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A comment on Hard Startups. Parent comment

Re:Hard Startups by olau on Thursday February 27, 2020 @11:50AM (#22434969)
You can calculate how much power is needed based on past data. That part is complicated, but not really unreliable, although of course the demand may look different in 20 years.

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.

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Re:Hard Startups by acidburnNSA on Thursday February 27, 2020 @12:39PM (#22435582)
Given the uncertainties and low worldwide penetration of low-carbon anything, I think there's a reasonable case to be made for the opposite conclusion: it may be risky to not invest in nuclear.

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.

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