...if there's any substantial rainfall. So that's basically free energy which can offset some efficiency losses.

That said, I do think nuclear is the best house in a bad neighborhood.

Pumped storage involves pumps.

Shutting off the turbines when the grid is oversupplied has been a practice in a de facto sense since the invention of hydroelectricity.

In some sense, hydroelectricity is probably the only sustainable form of so called "renewable energy," although dams, as demonstrated in Libya last week, and the far more disastrous Banqiao event in the 1970's in China, implies potentially huge risks but if I had my way, as a "free river" environmentalist, I'd minimize its use.

Given Banqiao, like some suppressed citizens of China, I question whether Three Gorges was a great idea, particularly in an era of extreme weather.

...Our energy needs could not be met with nuclear generation alone (those would be some funny looking cars!)

We will need energy storage in some form or another, as we always have.

So we will be using a mix of the available non-CO2 emitting storage technologies no matter how the energy is originally generated.

Helms Pumped Storage is able to store surplus off-peak production from Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, representing a symbiotic relationship between the technologies.

I would love to hear from you about SMRs or other nuclear designs that can address variations in demand without storage, as large reactors like the two at DCPP only have two settings. On and Off.

Happy to support the extension for ops at Diablo, took a tour in July.

...gas.

I follow the CAISO data fairly regularly.

Storing energy while burning dangerous natural gas anywhere on the grid is obscene, whether or not a nuclear plant is providing energy to that grid.

Now it is true that in 2022, Diablo Canyon produced more energy on a 12 acre footprint than all the wind turbines in California, spread over more than 1000 square miles, but California has just one nuclear plant left.

With extensive coast line and a problematic water supply, California has the option of utilizing nuclear power, with high efficiency systems involved in process intensification to be one of the best places on the planet to engage in environmental restoration using nuclear energy.

I have written in my journal here a great deal about process intensification using high temperatures, for example, here:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

Supercritical water can partially address or completely mitigate many serious environmental issues, most notably municipal and industrial wastes via gasification. Under these circumstances, with heat exchange networks, electricity might prove to be an interesting and useful side product.

Some, but not all of the SMR's proposed can be involved in this sort of thing, at least with materials science issues addressed. (My son is working on his Ph.D in nulear materials.) I am pleased with many of these, but my son complains that in many cases, the materials science behind them has failed to exploit what has been learned since the 1970's.

In theory, supercritical water, might be a second product in a heat network, the first being thermochemical hydrogen for captive use to make fluid fuels, the best of which is DME, dimethyl ether.

I have pushed my son to consider these ideas, since I will not live much longer, and hopefully his generation will be able to clean up the horrible mess my generation has left for them. My son will be in a place to do something about it.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

BTW, I'm a fan and follower of your work even if we might disagree at times.

I've visited both the old and the new CAISO facility and worked with some of them, balancing our grid is one of the most fascinating things I've learned about this sector.

I've also toured Diable four or five times, most recently this summer, I always learn new things. The turbine deck is magical, but I want to learn more about new, smaller scale, nukes.

I expect that you'll agree that storage is essential in maintaining a safe and reliable grid and permitting flexibility. I completed courses at Stanford that included one in energy storage, XEIET139-021, in 2017. I was surprised to learn later that an in-law's firm had installed flywheel systems on one or more islands in the North Sea.

Assuming storage technologies as various scales are desirable, which do you find most worthy of consideration?

Thanks in advance.

Good luck to your son, we need his generation to unscrew what we've don.

...is superior to all other forms of energy storage on purely thermodynamic grounds, since no exergy destruction is involved with energy transformations.

I have no use for flywheel storage, since it requires the conversion of thermal energy to mechanical energy with ultimate losses to friction, even with the best tribological science applied.

In a situation involving exergy recovery of thermal energy now routinely rejected to the environment, one could consider the storage of syngas as a load leveling tool. The hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to give DME and/or methanol is, in fact, exothermic, the exothermic nature of it actually representing a problem for direct DME hydrogenation, since the copper based catalysts can be unstable at high temperatures. Such a system would be similar to compressed air systems without the requirement to heat the gas with dangerous natural gas, as was proposed many years ago by Denholm to address the poor reliability of generally useless wind systems.

Emissions and Energy Efficiency Assessment of Baseload Wind Energy Systems Paul Denholm, Gerald L. Kulcinski, and Tracey Holloway Environmental Science & Technology 2005 39 (6), 1903-1911.

This particular paper sticks in my mind after all these years because it was a milestone in the path that transformed me from a rote supporter of so called "renewable energy" into a generalized opponent of it. The carbon cost of CAES and the requirement for the use of dangerous natural gas appalled me.

Direct conversion of thermal energy to chemical energy has a lot to recommend it, not just for load leveling purposes on a grid, but also for portable energy use. A DME self propelled vehicle to my mind would be cleaner and more sustainable than any of the popular alternatives, including the one I personally own, a hybrid car. In general however, I oppose the car CULTure, but DME could replace all fossil fuels, dangerous natural gas, LPG, dangerous petroleum and dangerous coal, as noted in the seminal paper by the late great "Martian", Nobel Laureate George Olah:

Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash, and Alain Goeppert Journal of the American Chemical Society 2011 133 (33), 12881-12898

And, like you, I'm livid about the car culture and car-centric planning.

Can you recommend reliable sources to learn more, please?

I started here: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/emerging_dme.html