mrwolfisolveproblems
mrwolfisolveproblems t1_j28suc0 wrote
Reply to comment by Michaelmrose in How do fusion scientists expect to produce enough Tritium to sustain D-T fusion (see text)? by DanTheTerrible
Thank you for posting that. Doesn’t seem like it’s too promising right now, but it’s being worked on and moving in the right direction it seems. Hopefully they make some leaps forward in the next 5-7 years.
mrwolfisolveproblems t1_j1gdayr wrote
Reply to comment by FRCP_12b6 in How do fusion scientists expect to produce enough Tritium to sustain D-T fusion (see text)? by DanTheTerrible
So a 100kwh pack becomes 60kwh. A thousands of them together gives you 60MW for 1 hour. Peak load demand can swing 20-40,000 MW for 10+ hours at a time. That’s just peak demand, forget about base load, and that’s just in a regional area (say Texas for example) An extra 20,000 MW for 10 hours is 200,000,000 kWh. You would need 3.33 million old battery packs all tired together and synced to the grid. Not to mention every day they will lose capacity and eventually be useless even for grid storage.
TLDR: need to find a way to recycle them into new batteries like we do for lead acid batteries.
mrwolfisolveproblems t1_j1ehkcm wrote
Reply to comment by FRCP_12b6 in How do fusion scientists expect to produce enough Tritium to sustain D-T fusion (see text)? by DanTheTerrible
If an EV battery is so degraded it can provide a few hours of runtime in a car what meaningful use will it have to the grid? Has anyone actually tested this at reasonable scale beyond a simple demonstration? Who is going to pay for the infrastructure to connect all these old batteries to the grid? That grid storage argument is just thrown out there for PR. It would take decades to get off the ground and we’re going to have millions of dead battery packs in 10 years.
mrwolfisolveproblems t1_j1bph0g wrote
Reply to comment by DontWorryImADr in How do fusion scientists expect to produce enough Tritium to sustain D-T fusion (see text)? by DanTheTerrible
Battery end of life with EVs is the 1000 pound gorilla in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. All these states passing laws to ban sales of ICE vehicles have put zero thought into it that’s for sure. Not to mention the huge cost to consumers of said replacements. So insane to me that these problems are not close to being solved with EVs being jammed down everyone’s throat. I guess necessity is the mother of all invention, so hopefully mass EV adoption will drive solutions to these problems. End of sidebar.
mrwolfisolveproblems t1_j28sxzf wrote
Reply to comment by Michaelmrose in How do fusion scientists expect to produce enough Tritium to sustain D-T fusion (see text)? by DanTheTerrible
Thank you for posting that. Doesn’t seem like it’s too promising right now, but it’s being worked on and moving in the right direction it seems. Hopefully they make some leaps forward in the next 5-7 years.