What’s new is they’ve developed a way to store heat energy at much higher temperatures than previously possible, which makes the process much more efficient. And are making the bulky part of it out of rock cheap raw materials. There are engineering issues to work out yet, although they appear to have solved some, Some are mentioned up thread. Having your working material turn solid during maintenance is an issue this shares with the liquid salt thorium reactors, whose proponents don’t seem to think of that as a major problem. If the eventual solutions don’t add too much cost this has the potential to scale up better than an other mass energy storage proposed yet. If so there’s bound to be some practical use for it even if greenie dreams are worthless.
Hot Graphite
Google the "Windscale disaster" in UK
They had a huge graphite furnace to convert Uranium....the thing got out of control and the graphite combusted and out of control..
Some crazy scientist had insisted on huge filers on to of the heater tower....trapped most of the radioactive dust.
The twin Windscale towers with filters at top
Hot Graphite
Google the "Windscale disaster" in UK
They had a huge graphite furnace to convert Uranium....the thing got out of control and the graphite combusted and out of control..
Some crazy scientist had insisted on huge filers on to of the heater tower....trapped most of the radioactive dust.
The twin Windscale towers with filters at top