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'Limitless' energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Just... Freaking... Deploy nuclear plants! We have the tech, we know they work, their footprint is small. Why the frack do we feel the need to chase these ridiculous zany ideas that face obvious fundamental engineering flaws, like, oh I don't know, STORMS and corrosion??? Maintaining these would be a bloody nightmare.
It's not either/or. We need to roll out everything we can, including solar and nuclear, as well as carbon removal tech.
That's interesting you say that because building nuclear plants is also a "bloody nightmare", see Vogtle, Hinkley Point, Flamanville, etc
They have been dumb, that's for sure. However, a large part of the reason they were dumb is because of the regulatory process being, well .. stupid. Not engineered well for actually executing projects. Don't get me wrong, we absolutely need regulatory oversight, but it can be done in a more thoughtful way than it is currently.
These floating solar panels though, strike me as a general engineering nightmare.
Nuclear power plants have a massive footprint. For example in Australia they're planning to setup a new nuclear waste disposal facility with a forecast budget of half a trillion US Dollars and it will be full in 70 years time - they'll have to build a new one somewhere else after that.
That nuclear waste site will be radioactive for millions of years. The land will never be able to be used for basically anything, ever.
If you covered just that nuclear waste facility with solar panels, it would provide a massive amount of power. Enough to cover the day time power needs of a small country.
Solar panels aren't a "zany" idea. In fact one of the reasons it's being explored is because it would reduce evaporation. Power generation is often almost an afterthought. The panels also don't have to be ugly - in fact there are prototypes that are invisible. They just look like ordinary glass, and don't cost much more than glass either.
Half a trillion dollars over seventy years is nothing. How large is the waste site compared to the habitable surface? A few square kilometers is nothing.
The power needs of a small country is also essentially nothing over a seventy year span.
Nuclear energy is not ideal but it beats the hell out of coal plants, and it gives us a bridge to something sustainable. Solar has its own drawbacks and no nation is going to maintain a bunch of floating panels out in the ocean.
If nuclear was in any way comparable in terms of cost to renewables + storage you might have a point, but it isn't, so you don't.
In fact, hot take: Why don't we deploy a solar power belt around the equator... AND nuclear power wherever we can put it? And while at it, let's make reprocessing of nuclear waste a must-do. It gives you more kWh/kg uranium, and the inevitable waste you do end up having is a cup instead of a cask, and far less dangerous for far shorter.
This happens to solve another problem though, which is that decreasing cloud coverage in the Pacific is leading to increasing surface water temperatures
The quickest way to de-carbonize our grid is nuclear. Meanwhile the US closed Three Mile Island last year and onlined more natural gas in the state and Germany closed several nuclear plants and onlined more coal plants. It's fucking stupid.
Building new nuclear capacity takes a lot more time than building wind turbines and solar parks though.
Sure shutting the existing ones off is a bad idea but building new ones isn't the way
Also the building part consumes a lot of CO2, too, so it takes a bit longer than with renewables until your are break even.
I feel like a lot of those pushing for Nuclear don't see how France is relying on neighbouring countries in the summer because of the rivers not carrying enough water or not being cold enough for protest cooling and that factor will only get worse - especially with ACs being absolutely essential in summer in the next 50 years.
Sure keeping a good amount of nuclear for base level is good but especially if you're also doing renewables it's far too inflexible to be good if you have a sunny day with a lot of wind - so you need huge energy storage anyway if you want to completely remove gas and oil and at that point renewables are better in using those than nuclear
If they perfect this cement battery concept a combination nuclear/solar/wind strategy would be the ideal. Solar/wind as much as possible and nuclear to react to deficit with excess stored into block foundations for all three of the above.