Comments by "Archangel17" (@MDP1702) on "Real Engineering"
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Imo for now nothing really points to SMR's reducing the cost of nuclear in the future other than promises or too general and optimistic assumptions of advantages, while potentially ignoring the disadvantages too much. It seems the closer they get to production phase, the more it becomes clear they might not even be able to compete with regular reactors or at best equal those. And quite some cost and difficulties not yet factored in might also come up during operation and end of life too.
This doesn't mean that SMR's can't play a role anywhere, there are plenty of potential situations where SMR's might be really usefull. Like remote communities, industrial sites that need 24/7 guaranteed power, things like space travel in the future, ...
If SMR's do become less costly per kW than the regular large reactors, great. Maybe they will once they get past the R&D and protoype phase. I just don't see it happening for anytime soon, definitely not before the new fleet of reactors will/should get rolled out to combat climate change in time.
The project at 15:40 is essentially already quite a bit more expensive than the generation of new large scale reactors that France is ment to start building in the next 10-15 years. These plants are expected to be around 8-9B per 1600MW reactor (or at least it was before recent inflation spikes, but this article is also from 3 years ago), while this project according to this would be around 13,5B. This is similar to Flamanville 3, the first modern new modern reactor in France, essentially a kind of prototype/1st of what will be used to replace the older close to retiring old French reactors. Having learned from this "prototype" they'll be able to reduce cost and time for the future reactors in the fleet (normally) to the expected 8-9B cost.
Anyway, I guess we'll see what the future brings regarding nuclear use and what SMR's will amount to.
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Why do you think only native speakers can spreak/write english fluently? Many people have english as a second/third/fourth language and might still speak or at least write english fluently enough on the internet to pass as a native speaker. This is due to the fact that english is used in so many fields and so widespread. first of all due to the former british empire spanning the globe, secondly because of the US influence on world affairs after ww2 and thirdly because it's mostly used in science when communicating with people of a different native tongue, aviation, widely spread by english music, series and movies, internet where english is used as a universal language, ...
When we talk about the number of people speaking english fluently enough on the internet (which doesn't really need to be that fluent, because I have seen several times that americans too use average english, due to fast typing/laziness/...) we might be talking about 2 billion or more, here the 320 billion US citizens make up only 16%, if we scale down to 1.2 billion this still would only be around 25%
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@enlighteneddoggo5803
Jeezes christ, it is not about wether you can divide a foot by 10 (what would be the point?), it is about the mismatch of converting magnitudes of units ( 1 foot = 12 inch, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 chain = 22 yards, ..., 1 mile = 5280 feet vs 1m = 100 cm, 1 cm = 10 mm, 1 km = 1000m ). There is too much unnecessary calculations in imperial units compared to metric units. It might be fine in everyday life, but once you get to actual complicated engineering, it is usefull to easily move between these magnitudes with ease in order to prevent mistakes or to not waste too much time just converting measurements.
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personally I think the title is not that well chosen. Russia (or better the USSR), didn't so much stop the blitzkrieg, as well as the russian geography and climate. The entire point of the blitzkrieg is to surprise and overwhelm your opponent before he can really react, by for example creating weapons en masse, mobilise a lot of troops, stabilize the front, .... The blitzkrieg was already over by the time that Kursk happened, because the USSR effectively had had the time to build up their forces during the winter and later on. They had by kursk had the time to start their industrial warmachine.
The blitzkrieg in Russia ended when winter arrived and the germans where bogged down, by both the weather and cityfighting.
There are several reasons the blitzkrieg was less succesfull in russia than on other theaters.
1) the vast spaces of russia meant that the germans needed more time to move fast enough to decisively deal with the USSR, unlike what happened in France or Poland.
2) the bad infrastructure (roads) played also a large part, certainly in conjunction with the vast spaces that had to be crossed.
3) weather: when the winter arrived the germans had huge trouble supplying the front, keeping the troops healthy and their mechanised parts were more prone to breakage due to freezing.
4) cityfighting: what eventually really ended the blitzkrieg was the cityfighting in for example stalingrad. But this wasn't the only place, german troops came very close to moscow, up to 30 miles even reaching it's outskirts (if I remember correctly), but here then faced heavy resistance, together with upcoming winter.
So at the beginning of the winter the blitzkrieg was already over and the USSR was 'given' 'breathing' space to gather more troops, get their industrial machine working for war and prepare counterattacks, effectively the things the blitzkrieg was meant to avoid.
The blitzkrieg could have been stopped if the enemy had more tanks, troops, ..., but this would be one factor, for example if these superior numbers were spread out, the blitzkrieg still could be effective and was also meant to deal with these kind of situations in a way. If it wasn't for the russian geography and such, the blitzkrieg would have been much more effective and it still worked quite well seeing how far the germans came. But it was still much less efficient in comparison with how the blitzkrieg was executed on the western front.
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@JohnSmith-bf1sq
the entire current EV fleet...not the whole country
No, it was definitely said that the lithium in Nevada was enough to replace the entire US care fleet.
All current electric vehicles just wont have the range that is needed for the US.
Most people drive less then 50 miles per day. So I'd say even current range is good enough for most people. However the EV range is constantly increasing. All that is needed is enough fastchargers for long distances.
windmills kill thousands and thousands of birds and other flying animals
Like someone else said, the amount of birds killed by wind turbines is a fraction of the total amount of birds killed. If you see this as an issue, maybe you should also advocate to kill all cats, get rid of all glas windows, get rid of cars (yes more birds die due to cars).
change air currents
That is neglectable. The amount of energy wind turbines use can't change air currents for more than 100-300m, after that the unimpacted aircurrent just again fills up the gap.
*extremely loud*.
Directly underneath they can be as loud as a lawnmower, at 100m they should be as loud as a window AC unit and at 400m as refrigerator. It depends on the country, but usually wind turbines are not placed closer than 300-400m to residential buildings. In some countries this is even higher.
Solar, hard on the enviroment, depends on what kind but can fry birds as well.
The kind that can "fry" birds are hardly used and usually are found in very hot area's, where you'll already have less birds.
As for hard on the environment. Depends on how it is produced.
i live next to a giant wind farm.
How close?
they are not a stable way to provide power(cant be counted on to provide power at peak times and are often turned off)
Which is why we need energy storage for renewables. And EV's could also help out (being charged when there is a lot of wind/sun.
No doubt you live somewhere far away from them so as long as its not your back yard its ok.
I often am within around 1km of wind turbines and can't hear them at all. And I also have stood underneath them while they were operating in medium windspeed, they aren't that loud, ofcourse there is sound when you are closer to them, but there is regulation as to how loud they can be. For example they normally aren't allowed to be louder than 105db or close to it, which is as loud as a lawnmower. The sound degrades quickly.
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@arnekristian5704
Im not aware of any proposed solutions that are anywhere close to being able to supply enough power to actually realistically do this.
There are a lot of promising and very realistic solution already, from purely mechanical/physical storage systems (like LAES, CAES, ...) to chemical ones in many forms.
Too many to really start a discussion about really and honestly, it has been a while since I looked into it. but plenty used existing materials and processes and showed great promise, more than SMR's at least imo. Several of these promising ones had large scale first prototypes in the pipeline around this time. All of these are specifically being developed/deployed with gridscale storage in mind, so no need to think to much of power to weight or power to volume as with many current popular energy storage devices (current batteries like Li-ion etc essentially).
The main thing here is that most of those are still in their infancy and need to grow/really proof themselves in the coming years. Next to that even the "convential" batteries like lithium-ion etc could do it to some extent by then cost-wise and at pretty large scale, but not at worldwide scale.
The points you mentioned also are an option and should be used to really to get an efficient and reliable grid imo.
First of all we would need a lot more EVs
EV's will be pretty much standard by 2035, you'll be hard pressed to buy gas cars anywhere in the western world, and likely even in countries like China.
a change in mentality around we use the cars
True, but that can happen, especially if there is a financial incentive (be it the option to save cost by charging at low cost times and discharging into you house at high cost times, or just the provider giving a fee/buying back the electricity at an extra cost, ...).
very low efficiency solution
What de you specifically call a low efficiency solution? It still has an overall efficiency of around 75-80%, which is pretty good. Also considering how cheap renewables are, you could double its production and still have a significant lower cost than nuclear, especially since renewable is still expected to decrease in price while nuclear is expected to even increase or at best plateau.
Ive also read something about salt-based batteries where we store heat in melted salts, but still not that efficient and scaleable?
That is an option, but not really looked into as a stand-alone one I think, there are much better options being developed/deployed currently for this. What molten salt storage is usually used at is in combination with concentrated solar power (CSP), where you heat it up using solar energy being highly concentrated in a single point, which can reach high temperatures at that spot. It is pretty effective, but only usefull in hotter/arid regions like southern Europe etc. it also is still pretty costly (similar to nuclear) and consequently not really used compared to the cheaper and easier installed and maintained PV panels (eventhough these don't have storage built in). It has the ability to essentially provide power consistently (also during the night).
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If you ever have an idea and think to yourself, “why hasn’t anyone done this yet?”, there is a good chance someone already has.
That however doesn't mean much without context. Besides it just being an idea that isn't feasible, it could also be that the person before did it badly or that the time back then didn't allow it to be done properly or so many other reasons it could have failed. Context in this is everything.
And ofcourse there are times you think “why hasn’t anyone done this yet?” and it turns out no one actually did think of it or people thought in a similar way and just thought because of that, that it wasn't a feasible idea. This actually happens quite regularly, that you read of someone inventing/developing something actually very simple or obvious, but no one else just thought of it or did it before.
Why do we always see Africa as a continent that we can just go loot whenever we feel like it?
This idea has nothing to do with just looting Africa because we felt like it. The Sahara region just happens to be a great region for largescale solar that happens to be in Africa. Moreover it isn't like African countries had no say in these projects, for them it actually is a great possibility. They could make a lot of money from exporting/letting others export this electricity to Europe that then can be invested in their own country, possibly even creating jobs in the process. Not to mention that they themselves can also directly profit from this by using the skills and means of these companies to also build these solar power plants for their own local use.
It is kind of sad that people see every relation between Africa and Europe that is positive for Europe these days as new imperialism/colonialism, without looking into whether this also couldn't just be beneficial to Africa.
BTW, there is not much lithium gained from Africa, there are only 2 African nations in the top 8 producing countries and their amount is very low. Australia actually is by far the largest lithium mining country (40-60k tonnes vs Zimbabwe's 1,6k tonnes). The same for gold production, only 1 African nation in the top 10 gold producing countries.
Furthermore there is only 1 African nation in the top 10 of known lithium resources (Congo), which has around the same amount of lithium resources as for example Germany or Canada.
Ofcourse Africa still gets exploited in a lot of ways, you won't here me say differently, but please at least be correct regarding the resources or way they are, you're examples were just blatantly incorrect. And Africa isn't just being exploited by foreign entities either, but for a large part by their own leadership. Every region with weak corrupt leadership will get exploited by unscrupulous persons, be it through personal, corporate or national ways.
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If you incorporate the mining of the nuclear material, I believe it was only around 8 times better in land use. But ofcourse if you just talk about the plant alone, not the fuel acquisition, sure. Then again while Solar panels can be placed on area's that also can be used for other things like roofs, parking lots, even agricultural fields (in hotter regions even increasing the agricultural output of those fields), this isn't the case for nuclear. And ofcourse for now nuclear is geographically restrained to a few area's (close to a body of water, not to close to a large population center, ....), whereas solar panels are essentially only restricted above certain latitudes.
TLDR: while saying that nuclear takes up (much) less land is correct, it is so simplistic it is essentially just a useless talking point.
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