#lftr

i had to draw them, their designs are too fun to not to

This is an assumption a lot of people make. I made this assumption when I was younger. The difference between me and most people is that I accept evidence to the contrary. There is no place in the world where solar or wind power are grid competitive. Except maybe Denmark. This is because Denmark has an extremely low population, and (relatively) narrow straits that have consistent, offshore wind.

it is utterly amazing how people can ignore both the extremely obvious problems with solar and wind, and ignore the decades of experimentation.

Because we have been pushing for it my entire life.

Hypothetically, solar and wind require no material inputs, and as such, can hypothetically achieve better cost / KWh.

But this ignores all of the glaring problems with it, and the fact it effectively lies to the public. This is because solar and wind have a hypothetical maximum power generation. If a nuclear power plants says it's going to produce 600MWe (Megawatt electrical), since we can control the inputs, it's going to produce 600MWe, year round.

If a wind mill says it has a capacity of 20MWe, then it has 20MWe during ideal conditions. Solar array might only break 80% of it's capacity during a few hours for a few days out of the year. They are instead given a Capacity Factor, which typically ranges from 15% to 35%, over the course of a year.

This isn't to say solar and wind are useless, but they have problems.

Solar varies considerably, not just during the day, but over the course of the year, with the actual daily production dropping to maybe 20% in the winter.

Wind obviously only works when the wind is blowing.

As such, both need extensive power storage. We have a number of good ideas, but the only one actually used in any realistic amounts is hydro power storage.

I.e. you have a hydro power plant, and pump some of the water back up when power is available from your periodic sources. When the sun is shinning or the wind is blowing.

In order for this to work, you need the geographical basis for hydro power, which is one of the best power sources in the world. Where I live, we have a LOT of hydro power, but we also have costal mountains, which could produce massive amounts of wind power for extremely low costs. Naturally, we aren't doing it.

But, there is another, less obvious problem with solar and wind. The power they produce over their lifetime is only a few orders higher than the energy needed to produce them. This means that, at some point, we will likely have reached the point where it is self-sustaining, but we are not anywhere near that yet. We need baseload generation, and that is either hydro, geothermal, fossil fuels, or nuclear. Or, say, BEETD.

What can we do?

California has mandatory grid buybacks, i.e. if your house produce more power than it uses, the grid has to buy it back. Houses that have their own solar power have their own power walls, and very logically, only give back to the grid once the power wall is charged. This means that California gets a lot of grid buyback electrical power between 13:00-16:00, and little to none during the rest of the time.

So, the obvious answer is - hydroelectricity. California needs dams anyways to control water flow, to keep it consistent.

Seriously, for solar power, what California needs is storage. And California could theoretically reach a point where power generation is entirely local, or almost entirely local, with local grid balancing stations instead of local substations.

We don't have enough lithium and cobalt in the world to use for batteries, but we have iron-air batteries, salt water batteries, compressed air storage, flywheel storage, supercapacitors. Nevermind liquid salt solar thermal powerplants, that continue to produce power at night.

and *cough* LFTR *cough*

Canada solved all of the problems with nuclear power in the 1960's. CANDU reactors cannot meltdown, cannot go critical, and use natural uranium, and so weaponization is even off the table.

Canada has some of the largest uranium deposits in the world, along with the Canadian Shield, and most of the world's fresh water, (also important for nuclear power plants.

Make Canada Nuclear Again.

"NASA" - THORIUM REMIX 2016

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors: walk away safe. They tried it, the turned the cooling of to the reactor...NO FUCKING BANG.

https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-conducted-the-first-thorium-salt-experiments-in-over-40-years

LFTRs in 5 minutes-Thorium Reactors

China occupies a unique position, not only because it is currently the only country in the world that is actually building a molten salt reactor, but also because the Chinese Academy of Sciences has chosen MSR technology as an essential component of China’s medium- and long-term energy strategy.

The leading figure in China’s MSR effort is Jiang Mianheng, son of the former Chinese president and Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin and presently director of the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Jiang Mianheng received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Drexel University in the United States and has headed up a variety of technology programs in China. A 2013 conference presentation by Jiang Mianheng on nuclear energy in China is available online.

United States:

Still the only climate denier

Empire hanging on to cold war

Run by the wealthy morons

Has shit in the Whitehouse