Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are not available on all days. Right now people are trying to use batteries for storing the power so that it can be used when power from Renewable energy sources are not available. But this approach is not much successful as the batteries could not store the power for not more than few hours or few days.
To solve this problem, an MIT scientist had come up with a plan for combining the nuclear powerplant with another energy system .
Forsberg, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering says “As long as you had inexpensive fossil fuels available for electricity demand, there was no reason to think about it,” But now, with the need to address climate change, curb greenhouse gas emissions, and secure greater energy independence, creative new ideas are at a premium.
While nuclear plants are good at producing steady power at relatively low cost, their output cannot rapidly be ramped up and down. Meanwhile, renewable energy sources are also good at producing power at low operating cost, but their output is unpredictable. Fossil fuel plants can easily be switched on or off as needed, but have higher operating costs and produce greenhouse gas emissions.
One solution, Forsberg suggests, is to find a way to divert excess power from a nuclear plant, making it a “dispatchable” source of electricity — one that can easily be ramped up and down to balance the disparities between production and demand.
His plan involves pairing a nuclear plant with an artificial geothermal storage system, a hydrogen production plant, or a shale-oil recovery operation.
Wind and solar systems send electricity to the grid. Nuclear plants operate at full capacity with variable steam to turbines to match electricity demand with production (renewables and nuclear). Excess steam at times of low electricity prices and electricity demand go to hybrid fuel production and storage systems.
The characteristic of these hybrid technologies is that the economic penalties for variable nuclear steam inputs are small.
Three hybrid systems were identified that could be deployed at the required scale.
The first option is the gigawatt-year hourly-to-seasonal heat storage system where excess steam from the nuclear plant is used to heat rock a kilometer underground to create an artificial geothermal heat source. The heat source produces electricity on demand using geothermal technology.
The second option uses steam from the nuclear plant and electricity from the grid with high-temperature electrolysis (HTR) cells to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is primarily for industrial applications; however, the HTE can be operated in reverse using hydrogen for peak electricity production.
The third option uses variable steam and electricity for shale oil production. i-e Heated steam from a nuclear plant, in enclosed pipes, heats the shale; the resulting oil can be pumped out by conventional means.
At first glance, that might sound like a “dirty” solution, enabling the use of more carbon-emitting fuel. But Forsberg suggests that it’s quite the opposite: “When you heat it up, it decomposes into a very nice light crude oil, and natural gas, and char,” he explains. The char — the tarlike residue that needs to be refined out from heavy crude oils — stays underground, he says.
Few days back, Climate and energy scientists James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley released an open letter for calling on world leaders to support development of safer nuclear power systems.
These four scientists say the wind and solar energy won’t be enough to head off extreme global warming, and they’re asking environmentalists to support the development of safer nuclear power as one way to cut fossil fuel pollution.
Without nuclear, the scientists believe global energy consumption will overtake the planet’s ability to reverse the buildup of carbon dioxide pollution from burning oil, coal and other fossil fuels.
