Then much later quotes someone making the every obvious counterpoint, that we could install the nuclear on land and use that clean electrical power to manufacture the clean fuels.
Now just replace those land based nuclear plants with a cheaper source of clean electricity and we have a solution that looks more feasible.
One efficient solution for marine transportation would be Hydrogen storage as Ammonia, but it requires a new engine and it's a technology that is still in its infancy.
Nuclear ships and submarines exist for decades and are a workable technology. The economics might still be off, especially considering the full maintenance and decommissioning. But if there is a place to try small modular reactors that get cheaper and more reliable as they are produced in series, this is it.
The ships are rolling off the production line now, the big task is a massive (massive!) ramp up of production of fuels to fill them.
Carbon and other pollution fees are part of the solution to kick the market off, but again they're already in place (and would help nuclear powered ships equally)
Surely not hydrogen since its risk of exolosion is terrifying
In this review article, hydrogen and ammonia are classed as e-fuels.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
> Another example is transforming electricity into e-fuels (like hydrogen)
> hydrogen can be further converted to synthetic electricity-based fuels (e-fuels) as chemically bound RE and such as e-methane [27], [28], Fischer-Tropsch fuels [29], [30], e-ammonia [31], [32], and e-methanol [33], [34].
(that last paragraph doesn't say hydrogen is not an e-fuel, it says it's not a "synthetic" e-fuel, as hydrogen is as feedstock for synthesis here.)
It won't be hydrogen, because hydrogen is volumetrically not dense enough, it would likely be something like methanol or methane or maybe, with the right tech breakthrough, longer chains of carbon.
You definitely don't want a nuclear plant generating this, because nuclear is way too expensive. Today, right now, solar energy stored in batteries is cheaper than new nuclear. And every year that price falls further. And most of the energy would never even have to be stored in batteries, and PV is cheaper than operating already-paid-for natural gas generators in most markets right now, (and getting cheaper).
The energy world is being disrupted, but the incumbents aren't paying attention, and most of the US media is devoted to covering it up and discrediting cheaper energy, to benefit incumbent fossil fuel energy companies, the ones buying lots of advertisements.
Can you provide links to data supporting this? Everything I’ve read is that major solar installations that don’t have the perfect conditions are still often more expensive than nuclear.
No solar installation is cheaper than nuclear once you start factoring in batteries for many reasons (one is that large scale battery installations are still expensive and the other is that you have to charge the battery which means a non trivial part of your solar/wind capacity is going to charge the batteries)
This doesn't mean a drop-in 365/24/7 replacement for nuclear, but it's enough (if widely installed) to render nuclear irrelevant, as no one will want to build a new nuclear power plant if the grid is saturated with such solar plants -- nuclear will be utterly unsuitable for the wildly unsteady residual demand.
Battery price declines have accelerated recently, as usual driven by China. Last year LFP cells in China were going for $125/kWh; this year they could be going for as little as $60/kWh, with some predictions as low as $45/kWh.
https://cnevpost.com/2024/01/17/battery-price-war-catl-byd-c...
What’s the planned energy source that will be handling that unsteady residual demand? Sounds like in most cases that would mean there’s a blackout or fossil fuels no?
Also I think it’s telling that China, the center of PV and battery manufacturing is investing heavily in nuclear tech. The costs of nuclear are disproportionately high vs where they should be and they’ve already started building meltdown-proof gen iv reactors while we’re docking around with smr.
China's nuclear investments are pulling up short compared to their renewable investments. They too are evidence renewables are beating nuclear.
It's going to be clear very soon even to the most recalcitrant nuclear fans that their technology is doomed.
Source for this claim?
I wonder if metal e-fuels like, say, magnesium could be used. These might be more compatible with direct conversion of chemical energy to electrical energy. Oxidized magnesium could be directly released into the ocean to help reduce its pH. More aggressively: sodium?
> 48% of renewable electricity used to convert e-fuels into liquid is lost along the process, while up to 70% of the fuel's energy is lost upon combustion.
Not as bad as I thought tbh.
deploy existingg tech, work on the remaining problems
if there are angels here for deep sea clean shipping, kindly DM me
pros: global moat, feasible tech, price parity at $80/barrel , massive upside
cons: very early, capex heavy, long timelines