Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

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People (nuclear advocates usually), like to pretend that the only way to deal with this is an unrealistic number of expensive lithium batteries or fossil fuels but there is also:

* Smart meters that charge cars/turn on heat pump storage when electricity is plentiful. Already being done. German aluminum smelting (heavy electricity user) is dialed up and down depending on live electricity prices.

* Pumped storage. Coire glass will built soon in the UK - pumping out a max of 1.5GW, snowy 2 in Australia will store 350GWh - at the dirt cheap price of $6 billion. 90% efficient. Published studies confirm that, unlike for dams, the geography for this is very plentiful (contrary to nuclear lobby propaganda which routinely and dishonestly argues the exact opposite).

* Hydrogen/windgas - only about 50% efficient round trip but it's easy to store hundreds of GWhs for months, so will be useful to create seasonal storage when, one day (god willing) we get to the point where overbuilt wind and solar manages to supply 100% of current demand and large pumped storage/battery installations are full and we want seasonal storage for the unshiftable demand during the odd windless and dark weeks.

And the double irony is that all those things actively help make nuclear grids more efficient and so have been done for decades with nuclear power in France.

>Published studies confirm that, unlike for dams, the geography for this is very plentiful (contrary to nuclear lobby propaganda which routinely and dishonestly argues the exact opposite).

Could you please link this research? I have yet to find a thorough evaluation of pumped hydro resource availability anywhere.

https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

>We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.

Yea. Burning hydrogen/methane is a last resort if all the other balancing options are not sufficient. It’s expensive but it’s not a problem for two months a year.

> People (nuclear advocates usually), like to pretend that

When is this nonsensical tribalism going to end? Where are all the non-tribal people who are evaluating this stuff on facts and information alone? Why do we hear from the self-disqualifying tribalists?

Rant over. You're right - if we all buy cars with giant lithium batteries in then we need to buy fewer non-car lithium batteries.

And yes, pumped storage exists, and more will exist, but we have to decide how many point-solutions we need to replace consistent generation.

> Hydrogen/windgas - only about 50% efficient round trip

Moving electricity (at least in the UK) is only 90% [0] efficient on transmission alone. So, getting the power to the generation, which then becomes hydrogen at 50% capacity, to later burn at a certain efficiency and turn into electricity that gets transmitted at 90% efficiency, feels wrong. Unless your "round trip" figure includes the transmission losses, but then 50% feels too high to be doing that.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/550583/electricity-losse...

>When is this nonsensical tribalism going to end? Where are all the non-tribal people who are evaluating this stuff on facts and information alone? Why do we hear from the self-disqualifying tribalists?

Remember when anthropogenic global warming denial was mainstream? For MANY MANY years after the scientific evidence was completely undeniable.

Appeals to moderation were everywhere. The media would routinely play deniers with the scientific credentials of a ferret against actual scientists to maintain the appearance of balance and neutrality and claim it was an even debate.

Believers in global warming got filed into a tribe (still are, in many ways) hence they got "instant disqualification" from appeal-to-moderates like yourself who craved the fake balance the media served up.

Those people were almost as bad as the denialists. They werent at all interested in the truth - just some kind of social "balance" or harmony.

The only logical fallacy is you thinking that people changing their minds as more evidence came along is now a reason to attack people who disagree with you on any topic now. I'm not appealing to moderates, or to anyone.

I'm appealing to reason, as opposed to tribalism. You are citing the hurt of a tribe you have decided exists as a group to hurt, and justifying talking badly to other people who you imagine are in another tribe is, well, tribalism. Just stop and we can all have a useful discussion.

The parent said "For MANY MANY years after the scientific evidence was completely undeniable". Maybe he's saying that both sides aren't equally valid and taking their opinions as soon is a waste of resources.

I'm not saying both sides are valid, nor about taking opinions. Where are you getting this?

I'm saying stop thinking in terms of sides, and just present reasoned positions. Why is this so hard to grasp?

I did present reasoned positions. You just looked past them as your anger welled up.

For me the jabs were about skewering repetitive propaganda from staggeringly wealthy lobby groups with deafening megaphones that emerges from the mouths of the easily duped.

I want to make sure that the easily duped felt seen.

At the end of the day, intermittent renewables and nuclear are both low-externality energy sources chasing the same public funding. Neither competes with high-externality energy sources except in rare situations, and since the public purse isn't infinite they're in competition with each other.

So it'll probably be a while. FWIW, I'm on the intermittent renewables camp, wish there was more civility in the debate, recognize the worst behavior comes from my side of the aisle and still think pro-nuclear arguments are their own worst enemies.

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