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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Battery prices have dropped 50% in the last 12 months.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/03/07/battery-prices-collap...

That’s great.

Grid-scale battery storage is still a terrible idea when you can simply build a nuke station that does the same job with 0.01% of the waste material and space used.

Nuclear has the opposite but related problem of solar; whereas you often generate excess solar and need to store it somewhere during the day, nuclear energy often generates too much during low demand times and has excess energy to store as well. And you can’t easily scale down nuclear during lower demand hours.

One of the largest pumped hydro stations was originally built to store excess energy from a nuclear power plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...

Similar time frame. Slightly smaller capacity, Northfield Mountain was brought online to store power from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Interestingly the pumped hydro facility is still functioning as a grid battery, even after the nuclear plant was decommissioned for no longer being cost effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield_Mountain_(hydroelec...

I think "simply" is doing a lot of work there. Work that completely overwhelms it.

Building a new nuclear plant is a hugely capital intensive project, not to mention the massive amount of time it takes to complete it and get it fully online.

Places like France (that feed a huge percentage of their demand with nuclear) don't somehow magically have super cheap energy. Nuclear plans cost a lot to build, and a lot to operate.

Either global warming is a serious catastrophe or it isn't.

If it isn't, this is all moot and we should burn cheap, clean, abundant natural gas.

If it is, surely it isn't a problem to shell out more money to get green baseload generations from nuclear? We need to meet base demand around the clock, and nuclear is the least harmful way to do it.

Or we invest our money in the technology with the largest bang for the buck: renewables.

Then follow the research to handle the resiliency, still at vastly lower costs than anything nuclear.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Those huge capital costs are certainly limiting China's expansion into nuclear:

    China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years

~ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...

If they were cheaper they'd likely build 300 in that time.

or 1500

woa there, they've only got three of these:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Excavation-of-Ch...

:-)

right, you could imagine a much higher level of investment. that waste isolation pilot plant is 400 million dollars over 7 years, 50 million dollars a year. the 217 gigawatts of solar power the prc installed last year represent an investment of probably 88 billion dollars last year, assuming 40¢ per peak watt. so the prc spent more money building solar plants in the last five hours than they will spend on that nuclear waste facility in this entire year

and you say they only have three of them?

"Simply" building a nuke station sounds like an oxymoron.

Plus 0.01% is quite small but if it's got U235 it will still be more deadly millions of years later than thousands of percent of other deadly toxic highly energetic materials such as pure TNT, in the time the uranium half-life has barely elapsed. And due to the nature of radioactive half-life, the second half of the uranium will not lose its radiation until many millions of years more than the first half required.

Edit: not my downvote btw

it seems implausible that a nuclear power plant occupies 0.01% of the space of a battery bank of the same peak power capacity; if anything, i'd suspect the discrepancy is closer to the other way around (edit: it is, see the comment below where i do the math, and please stop posting thoughtless bullshit)

if you were talking about the solar farm, then yeah, i'd agree

If that seems implausible you might want to replause your seemometer. A nuclear plant has much higher energy density than any battery.

well, nuclear fuel rods certainly have much higher energy density than any battery. but they're only a small piece of the power plant, and i wasn't talking about the energy density (joules per liter) but the power density (watts per liter or, since we're talking about land use, watts per square meter)

a 10c 2000 milliamp hour 18650 cell produces 20 amps at nominally 3.7 volts, which is 74 watts. if it occupies 18 mm × 18 mm × 65 mm that's 3500 watts per liter. tepco's kashiwazaki-kariwa nuclear power plant is 8 gigawatts, which is 2300 cubic meters of 18650s. if you stack them two meters high, that's 1100 square meters, an area 34 meters square. maybe you have to double that so you can drive a forklift in between the racks of batteries, plus you need some space for things like fireproof bulkheads, wiring, and inverters, but we're talking about maybe 50 meters by 50 meters, 0.0025km². kashiwazaki-kariwa is 4.2km², 1600 times bigger. (also, it's more than two meters tall.) the hypothetical 8-gigawatt battery bank uses 0.06% of the land area. even if you scale up the discharge time from 6 minutes to the usual 4 hours, it's still only 2.4% of the area of the nuclear plant

you can get better batteries than that, too. and if you're worried about land consumption, as you have to be in japan, you can put your batteries in a building with multiple floors

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