It's also extremely popular to say that 100% renewables are a done deal because it's such a great story and feeling.
Most serious deep-decarb clean-energy publications I've seen suggest energy costs go up by $30-50/MWh at deep decarb levels. At those levels, current nuclear already competes. People looking at LCOE today (where the rock-bottom wind/solar numbers depend completely on the hugely-fossil grid for backup and intermittency but hide the carbon emissions with impunity) tend to completely miss this point, their bias that wind/solar are cheaper already being confirmed.
Yet there goes Japan with the 33 coal plants!
And yes, we're going to need extra longer-term storage, but less than you'd think (IIRC up to 10% for a large grid).
Nobody knows the cost of that storage. You can calculate an upper bound by using today's prices, but once these things actually come in demand, new ideas are going to spring up and the prices are probably going to fall, just like it did for PV and wind turbines.
It seems to me that investing in nuclear tech today is a really risky proposition.
Obviously this conclusion is far less popular.
Fortunately investing in various clean energy tech is not a zero sum game because of various investor's predilection to invest in one sector or the other but often not both.
Knowing very little about the topic, I recently saw an article talking about how the first wave of wind turbine blades was starting to be decommissioned, and running into difficulties with what to do with them. While they're no longer useful on the tower, since they're designed to withstand incredible forces, it's difficult to destroy, recycle, or otherwise dispose of them, and indicated they're ending up in storage.
Do you happen to know more about this particular phenomenon and what the end game is for that? Granted, this is likely less of a concern than the waste that coal creates, or the long term storage of spent nuclear fuel. I'm just curious about it.
We all agreed that the people will likely not worry about this nearly as much as they worry about burying vastly less but vastly more hazardous spent nuclear fuel (even though spent nuclear fuel in actual fact has a sound safe geological story).
That said, do you know what's the highest uptake (in percentage power capacity) of renewables not including hydroelectric nor biofuels in your country?
Here in Poland it is laughably low. Germany is not doing much better either. So "we theoretically could" does not mean we will.
Try playing with this online modeling tool:
With the plausible numbers there, new nuclear is optimized out of the mix.
This will be more expensive than fossil fuels with free CO2 release, but presumably CO2 taxes get ramped up to the point that's no longer true.
That's whistling past the graveyard, I think. Land use is demonstrably not a problem. Grid integration has long history of naysayers drawing a line in the sand and renewables blowing past it. EROI is just fine and getting better. Raw materials are also not a problem (lies that solar uses rare earths notwithstanding).
Intermittency remains an issue, but it looks easier to solve than making fission (or, to an even greater extent, fusion) practical. Combinations of storage, transmission and dispatch technologies are likely to get us to 100% renewable at a cost fission will have trouble matching, especially if industrial users of thermal energy (which is highly storable) can be brought on board.