rickair7777

Not impossible at all, literally or otherwise.

The core does have some inertia, but you can plan for that and lead the problem. For a daily cycle you could use water in a reservoir to store and retrieve energy. Ie the plant pumps water into a reservoir at a steady rate, and it's extracted for hydo power as needed. Worst case, it would be OK to just dump a little carbon-free heat energy, if a little more costly.

Mesabah

I assume you are talking about using the excess solar/wind energy to pump water into a reservoir to cover the several hour ramp time of nuclear. The question is why though, you would still have to install the full load capacity in nuclear, and the additional excess load in solar/wind to pump the water. All of this in addition to building the hydroelectric stations with associated reservoir where geographically available. You would have to build a grid that's at least three times larger than necessary, with associated construction emissions/pollution.

This is why eventually, the government will be banning solar/wind in the future when climate change requires drastic action.

Take a look at what a cluster California is to operate on renewables. California ISO - Supply

rickair7777

No. The storage of hydro energy would occur on site at the power plant, not by converting back and forth between hydro and electric energy over the grid. You could call it a "hybrid" nuke-hydro.

Nukes like to operate at steady-state output for extended periods. Peaks and valleys are handled with more "throttle-able" generation at other types of plants.

Locate the nuclear plant in a geographic location where you can build a small reservoir. Some of nuke output spins generators which cover the low-demand output, so constant output. The rest of the nuke output would drive pumps which would fill the reservoir continuously, also at a steady rate.

Any demand above the minimum, would be extracted out of the reservoir via hydo generators. Since the fluctuations are daily, the res does not need to be very large, although elevation helps efficiency.

If the reservoir starts getting too full over time, you can reduce the steady output of the reactor for a while to adjust. Reactor throttle response is just fine if your timeline is days or weeks.

You could also achieve the same by adding nukes to existing hydro plants, with the same dual output system.

Again, there's some efficiency loss involved in pumping water around, but the carbon impact is negligible... an 85% efficient nuke/gydro hybrid has a much better carbon footprint than a 99% efficient fossil plant.

Who knows. But if we go Full Monty nuclear, most wind and solar would be questionable in terms of cost, efficiency, and complexity.

Mesabah

Why wouldn't you just skip all that, and use carbon capture on the peaking plants, burning natural gas. When you have an abundance of steady state energy(nuclear at night), you can use it for direct carbon extraction, or waste heat for biomass. Skip renewables altogether till fusion is available one day.

The longer the left denies science, the worse climate change gets.

BobZ

Any idea how difficult the same environmental deciples of the global warmg church make building even the smallest of water storage projects....let alone a nuke plant?

Its not about co2. Or renewables. Its about power.

And not of the electrical kind.

rickair7777

This is true, but once folks spend a few days freezing (or stewing) in the dark, most of the wannabe activists will be crying for the grid to come back online. The folks trying to leverage all of this power know that, and will try hard not to push things quite that far.

4runner

They should’ve started working on a replacement for the 73 then. They should’ve made a 757 NG and not a 900ER guppy. Accountants making decisions vs engineering...

aviatorhi

3-5 years is probably accurate for launching it for orders, but EIS would probably be 10 years from now.

Mesabah

The Boeing NMA does not have a known engine in development for it; Unless it's classified, which is highly unlikely. Even a 2030 EIS is extremely optimistic. I'm not sure Boeing will even be in commercial airplanes by then, if the government doesn't bail them out of the 737Max debacle.

rickair7777

IIRC, RR bailed on NMA, but they still have two vendors lined up.

NMA *should * be relatively quick and easy to be build. They are not trying out a bunch of new gee-whiz tech or production paradigms (like 787), it's more an exercise in applying existing tech (much of it new-ish but already flying on other planes) to a different size niche. Same with motors, they'll use existing cores, tweaked for the specific mission. They know it has to get to market (relatively) quickly, otherwise the niche will get filled with buses of one flavor or another.