farmerben

It seems like a scam to put weather energy on the grid. There is a case for it in stand alone applications. Otherwise your wind energy needs to be scaled to pumped hydro. And you need thousands of acre-feet to be significant. Solar has to scaled to a throttleable backup source like gas. But the gas generators which are easy to turn on and off are much more expensive especially on maintenance than simple boilers and turbines. Nuclear simply runs at 100% thermal output, you can control steam to the turbine. A fuel boiler lets you control water and steam flow plus the oxidation rate, but they are not designed to fluctuate with daily pulses of solar. The problem with big solar farms is you still require 100% in the form of fuel energy. Solar just gives you the luxury of shutting off gas while the sun is shining, but it's not free by any means, the total system costs quite a bit more. You might be better off designing a stand alone desalination plant or something like that to plug directly into solar power, rather than design the whole grid around it.

Is there any nuclear reactor which would complement solar by being throttleable? From what I can see every large solar project needs to be matched by reciprocating gas engines to match supply and demand. These are less efficient and way more maintenance than a large steam plant.

What is your favorite type of nuclear reactor. I think the US should be building breeder reactors like EBR II and LFTR. For export purposes to perhaps unstable parts of the world I recommend CANDU because there is no fuel enrichment or reprocessing. There has been sensational news that CANDUs leak tritium into the atmosphere. But that is so miniscule I don't care. Currently the AP1000 Westinghouse reactor might be the most economical. It is a pressurized light water reactor.

This will keep you alive

Vertical axis wind turbines look cool, they just don't match the efficiency of horizontal designs. Their main advantage that they don't care about wind direction is offset by the inability to operate at all in low wind.

I've seen older people who could only read a teleprompter, and not manage to present real opinions in real time. You probably know who I'm talking about.

Biodiesel and ethanol are already a viable products, only slightly inferior to the real stuff. But the economics of land use is terrible. Wood is the only good biofuel IMHO, because the externalities on the growing side are not as negative. And I don't worry about carbon in and of itself that much, I just worry about losing arctic ice and sea level rise. If wind energy were actually cheap, we could deploy it in Antarctica to create ice, but that's pretty low on the list of things that actually work. I looked into throttleable natural gas plants. These are all reciprocating ICE engines. A great deal more expensive, high maintenance, and less efficient than the ideal combustion chamber.

https://newatlas.com/energy/supercritical-co2-turbines/ This technology might be way more appropriate in space compared to steam turbines. It's smaller, lighter, and potentially safer. It would reduce the chemical explosion hazard with sodium.

In boats, diesel is the only good option. Direct shaft drive is more efficient than hybrid electric when you run continuously rather than in impulses. The same applies to aircraft. If we run out of liquid fuel we will probably need to find a way to synthesize it.

In that case breeder reactors are jets.

I think oil is essential for long range aircraft and ships. 40% of that oil is gasoline. So cheap gasoline is not going anywhere. To produce all the other petroleum products we need we will produce a massive amount of gasoline in the process. You could stuff gasoline into home heating oil, or burn it directly in a furnace identical to the coal power plants. But that seems pretty wasteful. I could see a future where semi-trucks run on gasoline instead of diesel. Not because its better, but because they can. Whereas diesel is far superior to gasoline in shipping. And jet fuel is likewise superior to gasoline. So if most of the cars went electric, I could see a lot of the land based diesel equipment switching to gasoline because its cheaper. I think we are going to use all the fossil fuels this planet has to offer, even if we build nuclear tomorrow. The only question is how long will the fossil fuels last?

All over the Midwest we have those attic vents. Imagine how it would be if instead they had a 500W vertical axis recycled aluminum turbine.

Here is an excellent video showing what modern furnace and boilers really look like to scale. I worked on one in real life, and this is accurate.

4) Relatively difficult to do cold starts (they usually rely on gas or oil, so that's a whole extra fuel delivery system that's rarely used. ) Point number 3) is especially correct. Because coal plants use steam tubes with 3000 psi steam where the boiler tubes touch directly onto the furnace. You don't want pipes to change temperature all that radically or often. Inside a modern coal furnace they blow pulverized and dried coal into a 50m tall furnace. The hottest part of the furnace is well above the floor where you want to collect all the ash.

You are on to something. The problem is investing capital into low priority purposes that only run part of the time. I'm looking at the 500% capacity wind and solar example again. If you could adjust the demand side to take all the excess power using cheap pumps that you didn't need to run all the time then maybe it could work. Desalinating sea water, and pumping water long distances through pipes are examples I can think of. For instance, a huge pipe could divert some of the Mississippi river to reservoirs in west Texas and New Mexico where the water would be very valuable. You would be happy if the flow of water was reasonably predictable over long time frames and don't care if your expensive pumps only work on the days of excess.