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Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
Interesting read. Thank you. It makes a good point about some of the unnecessary limits on nuclear build that are currently there.
The only problem I have with nuclear as industrial heat is once again it goes against the current grain of decentralizing energy. To make the economics work you'd have to build the industry near the energy source, not the other way around. And you'd have to wait a long time to get it.
I think industrial heat will largely be solved by thermal batteries (cheap materials, not chemical batteries) that can store heat for days and provide temps up to 1700°C with 95% round trip efficiency at a cost that is almost competitive with natural gas. I don't see industry lining up to fund and secure a Nuclear plant when they could buy a cheap box of rocks
Thermal batteries are cool. Pun intended
https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyi...costs-in-half/
As for carbon capture, I'm not sure there'll ever be a way for it to be truly economical. CCUS can't scale because each system is bespoke and even with a very small percentage of the CCUS we'd need for difficult electricity markets that may need gas like Alberta, there's still way more carbon than all the SAF would need. The market just doesn't make sense for a true carbon molecule market. In fact, I'd bet CCUS plants will pay for the CO2 offtake to make SAF not the other way around |
I am 10,000% on side with thermal batteries. I happen to like salt as the medium, but am definitely curious about the refractory style designs being proposed. Salt will be a little more forgiving, managing thermal stress on refractory materials is a major challenge in operation. There are not too many thermal applications that exceed 850C, so that 1700C upper bound is a really juicy way to "extend" the effective exergy reservoir in the overall system. I think it is perfectly acceptable to accept otherwise curtailed renewable generation into such a thermal buffer, and have the draw on the reservoir be sized to be continuous, economic, and forgiving to the materials storing the heat potential.
This is ab-so-freakin-loutely the way forward, and the perfect way for fission and renewables to work together, as it obviates the need for high footprint solutions like pumped hydro storage, and gets into the promised land of $20 - $100/kW/h storage costs. If we can get there, we can have a system that delivers between 3 - 6x nominal wind LCOE. The key is to focus on backing up 100% of expected load in order to be primarily served by VRE. Contributions from clean firm like hydro and fission bring that multiple of LCOE down, to a point as well. We cannot forget that fuel is effectively the same thing as storage, and we are on a mission to substitute our fuel. VREs alone are fuel savers, not fuel substitutions. Fission and hydro can substitute the fuel, but they also benefit from the fuel saving features of VRE in so far as they can co-operate through common storage buffers.
I'd say the major issue preventing this is economic/political. A system with huge thermal storage capacity being fed by low cost, low emission generation would be extremely stable. Great for the broader economy, but requires being right about future demand forecasts, and it kills a lot of the opportunity for short term profit maxing via pricing arbitrage and ancillary service provision. It reduces fuel extraction and processing demand. The stochiastic nature of renewable generation creates perfect conditions for economic withholding, which we see owners of short-term storage (like BESS) and incumbent thermal plant assets taking advantage of this effect in deregulated markets today - Alberta is a textbook example. Regulated or capacity markets feel like a solution, but history shows these are vulnerable to different flavours of corruption and manipulation. Honestly, this is a really tough problem to solve, I don't know how to do it. It is getting into non-technical human factors and we are not rational creatures.
I hear what you're saying about the co-location of industry with NPPs. The industrial operator who would take the heat, power, hydrogen, syngas, whatever from the NPP does not want to build, own or operate the NPP. The same is true of the NPP owner/operator the other way - they don't want to own/operate the refinery or chemical plant buying their output. The key is the commitment each is willing to make to the other. The NPP can secure financing through the take-off agreement the customer is willing to commit to, which is backed by the strength and longevity of the underlying business. Then it comes down to pure willingness of the regulatory and stakeholder engagement processes, followed by the ability of all parties to follow through - just like any other project. The longer the take-off agreement is, the lower the cost of financing for the NPP will be, and typically this means the energy opex for the industrial demand on the other side can be set at a reasonable, known value for long stretches of time which is perfect for those kinds of operations.
Both tend to be located away from populations, but not so far as labour becomes an issue. They tend to be located at some point between close to the primary resource being processed and the point they can sell their product.
Both tend to take 5 - 10 years from resource discovery to operating, and project lifespans are on the order of 40 - 50 years... so the timing lines up pretty well on a case-by-case basis. The long tail lifespan makes the upfront effort worth it, and if enough such projects move forward then we will see meaningful impacts on high level metrics. This is a marathon, we want these solutions to endure.
I'd offer a small shift on thinking regarding nuclear being against the distributed trend. Nuclear-Industrial partnerships are going to have to tap high temperature, small modular designs. This is a non-traditional market for nuclear. Historically, NPPs were designed for a sweet spot of maximum power output per reactor volume unit, constrained by manufacturing limits on the reactor unit, costs of the containment structure, and to some extent turbine offerings. Thats how industry arrived at GW scale output ratings. THEN they went after the markets that could support that. Slim pickings! You could only go after high density population centers, sold as major civil works to municipalities, with very limited order frequency. The market got saturated super quickly, but the players all found plenty of ways to make additional money despite that peculiar set of circumstances.
The successful SMR designs will be able to decentralize the traditional go to market strategy of electricity only NPPs. The trade-off being a loss of power per reactor volume efficiency for a wider pool of potential customers that do not need to be major metros.
Large, high quality thermal loads are sort of the same as big human population centres in some ways. Modern economics does not account for energy in it's models, but it does account for labour. If one sets a standard of the thermal work available in a barrel of oil as 1700 kWh, and a day's worth of human labour as 0.6 kWh, after conversion losses we can estimate that one barrel of oil is roughly equivalent to 4.5 man-years of labour.
Humanity is consuming roughly 140,000 TWh of primary energy from coal, oil and gas each year. Using the conversion factors above, this is the same amount of work as ~370 BILLION people.
Applying that same lens to a site like the Dow Seadrift complex referenced in that whitepaper, we can see that 800MWt total service equates to a "labour population" of almost 18 million people per year. More than enough concentration to support such an allocation of resources. And it takes up 26 acres on a site that already consumes 4,700 acres. I don't really see how that's different from a person who is wealthy enough to put solar, GSHP and batteries on their property to get off the gas grid for heat and power. It's just that the "person" is a company, and their property is a chemical complex. What's more, is that they'll continue to take methane as feedstock but will be converting it into material goods that are not put into the atmosphere as combustion products, so it's a little more aligned with the interest of incumbent resource extraction interests.
I don't know, maybe I'm just autistically rambling again, trying to convince myself
I'm with you on CCUS, I am not 100% clear on how it's going to work, but we need to create reasons for people to actively take C out of the air and ocean somehow. Long term geologic storage options are so limited, and tend not to be sited where fuel gas is being delivered. Removing economics from the exercise, I could imagine LNG delivery infrastructure augmenting their operations in ways to accept processed CO2 from their points of delivery so it can be "backhauled" in their empty containers and "returned" to the productive areas that are more likely to possess suitable geologic storage options. The world needs to figure out how to pay the people that will go to the extent of building and operating such schemes. Alberta's trunkline is still only about 10% full, for example. Who is going to build more CC infrastructure if no one is bringing them volume to handle? The carbon pricing / penalty avoidance game we have set up ain't cutting it.