Is large scale energy storage any better than just using nuclear energy?
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
Gravity based energy storage is inexpensive to construct and reliable. It is wasteful - but we're capturing an incredibly tiny proportion of the energy available from wind and solar for electricity.
> "Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive"
This is cherrypicking to make a point. The batteries still contain chemicals which are toxic to life and environment. There will come a time when those batteries are "consumed" and the chemicals within them need to be dealt with in some safe manner. As far as I know, there's no battery technology with any side effects.
Tesla's batteries are well designed and engineered. Batteries before them have exploded, caused fires and loss of life and property. As long as the nuclear plant was also well designed I can say
"I set fire to a nuclear plant to test its safety features. The plant shut down automatically – the results are impressive"
Isn't there large economic incentive to recycle large batteries?
I agree many won't be recycled, but until we snag ourselves and asteroid, we have a finite supply of lithium. People will do their best to not lose something worth money.
To be economically viable battery recycling is done in developing countries that don't enforce environmental regulations.
This is specifically talking about lead batteries, but Lithium-Ion is basically the same: http://www.okinternational.org/lead-batteries/Recycling
If you generated all of the energy you used via atomic power at the end of your life the total size of that waste is about the size of a coke can.
1. How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process? Aren't we talking creating more batteries than we ever have before by several orders of magnitude here? We send most of our ewaste to the third world to be burned currently, this sounds like an ecological disaster.
2. Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun? A big project for sure but the reward is virtually unlimited, virtually free energy.
> How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process?
It doesn't matter. It can all be recycled.
> Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun?
I don't believe we're competent enough to manage nuclear waste in any form.
It can be, it isn't happening currently: "As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.[6] Another reason why it isn't being done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive as mined lithium"
Even so when recycled it still creates toxic waste in large quantities. What shall we do with that?
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.