Two years ago, sodium-ion battery pioneer Natron Energy was busy preparing its specially formulated sodium batteries for mass production. The company slipped a little past its 2023 kickoff plans, but it didn't fall too far behind as far as mass battery production goes. It officially commenced…
  • GormadtEnglish
    35•7 months ago

    I love nuclear but this new battery tech has me super excited

    It increases the viability of renewable energy sources (especially solar) which makes me hella happy

      • capitalEnglish
        27•7 months ago

        Not who you asked but look at France’s energy mix compared to the US.

        Imagine where the US could be today regarding emissions if we had kept up with nuclear this whole time.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•7 months ago

            Perhaps a bad example because most people undermine them, but China has still decided to move forward with 4 different nuclear facilities this year despite having an ABUNDANCE of solar manufacturing. If they found that decision worthwhile I would think the opposite, assuming most of the reasoning is current battery tech can’t sustain dark periods at a massive scale, but I’m not an expert.

            Also just saw you mentioned nuclear costs in another comment, I suggest you look at South Korea and China’s cost per facility compared to the US, they’re able to build and maintain facilities at about half the US does.

            • @[email protected]English
              2•7 months ago

              Literally every source I’ve come across has nuclear being massively more expensive than renewables + storage, at least in the West.

              The market decides what to invest in in a capitalist economy and they will tend to go for the thing that makes them the most money in the shortest time possible and that’s why new nuclear isn’t happening much.

              If you’re advocating for public ownership of utilities so there’s central planning and long term thinking instead of profit chasing, that’s an interesting debate to have.

        • GormadtEnglish
          12•7 months ago

          This is exactly why I love nuclear

          And who can forget the classic, “Where is the waste from fossil fuels? Take a deep breath, it’s in your lungs. Where is the waste from nuclear power? Where we store it.”

          Yes there have been disasters but the waste from those are tracked, in a specific location, and can be cleaned up. The default state of fossil fuels hits every living breathing thing on Earth.

          And even factoring in the impact from disasters nuclear is still the safest. And we have even safer designs for reactors nowadays then the reactors that had those disasters.

          • @[email protected]English
            14•7 months ago

            Nuclear suffers from the airplane fallacy where when something goes wrong it tends to go really wrong and a lot of people die at once and it makes the news. But fact is, many orders of magnitude more people have died from fossil fuel plants, mining, byproducts, and combustion. They just die slower, in smaller groups, so it doesn’t get reported on as easily.

            • @[email protected]English
              3•7 months ago

              They just die slower, in smaller groups

              looks doubtful

              I mean, I agree with your broader point that it gets a disproportionate amount of coverage and scares people, but I dunno about nuclear accidents killing people quickly and at once.

              I mean, Chernobyl was the worst nuclear incident, ya? Like, there were definitely some people who were killed right there, but it was a pretty small group, even so.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster

              There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer.[2][3][4] However, there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths that have yet to occur due to the disaster’s long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.

              So, immediate deaths were about 30. I mean, that airline crash we had out in those Spanish islands, whatsit called…

              googles

              Yeah.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

              The Tenerife airport disaster occurred on 27 March 1977, when two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport[1] (now Tenerife North Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife.[2][3] The collision occurred when KLM Flight 4805 initiated its takeoff run during dense fog while Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway. The impact and resulting fire killed all on board KLM Flight 4805 and most of the occupants of Pan Am Flight 1736, with only 61 survivors in the front section of the aircraft. With a total of 583 fatalities, the disaster is the deadliest accident in aviation history.[2][3]

              I mean, that killed about 20 times the immediate number of deaths in Chernobyl. I guarantee you that that collision didn’t get twenty times the media coverage or concern of Chernobyl.

              Even if we use the highest estimated total death figure listed above for Chernobyl for the “increased death rate from minor effects around the world” – 60,000 – and I suspect that that’s being awfully pessimistic – it kind of gets dwarfed by how many similar deaths around the world we casually ignore from coal power and the like due to particulate emissions.

              googles

              If one’s worried about death rates, nuclear’s at about the bottom of the list.

              https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh

          • @[email protected]English
            0•7 months ago

            And now we’re in an age of nuclear fusion. My kid or grandkids may live in a world powered by even cleaner reactors. Which is great because they will probably have to live entirely indoors.

            • @[email protected]English
              4•7 months ago

              Eh, I feel like we’ve been in an age of nuclear fusion for decades, it’s always just around the corner…

              But maybe this latest set of breakthroughs will be it. I’ll believe it when I see a production scale plant.

              • @[email protected]English
                4•7 months ago

                It has value in terms of research but I’ve seen no evidence that we’re even remotely close to hooking a fusion reactor up to a grid.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•7 months ago

          Sure, I get that. My priorities are clean energy that is as cheap as possible and nuclear just can’t compete on cost.