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foobarian 3 days ago

I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.

wongarsu 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The top of this German article [1] has a rendering of a planned 1.4GW power, 6GWh storage battery plant, with the decommissioned nuclear plant in the background. The battery energy storage is a bit smaller in area and of course of lot less tall. Eyeballing, the area is actually very comparable if you deduct the power plant's parking lot. The nuclear plant is Grohnde, a 1.43GW single-reactor plant.

The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse

1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...

SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not so sure about the "no water needed" as batteries require cooling (and sometimes heating). And perhaps batteries are not risky like nuclear waste, but by volume there would me much more battery material than nuclear material, and there is fire risk that must be mitigated. You can't just wire up a big stack of batteries, they need carefully designed separation and fire suppression so that if one battery goes into a thermal runaway it doesn't take out the entire installation.

foobarian 2 days ago | parent [-]

I imagine it wouldn't be nearly in the same ballpark, since one side does not perform the classic mechanical generation from temperature difference, and deal with the associated waste heat.