Hacker News Reader

Comment by _aavaa_ | Hacker News Reader

There is a valley of death between something that works in a research lab and something that world in the real world.

A research reactor does not have to produce electricity at anything close to an economic price, just as the fusion reactors.

A Thorium reactor might work, and might be built in some future, and it might even not come super over budget or over time like more or less every fission reactor we've built. In the meantime, wind/solar/batteries are being continuously delivered on time, on budget, are getting continuously cheaper, and are available today.

View on HN

Wind/solar can’t make the order of magnitude jump we need in power.

* What is the figure on the magnitude of power Australia needs?

* How many 2MW molten salt reactors like the built and being tested TMSR-LF1 reactor would Australia need to meet that figure? What would be the cost and time to construct that number in parallel?

* There's a 10MW version planned - what's the cost | timeline | number for those?

* Eventually there might be a ~ 300MW version built and tested .. what's the timeline on that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1

The CSIRO GenCost report seems to think the costs of batteries + renewables will be far less overall and more immediately available in Australia as we scale them out .. rather than waiting decades and still having to fudge about in the meantime .. thoughts?

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Gen...

Australia's electricity consumption in 2021 was approximately 265 TWh (terawatt-hours) per year. Napkin math works out to:

Annual energy production of one 2 MW reactor: 2 MW * 8760 hours/year = 17,520 MWh/year = 17.52 GWh/year.

Number of reactors required: 265,000 GWh/year / 17.52 GWh/year = ~15,130 reactors.

This is of course a silly computation for scaling a research grade molten salt reactor. 300+ MW reactors knocks things down to a few dozen.

Now, how about if we apply this same requirement to solar power? How many solar panels will we need to get the same power gain?

Total energy required: 265,000 GWh/year = 265,000,000 MWh/year = 265,000,000,000 kWh/year. Number of panels needed: 265,000,000,000 kWh/year / 584 kWh/year per panel ≈ 453,767,123 panels.

I know Chinese panels are cheap and all, but the notion that Australia will maintain a network of 450M panels is silly, and this is just to replace what we have now, not what is needed in the future.

That's an unsourced and unbacked assertion, not at argument.

And I have seen no convincing argument for why this would be even remotely true.

As a counter argument, consider how poorly such predictions have done in the past (i.e. early 2023) [0]. For over a decade the IEA has been saying the same thing, and for every year in that decade they have been wrong, comically wrong.

So if you want to make your argument, you'll have to explain why the literally exponential curve is going to not just flatten, but go to zero.

[0]: https://stacker.news/items/581737 (original image from https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...)

Curves always flatten when faced with a constraint and/or risk. In this case it's surface area and climate variability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com