You can make anything costly if you do it in unnecessary depth.
In a funny way chernobyl has been massively useful: by not cleaning it up, there is a huge experiment going on to see how damaging that sort of low level radiation is. And the answer is 'about 100 to 1000 times less dangerous than the models predicted'.
There is bugger all danger from FUKU and there never really was: Even the WHO admits that.
easier than that use Fischer Tropf to make hydrocarbons from CO2 and then cook them in a low oxygen atmospher to get carbon soot, and then compress that into blocks.
Its nothing new. There IS nothing new in storage. Its all years old ideas that are being dressed up in Green emperors new clothes because
- the assumption that renewable energy HAS to be made to work is driving the possibility of getting massive subsidies and
- people without engineering backgrounds will believe anything and are easily parted from their money.
The ENGINEERING reality is that far far better stores of energy exist ready made in the form of fossil fuel and fissionable and fertile materials.
There is no need to create it with an expensive inefficient and physically massive and expensive transient technology and then store it in another expensive inefficient and physically massive and expensive (and potentially highly dangerous) technology in order to do the same job.
the energy density of atomic binding energy is at least three orders of magnitude above anything else we know of, and can use. That means storage is small and has little impact on other things. The fact that its extraordinarily difficult to access it at all, makes it somewhat expensive, to access, but inherently very safe. And as far as our curent thunking goes, its te primary energy driving the Universe. It doesn't get better than that.
The excess of radiation generated by nuclear power is less than one percent of the total radiation we receive. It really is a non-issue.
Eventually these facts will be recognised, but sadly it seems, not until every other alternative has been explored, because people like to believe, rather than learn science, do sums, and face reality.
It could be done, but there are cheaper more reliable ways using batteries and inverters these days. I can't recall the spec of the largest one to date but it was in the 10-20kWh range in the 1970's.
It is a very old mechanical UPS design. Whilst there is good mains power a clutch keeps the drive from mains to generator in - lose mains and the flywheel keeps the generators going until it runs out with gradually falling frequency so you have to hope the load is tolerant.
Such things have already been successfully engineered. The I know of was the emergency shutdown flywheel supply for the MRAO Ryle 5km aperture synthesis telescope at Cambridge where the stored kinetic energy in the flywheel was intended to stow the instruments back to vertical in the event of mains power loss in a storm.
Big dish scopes have been wrecked in storms through losing power and emergency generators failing to start. ISTR alignment of the bearing was carefully chosen so that if the rotor broke loose it would not hit anything in the two miles or so it was expected to travel.
The main problem with this method is that to be any good at energy density the flywheel necessarily contains a very dangerous amount of kinetic energy. Think robot wars Hypno-Disk on steroids.
Use a DC motor/generator and use an inverter. It increases the cost, but makes the system much less critical of rotor speed. You need more than
3000rpm at the flywheel to get a decent energy density per unit mass, too, so you need to add gearing to keep the output frequency right on a synchronous system, which causes its own losses.
No. Maybe a wind turbine will kill somebody, some time. When a big dam breaks it's like a tsunami, and many thousands are likely to die. In the case of the Russian dam, there could be hundreds of thousands, and whole towns destroyed. Do you see the difference?
ISTR that when the Hinkley Point A steam turbine came apart, one disk went through eight brick walls and I think some bits just about made it off site. And that was only going at a little over 3000 rpm.
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