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Google, Amazon, Microsoft dive into costly deals that aren't generating anything yet. //
Nuclear power contracts signed by hyperscalers show they're desperate for reliable "clean and green" energy sources to feed their ever-expanding datacenter footprints, however, investment bank Jefferies warns that these tech giants are likely to end up paying over the odds to get it.
johnwalker 13 Jan
nagle:
Two islands with four chargers each can charge eight cars. Charging stations may be able to replace gas stations on the same real estate.
Current standards for electric vehicle charging stations have the following maximum power delivery:
- SAE J1772 DC Level 2 — 400 kW
- IEC 61851-1 — 80 kW
- Tesla NACS — 250 kW
(Again, these are maxima under the standards: many installed charging stations are lower power. A typical Tesla V2 Supercharger provides 120 kW.)
Plans for future higher power charging standards include the Megawatt Charging System 1 (MCS) with a rating of 3.75 megawatts (3000 amperes at 1250 volt DC).
Let’s compare this to a gasoline pump. A typical filling station pump in the developed world delivers around 50 litres per minute (38 l/min in Safetyland), and gasoline has an energy content of around 7500 kcal/litre depending on its formulation (around 5000 kcal/litre for pure ethanol and 8600 for #2 diesel). Plugging these into Units Calculator, we get:
(50 litres/minute) * (7500 kcal / litre) = 26.15 megawattso even the proposed MCS (which is primarily intended for large commercial vehicles and buses) delivers only around 1/7 the power of a gasoline pump.
Now, even getting installation of five megawatt electrical service is a pretty big thing in most places (that is the consumption of a very large office building), so it looks like building out an infrastructure which will allow electrical vehicle charging times competitive with gasoline filling will require very substantial upgrades to the power grid and local distribution facilities.
Three things could produce an African Renaissance: liberty, capitalism, and energy. The Western world can't do much about the first two; that's something the people of the various nations of Africa will have to work out for themselves. The one thing the West could help with is energy development. But American and European climate scolds seem determined to prevent any energy development. It is, in effect, a re-colonizing of Africa.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/10/17/climate-colonialisms-stranglehold-on-africas-energy-starved/
In 2024, it is unconscionable that over 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 28% of healthcare facilities have reliable electricity. More than 900 million people cook with traditional biomass like wood and animal dung, inhaling toxic fumes that claim over 600,000 African lives each year. Clean water remains a luxury for vast swaths of the population.
Atterus
Ars Tribunus Militum
6y
1,830
Wednesday at 1:02 PM
#8
Gee... it seems like nuclear can actually provide a ton of clean power for high demand applications.... maybe we can, i dunno, build larger ones for general load? Had that been done before? Derp?
Oh, and the crazy costs are always government red tape and activists almost requiring a plant to be built three times with nutty reqs as regs are arbitrarily changed repeatedly and facilities are fined for stuff the govt is supposed to handle (Yucca). Always lots of pointing out the "uneconomical" costs and totally ignoring other advanced nations are reliant on it and seem to have solved the base load issue...
One of those was laughing at Russias/OPECs death grip on energy costs, btw. Oh, also found a ton of the animosity against nuclear is fanned by hostile revanchist nations afraid of everyone cutting them loose. Again, gee, imagine China pushing solar! Imagine Russia pushing wind and solar! Both suppressing nuclear abroad while pursuing it themselves. Wowsers! Whodathunk? (The nuclear sector for the past 40 years)
If other nations can be powered largely by nuclear, so can we. Any other argument is hypocrisy for sustainability and pandering to lobbyists afraid their "green" stock or fossil stocks will crater as a result. Interesting as soon as nuclear gains headway, the lobbyists do everything they can to stall it...
For the record, we need a mix, but nuclear IS the solution overall. It's goofy seeing real world examples work for cost and people get all sticker shocked at govt inflated prices but are okay blowing trillions on pipe dreams... that still don't match nuclear...
Edit: correction, reference to Russias pushing for Europe to adopt solar and wind power pre Ukraine war to control their reactions when base load couldn't be met with those sources and control them via gas prices as a result, for a while.
Electrical engineers must learn to navigate industry codes and standards while designing battery energy storage systems (BESS)
In 2022, Florida was third in the nation, after California and Texas, in total solar power generating capacity, and solar energy accounted for more than 5% of Florida’s total net generation. About four-fifths of the state’s solar generation came from utility-scale (1 megawatt or larger) facilities. //
The Lake Placid Solar Power Plant is located in Highlands County, Fla., and suffered damage during Hurricane Milton. The facility opened in December 2019 and is 45 megawatts, which is enough to power more than 12,000 homes at peak production. //
The frequency of major storms and the costs associated with repair from them must be an essential part of any calculation when deciding if a new power facility is right for the region. It appears that green energy activists aren’t providing this data, but rather their visions of would should be based on their beliefs.
Theology is no way to power a civilization. //
rebelgirl in reply to CommoChief. | October 15, 2024 at 8:26 am
My son is a commercial electrician who works on residential and commercial solar installations. He says he would never have it.
They install the panels on roofs where no one takes into account the problems involved with reaching the source of a potential attic fire. //
Joe-dallas in reply to CommoChief. | October 15, 2024 at 5:01 pm
Correct – the capacity factor for solar during summer is around 35%
The capacity factor in the winter is around 6%
The texas freeze fiasco of Feb 2021,
Solar was producing around 12% capacity factor across the entire nation and a DROP of 60% – 70% wind production across the entire NORTH AMERICAN Continent for 7 DAYS
New Google agreement could boost development of small modular reactors—if they work.
He even takes the step that I rarely see from even the most reasonable of “reasonable” nuclear critics and concedes that “nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce.” He concedes so much that I’m not always entirely sure what it is we’re disagreeing about.
But a big part of the difference, I think, is probably that Noah lives in California and hangs out with a lot of tech/engineering types for whom all the points about nuclear that he’s conceded are conventional wisdom, and he’s annoyed that a lot of these people have an image of solar (and especially batteries) that’s stuck in the 1980s, rather than seeing these as dynamic, forward-thinking economic sectors. I live in DC, and I hang out with lots of people who work in or adjacent to Democratic Party politics. And among the people I know, the conventional wisdom is toward much too much complacency about the current state of renewables. Many people think that because photovoltaic panels are now cheap, all the problems are solved and the big issue is that you need to say you’re pro-fracking to win Pennsylvania, and they’re looking for linguistics gurus to help them defeat fossil fuel propaganda.
I think that this is all wrong, that the world will remain much more dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future than a lot of progressives want to admit, that there are a bunch of difficult and outstanding problems that need to be solved, and that nuclear policy may provide important solutions to some of those problems. There is, of course, no way of knowing exactly what the future of any technology may hold. But I think nuclear fission remains extremely promising if — and it’s a big if — we change Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules to allow for more innovation.
Following a major earthquake, a 15-metre tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident beginning on 11 March 2011. All three cores largely melted in the first three days.
In 1971, the AEC proposed a radically new regulatory philosophy requiring all nuclear plants be designed to hold all radioactive emissions to levels such that "exposures were as low as practicable". In other words, there is no limit. And the criteria is not whether the benefit of further reduction outweighs the cost. The criteria is: can you afford the reduction?
This was such a departure from standard regulation that, despite their desperation to get plants on line, it did produce push back from industry. But after considerable debate the policy was formally adopted in 1975 with the wording changed slightly to "as low as reasonably achievable" or ALARA.
In practice, As Low As Reasonably Achievable is interpreted by the regulators to mandate any regulation that allows nuclear to remain competitive with alternate sources of power.
On Tuesday, Google announced that it had made a power purchase agreement for electricity generated by a small modular nuclear reactor design that hasn't even received regulatory approval yet. Today, it's Amazon's turn. The company's Amazon Web Services (AWS) group has announced three different investments, including one targeting a different startup that has its own design for small, modular nuclear reactors—one that has not yet received regulatory approval.
Unlike Google's deal, which is a commitment to purchase power should the reactors ever be completed, Amazon will lay out some money upfront as part of the agreements. We'll take a look at the deals and technology that Amazon is backing before analyzing why companies are taking a risk on unproven technologies. //
X-energy's technology is based on small, self-contained fuel pellets called TRISO particles for TRi-structural ISOtropic. These contain both the uranium fuel and a graphite moderator and are surrounded by a ceramic shell. They're structured so that there isn't sufficient uranium present to generate temperatures that can damage the ceramic, ensuring that the nuclear fuel will always remain contained.
The design is meant to run at high temperatures and extract heat from the reactor using helium, which is used to boil water and generate electricity. Each reactor can produce 80 megawatts of electricity, and the reactors are designed to work efficiently as a set of four, creating a 320 MW power plant. As of yet, however, there are no working examples of this reactor, and the design hasn't been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. //
SetsChaos Smack-Fu Master, in training
28d
4
I'm excited at the prospect of having new nuclear energy in the US. There's been a huge NIMBY push since at least TMI that's seen a lot of regression in the field, despite the science clearly showing advantages for nukes as a base load power source. As much as I want LLM and AI to go the way of NFTs, I am happy to see something revive nuclear.
SMRs are a step in the right modernization direction, but it'd be really cool to get some thorium mixed in here, too. //
Unimportant Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5y
154
I am optimistic about the nuclear renaissance but I am concerned about labor shortages in the supply chain and among operators.
The premier modular reactor operator, the U.S. Navy, faces a critical shortage of skilled shipyard workers. Repair backlogs can run into year. New construction isn't meeting its goals. Subcontractors that make low volumes of critical parts are affected as much if not more.
It didn't use to be this way but capacity was cut back over the years after the Cold War. Shipyards were closed.
There's a public-private nonprofit entity receiving millions to recruit workers:
buildsubmarines.com
Join the Team Building the Next Generation of U.S. Naval Submarines
Take the first step to join our mission of constructing advanced U.S. Naval submarines. Discover numerous career opportunities across various disciplines and make your mark in this new era of manufacturing.
They have a comprehensive job board with jobs across the supply chain. They're advertising nationally.
New reactors will need the same people. //
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a construction permit on September 16, 2024 to Abilene Christian University (ACU) to build a molten salt research reactor. This marked the first university research reactor approval in 30 years. It is the first liquid fuel reactor ever approved for construction by the NRC and only the second advanced reactor approved since the NRC was created in 1974.
Aside: The first advanced reactor construction permit was issued to Kairos for its Hermes in December 2023. End Aside
Natura Resources is the technology supplier for the important new facility. Andrew Harmon, Natura Resources Vice President of Operations and Business Development visited the Atomic Show to fill in some of the backstory about the project origins, the decision to pursue a research reactor as a step towards their ultimate goal of supplying a large number of factory-produced 100 MWe molten salt reactors, some of the major successes and challenges along the way and the level of community support that the project has attracted.
National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) are jointly setting up a highly efficient 800 megawatts advance ultra supercritical (AUSC) thermal power plant. //
India’s current arsenal of thermal power plants operate at an average of 32 per cent efficiency. The AUSC technology can ramp this up to 46 per cent efficiency. In the past few decades, Indian coal fleet has gone through rapid changes in terms of technology, with the first supercritical plant launched in 2010 at Mundra Adani Plant. Following this, a total of 72 supercritical and 20 ultra supercritical units have come into operation. //
State-of-the-art ultra supercritical technology heats steam temperature at around 600 degrees Celsius and 300 Bar pressure with an optimal efficiency of 42 per cent. Increasing steam parameters is one of the best ways to achieve results in increasing efficiency.
The AUSC technology will increase the steam temperature to 710-720°C at 300 Bar pressure and achieve efficiency upwards of 46 per cent. This will decrease the coal usage and emission intensity per megawatt-hour of electricity produced.
To note that our modern society is energy-hungry is not only a massive understatement but an exercise in belaboring the obvious. Everything about our modern technological lifestyle requires energy and plenty of it, and cheap, reliable energy is one of the best (along with free markets) guarantors of a prosperous society. While "green energy" advocates still shout for the need for wind and solar power, the most reliable, efficient, and yes, cheapest energy in the United States is generated by fossil fuels - coal and natural gas - and by nuclear power. //
But given advancements in coal-burning technology, and also given that the United States is sitting on mountains of coal, there are good arguments for the continued use of coal. //
the U.S. led early with a leadoff home run. It invented, developed and perfected the first ultra-super critical (USC) coal-powered plant.
Coming online in 2012, the 600-megawatt (MW) John W. Turk Jr. Coal Plant in Arkansas employed new technology, most notably, an advance in metallurgy that allowed pipes and boilers to operate for extended periods at extremely elevated temperature and pressure.
This higher temperature allows efficiency of 40%, instead of the more usual 33%. Also, Turk had the best pollution controls, its emissions being mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor. Power Magazine was so impressed that it gave the plant its highest honor in 2013. //
Having improved on USC technology, Chinese plant efficiency is around 44%. The new 1,350 MW Pingshan Phase II plant achieves 49% efficiency! The best Chinese coal plant is now cleaner and 22 % more efficient than its American counterpart.
Since 2010, India has constructed more than 90 super critical and ultra-super critical coal plants.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/energy/budget-2024-25-ntpc-bhel-to-set-up-a-hi-tech-coal-power-plant-how-will-it-work
mopani Ed in North Texas
6 minutes ago
The only reason I am not a fan of coal for electric power is that it takes 100 rail cars per day to feed a 1GW power plant. Half the rail traffic in the USA is coal. If we could cut half the rail traffic it would save a lot of lives lost at rail crossings. Its simple statistics: in a lot of areas in the Midwest, there's an at-grade crossing nearly every mile.
A similar size pressurized water nuclear power plant only needs 35 tons of uranium per YEAR, and requires mining about 200 tons of uranium ore to produce. And the used nuclear fuel is the only waste product that gets safer with time, unlike every other pollutant.
https://www.daretothink.org/how-big-is-that-thorium-ball/
If we would build the molten salt reactor that Jimmy "I pretend to be a nuclear engineer" Carter killed, or the breeder reactor that Bill "sold to the highest bidder" Clinton killed so thoroughly, Nuclear power would only need 1 ton of fuel per YEAR. Versus 100 rail cars per DAY for coal.
I would rather build coal than depend on "sunshine, summer breezes, fumaroles, and chicken manure" for reliable electricity (Petr Beckman), but nuclear is better.
While active, the natural reactor generated fission waste byproducts similar to those produced by modern nuclear reactors at power plants. This provided some useful evidence for the scientists, who found that the radioactive waste products created by this natural process, including those with million year half lives, have decayed away. The byproducts have also barely moved - according to the US Department of Energy, the plutonium “has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago.”
This means that when the Oklo reactor was discovered in 1972, the fission products had been harmlessly lying in the same place for around a billion years.
Also, in the hundreds of thousands of years it has operated as a nuclear reactor, Oklo has never had a meltdown or explosion. Scientists found that “the combination of aluminium phosphate grains to trap radioactive materials and the groundwater to regulate the reaction allowed for an extremely safe reactor.” Mother Nature knows best.
So next time someone tells you that solar and wind are the only ‘natural’ forms of energy generation, tell them about the natural reactors in Gabon. I’ve yet to hear about solar panels and wind turbines sprouting up naturally and generating electricity without human intervention anywhere in the world in the history of our planet. The blunt truth is that nature created fission well before humans were capable of building nuclear reactors. If that isn’t a clear definition of ‘natural’ energy, I don’t know what is.
The REPOWER plan rests on four pillars:
1) Replacing all subsidies and mandates with a CO2 fee, which shall be set by Congress.
2) A grid of ratepayer owned coops which provide local power distribution and backup power.
3) Coops or consortia of coops contracting with merchant providers for the bulk of their power, or possibly building their own base load plants.
4) Unshackling nuclear from a regulatory system based on the Two Lies. Nuclear's remarkable energy density, combined with competition will drive the cost of nuclear down to its should-cost of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The end result will be a largely nuclear grid, backed up by local fossil generation and supplemented in some areas by hydro, wind, or solar. //
The REPOWER plan has been criticized on the grounds it not only does not get rid of fossil fuel, it requires extensive expansion of fossil fuel capacity. The goal here is reducing CO2 emissions, not eliminating fossil fuel capacity. And we must reduce CO2 emissions in a way that uses the planet's resources efficiently. If we end up in a situation where we could have both less CO2 and less cost, we are being criminally stupid.
REPOWER will result in nuclear at a naive LCOE of less than 3 cents/kWh. That makes drastically reducing grid CO2 emissions so easy it's almost automatic. Figure 1 summarizes the results of a study of the German grid in which nuclear's overnight CAPEX was set at $2000/kW. (In the 1960's, we were building nuclear plants at less than $1000/kW in today's money.) //
Currently, the grid is producing about 25% of man-made CO2 emissions. If we cut that by a factor 20 with should-cost nuclear, we are down to about 1% of the total. At that point, we are far better off going after the other 99%, then expending resources on further reducing the 1%.
Takeaway
Unless we have cheap electricity, decarbonization in going nowhere. The Good News is we can have both very low grid emissions and cheap electricity. All we have to do is:
a) Put the ratepayer in charge of the grid.
b) Let the underwriters balance nuclear safety and cost.
As New York State Energy Planning Board charts our energy future to implement the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), it is essential that we consider daily/hourly/seasonal demand profiles for each consuming region. Such sober analysis would help identify what combination of generation technologies can reliably serve the electricity loads and avoid blackouts… all while being cost effective and environmentally sustainable.
The below chart illustrates the daily grid electric load for New York State. There is an orange dot for each day corresponding to the average load in megawatts (MWs). //
However, let’s focus on minimum daily load. The rectangle underneath the teal line represents New York’s grid electricity needs that is constant over 365 days of the year. Since the 2023 total demand was 16,785 MW, 79% of New York’s electricity consumption is constant — also known as “baseload demand.”
The below chart graphs minimum daily load (in gigawatt-hours, GWh) against total demand over the 7 years 2017-2023. The light teal box shows the range of baseload demand over the period. Over 3/4 of New York’s grid electric consumption is constant.
The likely cause is the plant is essentially fully-depreciated //
CGNP's key finding was obtained by dividing PG&E's DCPP net cost forecast of $418,407,000.00 by the number of megawatt-hours (46,519,200 MWh) the plant would be producing if it ran 100% the time during this period. (PG&E must supply the replacement power any time the plant is not producing power, such as during an outage.) The net result was $8.9858 / MWh. Since there are 1,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) in a MWh, this corresponds to only 0.8958 net cents per kWh. This net cost is similar to the cost of running a large hydroelectric dam, the least-expensive means of grid-scale electric power production. //
Finally, DCPP's owners are not economically compensated for providing substantial synchronous grid inertia (SGI) to the California power grid. CGNP located a relevant 2018 filing from ERCOT, the Texas grid operator that underscores the economic value of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants contribute substantial capacity and SGI. ERCOT considers SGI so important that they post the current SGI value at their overview dashboard. CAISO should emulate ERCOT in properly valuing DCPP for its abundant capacity and SGI contribution to stabilize the California grid.
Without sufficient synchronous grid inertia, the grid becomes unstable and a blackout occurs.
Inertia refers to a system’s capability to resist change. For a power grid, greater synchronous inertia confers greater ability to resist frequency changes. //
In contrast to gigantic 2,256 megawatt nuclear power plants such as Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) near San Luis Obispo, California which provide very large amounts of synchronous grid inertia, so-called inverter-based resources (IBRs) such as solar powered generators, wind power generators, and batteries supply negligible amounts of synchronous grid inertia. //
Prior to the introduction of significant penetrations of IBRs, each power grid's synchronous generators (coal and natural gas-fired generators, large hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants, and nuclear power plants) had sufficient synchronous grid inertia to assure power grid stability. The synchronous generators have a large amount of rotational inertia as a consequence of having massive rotating turbines and massive rotating generator rotors. (See photograph below.)
As a simplified example, each of the pair of DCPP’s generators have rotating components which weigh in excess of a million pounds (500 tons.) DCPP’s turbines rotate 30 times per second. The rotating magnetic field induces the 60 cycle per second (Hertz) AC voltage (25,000 Volts) and AC current (45,120 Amperes) in the stator windings of each unit. In response to perturbations in grid frequency, the rotational kinetic energy can be instantaneously converted to changes in the output power of the generator which tend to stabilize the generator’s output frequency and voltage.
The Biden administration has announced plans to reignite a shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant with a $1.5 billion loan that, combined with other nuclear announcements yesterday, suggests the US federal government is right now all in on nuclear energy.
The 800-megawatt Holtec Palisades plant, located on Michigan's southwest coast in a relatively low-populated area, shut down in 2022 mainly due to it struggling to afford to stay operational while competing against cheaper fossil fuels.