Iron flow batteries with 25 year life and 4 to 10 hour duration

Iron flow batteries provide a long duration energy storage solution suited Australia's resource availability and harsh climate. ESS technology uses the abundant low-cost elements of iron, salt, and water to deliver environmentally safe battery solutions capable of providing up to 12 hours of flexible utility-scale energy storage. From sundown to sunup! “ESS iron flow technology provides cost-effective long-duration energy storage and is ideal for applications that require from 4–12 hours of flexible energy capacity. ESS systems provide resilient, sustainable energy storage well-suited for multiple use cases including utility-scale renewable energy installations, remote solar + storage microgrids, grid load-shifting and peak shaving, and other ancillary grid services. ESS technology is safe, non-toxic and has a 25-year lifespan without capacity fade. Demand for long-duration energy storage systems is expected to grow rapidly in Australia; New South Wales announced the procurement of 2 GW of LDES in its recent Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap.” Stuart Parry, Managing Director of ESI, says: “Safe and non-toxic ESS iron flow batteries are perfect in Australia’s harsh environment and the ability to locally source electrolyte provides insurance against supply chain risks and price escalation. The transition to clean energy requires new long-duration storage solutions and we look forward to working with ESS to meet the needs of an increasingly renewable energy grid.” read the whole story here; https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/27/iron-flow-batteries-to-be-built-in-queensland/

Canada commits C$970 million to new nuclear power technology from GE/Hitachi for small nuclear reactor

Does he not know that this is no panacea, just more nuclear wasdte than the big reactors.. It might be great to generate heat for the tarsands to cook the tar out of the sand, but then we are left with even more polluted residue, and guess who ends up dealing with aftermath, yes, the taxpayer, just like all those abandoned oil and gas wells.. Read more about how these bold plans for small nuclear teactors make it harder to placed their wate in geological safe storege places, here; https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111833119 exerpt: Small modular reactors (SMRs), proposed as the future of nuclear energy, have purported cost and safety advantages over existing gigawatt-scale light water reactors (LWRs). However, few studies have assessed the implications of SMRs for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The low-, intermediate-, and high-level waste stream characterization presented here reveals that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than LWRs, which will impact options for the management and disposal of this waste. Although the analysis focuses on only three of dozens of proposed SMR designs, the intrinsically higher neutron leakage associated with SMRs suggests that most designs are inferior to LWRs with respect to the generation, management, and final disposal of key radionuclides in nuclear waste. Abstract Small modular reactors (SMRs; i.e., nuclear reactors that produce <300 MWelec each) have garnered attention because of claims of inherent safety features and reduced cost. However, remarkably few studies have analyzed the management and disposal of their nuclear waste streams. Here, we compare three distinct SMR designs to an 1,100-MWelec pressurized water reactor in terms of the energy-equivalent volume, (radio-)chemistry, decay heat, and fissile isotope composition of (notional) high-, intermediate-, and low-level waste streams. Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30. The excess waste volume is attributed to the use of neutron reflectors and/or of chemically reactive fuels and coolants in SMR designs. That said, volume is not the most important evaluation metric; rather, geologic repository performance is driven by the decay heat power and the (radio-)chemistry of spent nuclear fuel, for which SMRs provide no benefit. SMRs will not reduce the generation of geochemically mobile 129I, 99Tc, and 79Se fission products, which are important dose contributors for most repository designs. In addition, SMR spent fuel will contain relatively high concentrations of fissile nuclides, which will demand novel approaches to evaluating criticality during storage and disposal. Since waste stream properties are influenced by neutron leakage, a basic physical process that is enhanced in small reactor cores, SMRs will exacerbate the challenges of nuclear waste management and disposal. Sign up for PNAS alerts.