benefit from a way to store excess produced energy
You are right about Cobalt, but it is already being reduced/removed.
It's not even comparable to fossil fuel mining (even though technically it is fossil fuel mining). Because it's recyclable, so we aren't "losing" any material, in the form of converting it to an unproductive/hazardous byproduct.