
Are Environmentalists the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Useful Idiots? - ericdanielski
https://medium.com/libertarian-socialism-american-style/are-environmentalists-the-fossil-fuel-industrys-useful-idiots-49ca072ce20e
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avmich
> Fission is really the only option for always available industrial amounts of
> power

Why not batteries, of all kinds (pneumatic, hydrogen, gravitational), or
specifically electrical? Costs, perhaps?

The argument between proponents and opponents of fission power rarely focuses
on externalities costs. Opponents claim nuclear power is very costly when
nuclear waste utilization is considered. What is missing here?

To paraphrase, given the current growth rate of solar+wind and other renewable
sources of energy, one would think the biggest remaining problem is to
neutralize intermittent nature of those sources - or at least of biggest of
them, for which batteries would be a solution. Nuclear proponents disagree.
Can we have good numbers to compare?

~~~
PeterisP
We don't really have good options for "industrial-size" batteries e.g.
something that can offer many GWh of storage, which is something that would be
required to sustain modern society through the daily (and nightly) variations
of solar and wind power.

Pumped hydro can do that in certain places and with major changes to local
ecosystem, so this is what we're using, but a full switch to renewables would
need much more than what we can get from current pumped hydro locations.

Pneumatic, hydrogen or gravitation other than pumped hydro have never been a
reasonable option in scale - there are various companies working on that, some
of them have posted their PR pieces here, but up until now all that has been
pure puffery with no way to scale to large amounts (GWh, not MWh) in anything
close to practical costs or infrastructure size.

Electrical batteries are not _yet_ sufficiently capable but they may be
becoming an option in the near future. E.g. the Tesla superbattery in South
Australia is (or at least was) the largest project with 129 MWh of storage -
that is a step in the right direction, it is very useful for rapidly covering
short-term fluctuations, but the 'superbattery' is comparably _tiny_ , it's
less than 1% of the capacity of a single decent pumped hydro plant which get
20000 MWh or more. And if we want enough storage so that the country won't
have blackouts every time there's a windless winter evening, then we need much
more than that. E.g. UK seems to consume 25GW electricity even during
nighttime, so a single windless winter night with 12 hours of darkness needs
300 GWh of storage (so, some 2000 stations like Tesla built in Australia) just
for the daily variation - without accounting for seasonal variation in solar
and wind.

So the answer to "why not batteries" is that this will happen when we will
have the capacity to install 1000+ times larger batteries than current
megaplants while still having a reasonable price. I'm sure that this is
possible and will eventually happen, but we're not there yet.

