> Viable base load battery storage is science fiction.
That's a huge exaggeration. There are several solutions building commercial plants right now that should be good enough. Ambri is one example that was designed from the ground up for grid energy storage.
The other thing is that even with nuclear, if we want to solve emissions from transportation, steel production farming and fertilizers, we need to produce a HUGE amount of hydrogen. If you have hundreds or even thousands of renewable hydrogen production plants, you have all the energy regulation capability you'll ever need.
I feel like most nuclear proponents really aren't looking at the big picture. Not that I'm against nuclear btw. It'd be tragic if we didn't continue the R&D we're doing. But it's not as essential as you'd think, if you keep in mind the fact that we have to solve the energy storage problem anyway to get electricity into places where you don't have a grid connection.
I actually think the main benefit of renewables is that they stimulate even more R&D in energy storage. There's huge synergy benefits.
>That's a huge exaggeration. There are several solutions building commercial plants right now that should be good enough. Ambri is one example that was designed from the ground up for grid energy storage.
The largest such example cost $100 million and can run the state grid it's connected to for 7 minutes.
AFAIK gravity storage is in the works now.
Nuclear works, with large risks, but so does hydro, solar, wind, without the risks of nuclear. And as we're approaching effective fusion, starting to phase out construction of new nuclears makes complete sense.
Solar and wind do not "work" in the same sense that nuclear works. Nuclear does not go to zero when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn't shining. Solar and wind cannot meet baseload needs in most places. They may perhaps be able to decades or centuries in the future when we get our long-awaited flying cars, but they cannot do so now.
To cover the electricity needs created by using solar as base load for the US, you would need on the order of 10 TWh of sotorage -- that means basically using all of the Great Lakes as water storage, filling them up with 300 feet of extra water every day and pumping that out every night. Theoretically possible, but an unimaginable feat of engineering and prone to nimbys in Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland, far more so than creating a few dozen extra nuclear plants...
"Effective fusion" will always be that perpetual "20 years away" we've been hearing about for the last 60 years.
Nuclear's "large risks" are considerably more mitigatable with the new generation IV reactors. They fail cold/safe, use far less fissile material, in some of the models can consume the waste from other facilities, and in other cases, the waste they generate remains radioactive for less time.
Hydro has significant and lasting impact on ecosystems downstream from wherever they're damming up, to the detriment of biodiversity, fish species, watersheds, etc.
Solar is great, when the sun is shining, though, you know, we're running out of sand, and they take up a ton of land. (Though I do think a bigger push for more rooftop makes a lot of sense, and have a system on my house.)
And wind also takes up an insane amount of space, is fairly limited in terms of where it can be utilized, kills birds by the truckload (though apparently making one blade a different color can solve for that), and the blades themselves are impossible to properly dispose of or recycle. (Not actually impossible, just impossible in the way that our capacity is super limited, it's super difficult, and no one wants 120 ft aged out fiberglass paperweights which are super difficult to cut.)
My point is while it's easy to suggest the hydro/solar/wind triumvirate as a stand-in replacement for nuclear, we're _still_ grappling with those technologies' significant shortcomings, as you can witness by watching Germany transition away from nuclear and more on to... wait for it... NG, because they can't consistently meet demand or manage peaker events with renewables and decommed way too much capacity with nuclear.
A single waste site the size of two football fields is enough to store ALL waste generated by Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station: the largest nuke in the US, which has a capacity of 3,930MW -- enough to serve more than 4 million people. That's a hell of an efficient means of generating carbon free power, with very little footprint. (Worth noting that PV needs a large on-site reservoir for cooling since it's in a desert.) Still, compared to the largest solar farm in the US, Solar Star, which clocks in at 579MW from a system spread out over 3,200 acres (142 football fields), it's a decent compromise.
My point here is that instead of imagining nuclear as a point-in-time from tech decades ago and comparing it to new and current solar/wind tech, exploring nuclear's newer options could be huge if we could get out of our own way, and with limited risk.
We could do just as badly and still have nowhere near as many deaths (including evacuation related deaths) as a single coal plant causes due to pollution.
That said the more intermittent ambient energy is on the grid the more difficult it is for nuclear to operate 24/7, which makes it take longer for nuclear to go from expensive to cheap.
I checked the prices in your document. But I'm more after the actual resources consumption. For ex. if solar is cheap, but in the end, solar panels production releases more CO2 than nuclear, then it's of no use for CO2 emissions.
> Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world
Cool story. My city of 7M people has ~50 days of sunny days per yer, is located on a plane (as the most part of large cities), doesn't have active underground volcano nearby (as 99% of Earth's cities) and requires indoor heating at least 7 months/year. The city consumes an equivalent of two nuclear power plants output in electricity alone (half of that is from an actual nuclear plant). Heating probably consumes even more energy, but it's direct heat from CHPs so I can't google direct MW numbers straight away. I'd like to see calculations on powering that from solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro.
The consequences of a Fukushima Daiichi every 5 years would be preferable to accelerating climate change while waiting for the arrival of a battery technology orders of magnitude more dense then what we currently have.
That said, we could also make a transition to molten salt reactors and avoid both of those outcomes.
Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.