Liquid Metal Storage batteries and wind generation

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Include the ongoing direct and indirect costs of chernobyl and fukushima, the ongoing cost for temporary and long term safe disposal (be sure to include generous reserve assets for the timeframe 100 years from now upwards) the cost for all the subsidies that have been thrown at nuclear power so far, and those bills might look quite different.

Not saying nuclear is necessarily a bad idea, but at least let's not be hypocrites about the true costs...

thorium reactors are inherently safer and few of those have been used.

a shame really.

The transformer explosion in NYC during hurricane Sandy is precisely why this is a bad and VERY DANGEROUS idea(liquid metal batteries)!

Corrosion, leaking, and water infiltration aside, major weather events that knock out power and cause flooding tend to overload key grid elements and trigger current overloads. Batteries WILL detonate if excessive current passes through them and if there were such batteries on the grid in the New York area, what would've happened would've look much like what you see here, only far bigger and incendiary:





[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYC7sV1Kj9o[/youtube]

Put something that shuts it off if too much current is passing through?

Wind can be a better solution if the population was less.
Nuclear costs are also spread over a long time for all of the waste.

I still think it's an idea worth pursuing - the inability to have large-scale energy storage is electricity's greatest weakness and our need for energy production will be significantly reduced if we can store every bit that isn't used! There may be risk of explosion, but it won't have near the same waste or threat as even the best of nuclear plants will. If one storage facility removes the need for another reactor, I say GO FOR IT!

You don't necessary have to put the battery on the wind turbines, you can put them in safe storage rooms while be linked to the electrical grid which is also linked to the wind turbines.

There is another idea of storage by some Québec engineers which consists of giant rotating wheels. You use electricity to spin the wheels and use the spin to generate electricity when needed.

It really doesn't actually matter where the batteries are located as long as they are connected to the grid. You need current flowing back into them in order to have power coming out to complete the circuit; 'member? So a massive power surge(which can be instigated by a whole bunch of different things)on the grid that happens to work its way to the battery bank will trigger a catastrophic explosion.



This does not mean liquid metal batteries(even those that have alkali metals like sodium) are useless They can store very large amounts of electricity but the explosion hazard is there and connecting them to the grid makes the risk of an explosion only a matter of time.

which is the exact same case for many sealed battery types including lead acid used in security systems all over the world, even peoples private homes.

protecting them however is a piece of cake and doing the same for liquid metal storage would make that particular aerguemnt mute, we have already dealt with the issue.

the consequences of an explosion would be far worse, that much is true.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't work with the technology and improve it. At one point, starting a car meant taking a very serious risk of breaking your wrist and they were incredibly dangerous when in motion. We didn't give up, look what cars do now.

The laws of physics and chemistry cannot be changed or improved. Whereas science and technology can. Why should we pursue a technology that is both expensive and extremely dangerous?

@Oodain: Lead, even in molten form, isn't NEARLY as reactive as sodium since the latter is an alkali metal whereas the latter is a mildly reactive transition metal. Rechargeable battery have a finite number of charge cycles which means that the sodium will have to replenished and production of liquid sodium on a large enough scale to meet the demands of wind power grid storage devices. Wind power is EXPEN$IVE. There's just no getting around it. It's been around for quite a while and the incentive to dump money into it is the fact that it's "clean energy" when there are already much cheaper sources of power available which do not rely on fossil fuels or the weather to produce electricity. Geothermal is the cheapest form of electricity available and it is inexhaustible since it does require fuel and can generate electricity round the clock with no need for explosive storage batteries.

You saw the laws of chemistry and physics are immutable, I say we just haven't found the workaround yet. Sodium will always be intensely reactive, but our ways of isolation sodium from anything it can react with will continue to improve and make this technology much safer, and cost will decline in time as it always does.

Geothermal has location issues. If there isn't a big enough source of heat close enough to the surface, it simply isn't feasible on a large scale (as far as I know), which is a shame because it really is a brilliant source of power, direct heat, and hot water.

What happens when the pipe with hot water gets clogged making geothermal energy?