At least one of the early large scale pumped storage plants[1] was financed by power companies to optimize their internal costs. So it's long been the case that time arbitrage is a good idea for power production.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...

Pumped storage is a very cheap way to store energy, but unfortunately its scale is limited by geography.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...

There are some rather clever and simple options for energy storage - like sending an electrically driven train up a few miles of inclined track - http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1...

That said, for reliable baseline energy, you're not going to beat nuclear for a while. Modern nuclear "waste" is usable as fuel in Breeder type reactors (LFTR, Traveling Wave reactors) and the waste from those is containable with modern technology.

From start to finish, bringing a nuke plant online is a 30 year proposition, assuming there are no snags along the way. There are no shortcuts in the offing.

Oh, that's just ridiculous. You can't count 27 years of lawsuits in the "real" cost of building a plant, if people actually wanted to. If we were going to start building lots of plants, there's been plenty of proposals to standardize the designs.

This is in the opinion of Janice Dunn Lee. I think she knows what she's talking about.

https://www.iaea.org/about/leadership/janice-dunn-lee

Can you link to a source where she says that and not just her bio page? Googling this for me yielded no results which contained supporting evidence for you, but that may just be bad searching on my part.

I heard her speak on the radio regarding low-carbon energy solutions. I'm trying to locate the program online.

The last nuke plant built in America, Watts-Barr, took only 43 years. It cost $6.1 billion. So I guess the bar to improve is quite low. Good luck.

Yes, and every new nuclear plant has to be mothballed for decades as a vital element to its construction. It's so the concrete can cure properly, right?

You're going beyond advocacy into sheer lunacy. Nuclear power plants do not take longer to build than the WWI, WWII (including incidentally the entire Manhattan project), and the Korean, Vietnemese, Iraqi, and Afghanistan wars combined. And I could probably jam some more things in there, since I'm not really looking up the time frames and just eyeballing it... because that's how stupid your claim is.

I don't know whether to hope that you realize the degree of BS you're spouting and that you're being deliberately mendacious, or to hope that you actually believe it and are at least being honest to what you think about the world.

It is sad to see that nuclear advocacy has simply become telling people they or their ideas are stupid because they point out the political reality of the world.

It doesn't matter that it takes far less than 49 years to actually construct the physical manifestation of a nuclear power plant.

What matters is why it took so long to build.

You can't solve those problems by insulting people.

This is circular. You are saying that we should have policy B, partly because A is too expensive. Why is A too expensive? Because of policiy B!

China disagrees with you. They're building a bunch of AP-1000s, the same new GenIII+ design we're building in the U.S. "The timeline is 50 months from first concrete to fuel loading, then six months to grid connection for the first four units, with this expected to reduce significantly for the following units."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

There are also a bunch of companies working on small modular reactors built in factories and shipped to the install site, which I think would qualify as "shortcuts in the offing." Some of this work is supported by the DOE.

Yes it's much easier to build nuke plants in fascist countries. Just ask the people how quickly nuke plants get built in Chernobyl...

Improvement in battery technology is relative. You do not need superlight lithium-something batteries for general energy storage. The only questions for such systems are price per kWh, life-time and somewhat good input/output ratios. But especially the last may become unimportant as energy becomes really abundant. It is the same reason why power2gas may become interesting: only 40% energy efficency are sufficient when you produce 5 time your domestic need in a winter storm.

>Improvements to battery technology and short-term energy storage are key to cracking this problem.

Between perpetually 10 years' away jesus-tech grid-scale batteries and letting the invisible hand catch up and fix the demand side of fluctuating supply, I'd bet on the latter, personally.

Especially since it's already happening (c.f. aluminum smelters time shifting electricity demand).