chris222

The Fukushima cleanup costs are estimated at damn near a half a trillion dollars!

Chernobyl was estimated at 50 billion+ adjusted.

Accidents are rare but they are costly.

The thing you are missing is regulatory costs. All of those examples are great but they are not dealing with the United States regulatory frameworks. It’s extremely difficult to get Nuclear projects developed here.

We have just barely started investing into the extremely large solar projects that could easily change that 1.6% figure you quoted. I also don’t know if that number included behind-the-meter residential solar which is mostly what we have in the United States right now.

As a small example of how renewables can change I would examine wind power in the UK.

https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/biggest-solar-f...

Overbuilding wind and using HVDC transmission to move it around is sometimes cheaper than battery storage since it compliments solar peak times well.

A similar project is being constructed in the Southwest United States:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38801943

3,500 MW of wind+ HVDC transmission for 11 billion dollars.

Presumably all they would need to do here is change the ratios of solar and battery to achieve 24x7 dispatch. I presume the current arrangement is just more cost effective currently based on their needs but it does demonstrate there already are baseload style power purchase agreements occuring with combined renewables+storage facilities.

We’re likely to see another halving of battery costs within the next decade which will shift the economics further.

It would require a radically new design that takes a lot of the cost out. You also have the spent fuel storage problem and the risk factors of a meltdown (however small) to tackle which are always working against you. Technology development in the Nuclear area is SLOW.

Now compare to batteries. There are thousands of companies working on new technology development.

It’s just a matter of brain power and capital working on the problems.

I don’t see a viable path forward for Nuclear at the current costs and with how dramatic the rise of renewables and battery storage is increasing.

The price for storage is closer to $500/kWh for the large utility scale projects using Teslas Megapacks and falling fast [1]. I wouldn’t be surprised to see $200-300 fairly soon (within the next 5 years). Tesla is only starting to seriously ramp up production on Megapacks. I couldn’t find reliable pricing for a project usings BYD’s new MC Cube system but Las Vegas is installing half a gigawatt hour worth of those units.

[1] 413 million dollars for 800,000 kWh = $516.25/kWh installed price.

https://carboncredits.com/tesla-413m-megapacks-revolutionize...

Curious what you think of this recently completed project:

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mw...

With enough storage and onsite renewables you can mimic the stable baseload that Nuclear provides.

That is amoung the largest lithium batteries in the world. It’s great to see the gigawatt scale batteries get deployed.

Great for turning renewables into baseload power and also their response time is hard to beat.

A 550 mile 525kV HVDC transmission line and a 3,515 MW wind facility has secured financing and started construction. The goal is to deliver renewable power from New Mexico to Arizonia and California customers.

You can take a Model 3 pack and make it a home battery. Technically the battery in a car will be exposed to way more danger. Yet they could sit right next to each other in a garage and insurance would freak out at the DIY home battery.

Yes it is definitely the case that overprovisioning can help here but it would probably be the case that you would conserve in a long power outage.

As the grid goes renewable the “controllable loads” will be more important. Dryers, EV charging, electric hot water heating and heat pumps can all be connected to optimize renewables minimizing the use of expensive batteries.

For that price you can build almost any combination of wind/solar plus storage. It will probably use less land when you factor in exclusion zones and require fewer operators and resources. It will also have no major calamity risk and an easy clean up and decommissioning.

The Tesla megapack price is about 300 million dollars per 1GWh of storage these days.

Worker threads have been around for a bit:

https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html

This one looks more promising.

https://www.halcium.com/

The new system on a chip is an insane innovation but it’s “under the hood”.

Here we have motors that don’t require rare earth metals.

The largest battery maker CATL is making breakthrough leaps in LFP batteries (which have no cobalt). [1]

Recycling large EV batteries is becoming cheaper and easier. [2]

Are the EV FUDsters heads exploding yet?

[1] https://www.catl.com/en/news/6091.html

[2] https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=hBfD1lLd4dxEJI6b

The biggest advantage is the shape which drastically reduces air resistance and 3 wheels which reduces rolling resistance. Everything else in an EV is almost as efficient as it can possibly be. Aptera is about 100Wh/mi while a tesla model 3 is 200-250.

Weight/rolling resistance would be second so battery gravimetric density and better tires is the next thing to improve. We can probably get small sedans slightly under 200Wh/mi or 5 miles for every kWh.

The biggest problem is you need to match the pack voltage when DC charging.

Everything except cooling/heating and propulsion uses an insignficant amount of power.

You can cover a parking spot with 3-4kW of solar though.

I’m not so sure with overprovisioning, batteries and controllable load. Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries. We barely have any storage on the grid right now.

For whatever reason both solar and heat pumps are insanely cheap in Australia vs America. It’s mostly in the labor part for some reason. This comes up all the time in the solar subreddit where Americans are routinely quoted at $4.00+ per watt for solar and $20,000+ for heat pump installs.

I’d rather an article talk about how panasonic cells achieved 20% more density over 5 years at volume production. Much more impressive.

https://electrek.co/2020/07/30/tesla-batteries-energy-densit...

I think they can solve for more RAM pretty easily with the M3. Apple silicon is pretty dedicated to having the GPU cores integrated with shared memory though so I don’t see them offering graphics card options.

An M3 extreme which is 2 or even 4 M3 ultras sounds like it might be doable. M3 is already going to be a huge performence step because it’s a new process though.

Yes, that was edisons original system.

Yes, this is called clipping and it’s not a bad thing. Most areas don’t have perfect peak sunlight for very long at all.

And bots/autonomy.

Sheetz, Wawa and Royal Farms all already have Tesla chargers. Wawa has a location in Virginia with no gas pumps but Tesla chargers. So yes they are already planning for this future.