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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.

    This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).

    The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.

    Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks’ worth.







  • Four points:

    The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.

    1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.

    It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).

    5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.

    Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.

    That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.

    Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.

    It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.