The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[Elixir]

If only solar energy could be stored in something like…a battery?

A free battery made with no environmental impact that's as safe as a nuclear power plant?

Yeah, if only.

Meanwhile, the laws of physics continue to apply, even if you prefer to ignore them.

We almost have them. They’re called water pumps. (You could even run them off a reactor’s output, by why bother if you have one of those?)

 

[bilby]

If only solar energy could be stored in something like…a battery?

A free battery made with no environmental impact that's as safe as a nuclear power plant?

Yeah, if only.

Meanwhile, the laws of physics continue to apply, even if you prefer to ignore them.

We almost have them. They’re called water pumps. (You could even run them off a reactor’s output, by why bother if you have one of those?)

Pumped storage hydroelectricity has been a thing for decades.

It works really well, though it's not very environmentally friendly, and it's very dangerous - the worst power plant accident in history was at Banqiao Dam in 1975, 26,000 people were killed and six million lost their homes (which makes Chernobyl look like a damp squib).

The real problem with it, though, is that all the suitable sites have either been taken, or are being used for more valuable purposes (such as having cities built in them).

There simply are not enough suitable sites for such schemes to cover the storage demands of a mostly intermittent generation (ie wind and solar) grid.

 

[Elixir]

The real problem with it, though, is that all the suitable sites have either been taken, or are being used for more valuable purposes (such as having cities built in them).

You could put it at the North Pole and let it run down gravity feed hydro lines all over the planet, all the way to the South Pole!
Can you imagine the pressure by the time it gets to Australia?
But again, if you have nukes why bother?

Seriously, I hope for the success of the Aurora powerhouse (a fast neutron reactor built at the Idaho National Laboratory) and that it becomes the Model T of off grid power supply.

 

[bilby]

Seriously, I hope for the success of the Aurora powerhouse (a fast neutron reactor built at the Idaho National Laboratory) and that it becomes the Model T of off grid power supply.

Liquid fuel (molten salt) fast-spectrum reactors are the obvious next step, not least because they can run on the spent fuel currently stored in dry casks at existing power plants. Liquid fuels avoid pretty much all of the operational risks associated with solid fuel reactors - they can't melt down, because they are already molten.

I am very impressed with the Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor (MCSFR) design from Elysium Industries. Ed Phiel clearly knows his stuff.

 

[Elixir]

They look interesting - tiny company. Wonder if they have any public offering.
I’d love to find another OKLO to invest in.
There are other interesting companies on their linked in page.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If only solar energy could be stored in something like…a battery?

A free battery made with no environmental impact that's as safe as a nuclear power plant?

Yeah, if only.

Meanwhile, the laws of physics continue to apply, even if you prefer to ignore them.

We almost have them. They’re called water pumps. (You could even run them off a reactor’s output, by why bother if you have one of those?)

You need a lot of water and you need terrain that is good for building the upper dam.

Note that the latter is in very limited supply and generally not in areas with lots of water.

And it's disruptive to the ecology of whatever your water source is.

 

[Toni]

If only solar energy could be stored in something like…a battery?

A free battery made with no environmental impact that's as safe as a nuclear power plant?

Yeah, if only.

Meanwhile, the laws of physics continue to apply, even if you prefer to ignore them.

We almost have them. They’re called water pumps. (You could even run them off a reactor’s output, by why bother if you have one of those?)

You need a lot of water and you need terrain that is good for building the upper dam.

Note that the latter is in very limited supply and generally not in areas with lots of water.

And it's disruptive to the ecology of whatever your water source is.

You also need a hella lot of water and energy to run these enormous data centers. Do we need those? Why?

 

[TV and credit cards]

Closed-loop geothermal system is a potential source of low-carbon renewable energy
This article in Nature states that Closed Loop Geothermal Systems can provide for 9TWe or 70% of current world energy production with water as the working fluid. With something like sCO₂, which is environmentally friendly provided it is captured from fossil fuel emissions, 15TWe can be achieved. The battle is cost of drilling which has been revised downward a good bit. Nothing on a revised LCOE. Looks like there's not enough projects to draw meaningful data from.
Revised Cost Curves for vertical and horizontal drilling

 

[ZiprHead]

Any truth to this?

 

[barbos]

Any truth to this?

You need to ask?

 

[bilby]

Any truth to this?

View attachment 52553

Yeah, kinda.

It's an idea that was proposed back in 2016 by a team at Bristol University, whereby you could collect Carbon-14 from the graphite moderator that has been exposed to neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor, make it into artificial diamond, and sandwich that radiocarbon diamond between layers of ordinary carbon, to make a betavoltaic cell.

Essentially the electrons from the beta decay would provide energy, in a similar way to the way photons transfer energy in a photovoltaic cell, and the regular carbon would be the semiconductor, and would also act as containment and shielding for the radiocarbon.

It's a nifty idea for a way to make small amounts of electricity for a long time, and has some potential advantages over RTGs, but as far as I know, it's still a long way from being commercially exploited.

Of course, it's not really a "battery" as it doesn't store charge chemically. Although, that meaning of "battery" is itself a misnomer, as a battery originally referred to a number of electrochemical cells connected in series to generate a useful voltage, and most modern "batteries" are really single electrochemical cells. If "battery" just means "portable electricity source", then I guess that such a betavoltaic cell could be called a "diamond battery".

None of which gets one closer to being available in the shops.

Betavoltaic sources based on Tritium rather than on Carbon-14 are commercially available, and have long-ish life (Tritium has a halflife of about 12 years). They are small, long-lived, and available to purchase right now - if you only want a few microwatts of power, and have a spare few thousand dollars to spend on it.

I would hazard a guess that these "Diamond Batteries" will be similarly pricey, and only have a niche commercial market, just as Tritium betavoltaics do. Nothing about the way they are made, nor the raw materials they are made out of, screams "cheap" to me.

These power sources are great for stuff like satellites and space probes, where re-charging or replacing the battery is difficult. If you are sending a circuit board to orbit Jupiter or Saturn, where solar energy is meagre, this kind if kit is pretty useful. Particularly given the difficulty in getting a charger cable that's a couple of billion km long, since Dick Smith and Radio Shack went bust.

A phone battery needs to be able to provide a peak output in the order of a watt or so, so current betavoltaic cells are about a millionth of the power needed to run a phone. Or to put it another way, the current cost of a betavoltaic phone battery would be in the order of five billion dollars.

Clearly, costs need to come down (or phone power requirements need to come down) quite a bit to make this a viable way to look at cat pictures and surf IIDB.