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World's Largest Solar Project Would Power 1 Million U.S. Homes

THRESHIN said:
First, do know that I am very much for researching and investing in fusion. I do believe it will be the future. We are making huge strides in fusion.

That being said, the media is once again being sensationalist. A commercial fusion plant is a LONG way off. Even with how well this is going we will be lucky to see this within our lifetimes.

We have proven fission designs that work right now. Time to construction can be less than 2 years for a modern SMR. The concept of molten salt fast neutron reactors is nothing new either. The biggest barrier has been material science to support such a design.

Your fusion fuel isn't quite that easy either. It's true that fusion uses hydrogen, but it uses isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium and tritium or possibly just tritium depending on how they want to do it. Tritium is so rare naturally you can forget extraction from water. Deuterium is possible, but first we must extract the heavy water and then separate the isotopes. Heavy water is also extremely rare but far less so than tritium.

So in short no you are not going to fuel a fusion reactor with just electrolysis of water. Sorry, would be nice if it was that easy.

Information I find mentions "isotopes of hydrogen and lithium from seawater". So they're extracting deuterium. Lithium is unexpected, we shall see where they're going with that one. not a lot of technical information as of yet. To be expected.

I'm highly skeptical on their timeframe. We have done well but yet we are still far from a sustained controlled fusion reaction.

All this being said, I want them to prove me wrong. I'll believe the hype when there is something to show for it.
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The limited reading and googling I did shows the majority of plans involve using high energy neutrons from the fusion reaction to breed tritium from lithium. Lithium-6 is the preferred isotope but makes up less than 10% of naturally found lithium. Just one of many hurdles sustainable fusion has to overcome. Needless to say, the process of breeding tritium saps usable energy from the fusion process.
 
When people need money they turn the hype machine on. How many times over how many decades on this very site have we heard what is right around the corner on tech and it turns out to be pie in the sky BS. I have followed the tokamak reactor forever and every so often you hear "NEW BREAKTHROUGH" and what is it really? They need more funds.

I agree show me first.
 
Tsumi said:
The limited reading and googling I did shows the majority of plans involve using high energy neutrons from the fusion reaction to breed tritium from lithium. Lithium-6 is the preferred isotope but makes up less than 10% of naturally found lithium. Just one of many hurdles sustainable fusion has to overcome. Needless to say, the process of breeding tritium saps usable energy from the fusion process.
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thanks. i admit i didn't have much time to do more than a quick search. i do remember something like this from a while back...it's a neat idea, tritium is quite rare so they make some instead.
 
THRESHIN said:
thanks. i admit i didn't have much time to do more than a quick search. i do remember something like this from a while back...it's a neat idea, tritium is quite rare so they make some instead.
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Yep.

The biggest hurdle I saw (other than limited supply of lithium-6) is that one fusion reaction is only capable of making one tritium, so the process would need to be 100% efficient (impossible) or a neutron multiplier is needed (typically beryllium). So not only does the issue of getting net positive output still need to be solved, the problem of fuel needs to be solved as well.
 
Recent video showing that all is not dead for solar thermal. For clean night time energy far away from water source, ie Gobi Desert, it may still be the best solution.


View: https://youtu.be/v_kgre8h57I?si=E030rGWgQ-mzLpwV

Using Sodium and salt makes it easier to heat up should hardening occur. If coat reductions on the components can come anywhere near what PV has experienced, the technology is more than viable especially seeing all the Lithium battery plants going up in a toxic cloud lately.
 
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OKC Yeakey Trentadue said:
Recent video showing that all is not dead for solar thermal. For clean night time energy far away from water source, ie Gobi Desert, it may still be the best solution.


View: https://youtu.be/v_kgre8h57I?si=E030rGWgQ-mzLpwV

Using Sodium and salt makes it easier to heat up should hardening occur. If coat reductions on the components can come anywhere near what PV has experienced, the technology is more than viable especially seeing all the Lithium battery plants going up in a toxic cloud lately.
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Back in the early days of solar I used to think it was silly to pursue panels due to how inefficient they were, and solar boilers were a better solution for harnessing solar power, using well tested and highly efficient steam turbines.

I never realized it was also theorized to provide mostly steady baseline power.

I can't watch the video right now, but I presume the plan is to either super-heat steam to the point where it retains it's heat throughout the night, gradually releasing the pressure through a turbine, OR they heat some sort off thick walked metal tank, and the metal retains enough heat to keep the process going throughout the night?

Either way, these are cool potential solutions, but they will probably not see the light of day, at least not beyond a one-off that gets released to much fanfare
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Back in the early days of solar I used to think it was silly to pursue panels due to how inefficient they were, and solar boilers were a better solution for harnessing solar power, using well tested and highly efficient steam turbines.

I never realized it was also theorized to provide mostly steady baseline power.

I can't watch the video right now, but I presume the plan is to either super-heat steam to the point where it retains it's heat throughout the night, gradually releasing the pressure through a turbine, OR they heat some sort off thick walked metal tank, and the metal retains enough heat to keep the process going throughout the night?

Either way, these are cool potential solutions, but they will probably not see the light of day, at least not beyond a one-off that gets released to much fanfare
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They run a turbine off of superheated molten salt from the focused mirrors. Massive plants have been around for over a decade and they've had plenty of issues, but China seems to want to push forward with 30 new plants planned.
 
Poseur said:
You're ignoring ore mining, processing and waste disposal of the radioactive materials. I'm not against nuclear power, it's just a weak argument point. Solar should be everywhere and not tucked off in the desert. I'd be happy to live within a mile of that solar farm. I work next to one and it's no big deal at all. The opposite is true for nuclear.

I wonder if this is at all tied to Lake Mead's water levels.
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I would hate to live near solar and would have zero issues living next to nuclear. You don't have to put nuclear waste into disposal. You can just keep reusing it. Obama backed away from that tech...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucle...PUREX process is a,in the industry at present.
 
OKC Yeakey Trentadue said:
They run a turbine off of superheated molten salt from the focused mirrors. Massive plants have been around for over a decade and they've had plenty of issues, but China seems to want to push forward with 30 new plants planned.
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Superheated molten salt sounds like a recipe for astronomical maintenance costs, is it?
 
Eivind68 said:
Superheated molten salt sounds like a recipe for astronomical maintenance costs, is it?
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It's not as bad as most people think for its ability to destroy equipment, and it's certainly not as destructive as hydrogen, but getting to the cost of electricity is incredibly complicated because of onerous regulation, taxation, subsidies and a genuine effort to obfuscate the costs of energy supply chains by various lobby groups, corporations, and politicians. The truth, any truth is almost impossible to uncover.

As a rule, I'm just generally not a fan of large scale solar though, I genuinely believe that small scale on-premises solar should be part of the building code. Even here in the deeply frozen north it reduces your annual grid use by 10%. I'm a big fan of small wind turbines as well, We've been getting cheques for our power here in the Haliburton Highlands for the last five years since we put two solar arrays and two turbines in for the shop, the warehouse, and the yard. We're drying wood indoors, we use a shit load of power.

The same thing is true at my house, solar and wind exceed the power needs of my family of seven. Or did, my girls are all in university or working now.
 
Small scale residential wind turbines would be great. Winters and nights here tend to be very windy, potentially making up for the lack of sunlight and definitely reducing the amount of battery storage we would need. Wind turbines on the north-facing roof, solar on the south.
 
Tsumi said:
Small scale residential wind turbines would be great. Winters and nights here tend to be very windy, potentially making up for the lack of sunlight and definitely reducing the amount of battery storage we would need. Wind turbines on the north-facing roof, solar on the south.
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I've heard nothing but but bad things about residential wind. It's so inconsistent, it hardly even worth it, especially against solar.

Yes, it's possible to have wind at night, but there will be so many wind less nights that you likely will not be able to reduce the size of your battery bank.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Yeah, in order to get decent wind you need to get some altitude which most people dont think about when putting up something that is barely higher than the roof top
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There's also topography at a not insignificant distance to consider, when we were putting them up the company actually mapped the geography and wind patterns in a 100+km radius of the turbines we put up, the ones at the yard are huge, and those could still get stopped dead by a poorly placed hill or copse of trees. Hills tend to be pretty static, but new trees can happen, bastard things grow all over the place. I mean, I'm a fan of trees, we make log homes out of them, but they can really cramp your style whether your power is wind or solar.

One thing people need to understand with wind is that it's not likely you'll get your money back unless you use A LOT of power, their return improves with scale. Solar tends to be much more forgiving on a residential scale.
 
It doesn't take much to knock an electrical grid over. Get enough of your generating capacity knocked offline, frequency drops by a percent (I think grid tolerance to frequency shift is less than 0.5%?), then the safeties on your interconnects trip, and it's off the to the races for a very rapid cascade failure.

In my completely uninformed opinion, the ideal grid is nuclear, with large hydro and geo for base load that can be modulated but has long ramp up/down time, and solar + wind with batteries for rapid response. And maybe some gas plants for rapid response when solar isn't producing.
 
PV solar and wind are empty megavar producers. Can't rely on them for grid stability. We're just a little over 12% on my regional grid, and we've already had to install reactive energy storage yards and advanced phase monitoring systems on every base load plant because of it. It really destabilizes the grid.
 
maybe one day.
Tokamak_Chamber1.jpg
 
Could hydrogen power act as a stabilizer for renewables based networks ??
 
We'd have to produce a lot of hydrogen. Millions upon millions of cubic feet worth every day per region. The most efficient way to do that is off-peak nuclear. So you might as well just build nuclear plants for base load power instead. You'd be better off producing hydrogen with off-peak nuclear for automobile use rather than grid tied energy production.
 
Marees said:
Could hydrogen power act as a stabilizer for renewables based networks ??
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I mean, maybe? You'd essentially collocate a peaker power plant that runs on hydrogen with a hydrogen production plant that maybe only runs when electricity is cheap, so you don't have to transport hydrogen. But the devil is in the details; that's a lot of capital expense compared to just building a natural gas peaker plant if you're somewhere where natural gas is a good option. If you skip the onsite hydrogen production plant and use commercially available hydrogen, most of that comes is reformed from natural gas, so you've got a natural gas peaker with more steps.

In my not so well informed opinion, if you're splitting water to form hydrogen, you'd be better off turning it into natural gas so you can store, transport, and use it easier. But that's just me and my crazy ideas. Synthetic fuels produced by excess solar/wind could enable a lot of things, but capital cost and intermittency make the economics difficult.
 
Marees said:
Could hydrogen power act as a stabilizer for renewables based networks ??
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In addition to capital costs mentioned, hydrogen from water has extremely poor efficiency. Roundtrip efficiency is something like 30% for the most efficient fuel cells I believe. Lithium battery roundtrip efficiency is 85-95%, depending on the efficiency of the inverters. I'm a proponent of flow batteries for grid storage- about 70% roundtrip efficiency but far easier to scale with less rare element usage and basically none of the fire hazards.
w1retap said:
We'd have to produce a lot of hydrogen. Millions upon millions of cubic feet worth every day per region. The most efficient way to do that is off-peak nuclear. So you might as well just build nuclear plants for base load power instead. You'd be better off producing hydrogen with off-peak nuclear for automobile use rather than grid tied energy production.
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I would say hydrogen should only be used for long haul trucks and planes due to its inefficiency.
 
Tsumi said:
Roundtrip efficiency is something like 30%
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I imagine there is a bit of not only portability of hydrogen per kilo benefit (hydrogen batteries 40kwh/kg potential is even higher than regular fuel) but is there a cost benefit if you have too much energy anyway that you will throw away to capture it ?

Say I have a 1,000 kwh of extra solars a month, I can buy more batteries to store it or put it in Hydrogen loosing more of the energy doing so... but does the hydrogen solution cheaper than the lithium battery ? yes you waste more PV, but right now I am loosing 100% of it and has solar get cheaper and cheaper loosing kwh I mind less and less if hydrogen is cheaper and battery stay costly. Has the challenge become all about storage and distribution (the issue) once solar get big enough if it continue its trajectory at a slower but good pace an other 10 years, cost of storage/ease of distribution will become more the question that the energy lost during storing.

And something like hydrogen could beat lithium for both
 
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I used to pass this solar plant every day working on the railroad and it was a sight to behold.
 
OKC Yeakey Trentadue said:
I've heard nothing but but bad things about residential wind. It's so inconsistent, it hardly even worth it, especially against solar.

Yes, it's possible to have wind at night, but there will be so many wind less nights that you likely will not be able to reduce the size of your battery bank.
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All depends on local conditions. Where I am it is always windy ... like 80-90% of the year. 12-24 mph winds are consider the low end of normal around here while up to 40mph is fairly regular. I'm not advocating for home wind by any stretch. I have no idea if it would help me at all as my power usage is relatively low. But, different areas will lead to different results when it comes to wind. Around here we'd only consider it "really windy" when it hits 50-60mph. Anything less is just a normal day ... maybe a bit windy.

On the other hand. Solar here would be crap. We can get 150-200 days of rain here in a year so really solar is going to be under-producing. Granted, the bulk of our power comes from hydro ... so all good.

So, what it boils down to is that you gear your power production to your local conditions. There is no "one size fits all" solution. Solar in one area is great and in another it is crap. Wind is awesome in one spot and crap in another. Local conditions are king.
 
When I see or hear of these large solar farms, I always think how much more stable MW capacity could be generated on the same footprint with Thorium molten salt reactors. And without the fragility and unstable nature of solar power production, it would remove the eyesore while delivering more reliable grid power.
 
CVNet1 said:
When I see or hear of these large solar farms, I always think how much more stable MW capacity could be generated on the same footprint with Thorium molten salt reactors. And without the fragility and unstable nature of solar power production, it would remove the eyesore while delivering more reliable grid power.
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There is currently no approved reactor design at this time, that would be the major hurdle. Once a design is approved you would probably see commercial units within 5 years. They are at least far closer to becoming a possibility than Fusion reactors.
 
There's zero talk of them in the real world nuclear industry. We are talking about PWR/BWR SMR's though, and large 1200MWe+ units. My company is licensed for one already, and not too long ago we solicited the state legislature for allocation of a loan to break ground and start construction.

But yeah, we've done molten salt before. My office is right next to what used to be one. They are an extreme pain to perform any type of work on, and to operate reliably. Any areas in the primary loop (or even secondary loop where sodium is used) where there's any sort of flow eddy or disruption, you get solidification of the sodium. Then it all just goes downhill from there...

So far every "cool" online pipedream I've seen uses fuel in the primary loop not within fuel rods. That makes maintenance impossible or not even feasible cost-wise due to long-term fission products coating everything you need to perform maintenance on -- a person isn't getting anywhere near it, and it embrittles all the components with neutron flux, requiring replacement at an even higher rate. We don't even have materials available for seals and motor winding coatings that can withstand that type of abuse anyhow for extended operation like you'd see on an electrical grid. So that brings you back to fuel in fuel rods and the whole flow eddy discussion where you can't maintain temperatures/cooling properly and end up with a fuel melt. Beyond that, the corrosiveness factor is off the charts. We have a hard enough time with just boron corrosion in PWR's, so MSR's bring a 100x factor to that problem.
 
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