> Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.

Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.

But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7.

> RIP, only France did nuclear right :(

And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.

> Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage.

What physical limit prevents this?

It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.

Pumped hydro is pretty interesting, but highly dependent on natural elevation changes to be considered remotely economical.

Isn't pumped storage hydro kind of that "silver bullet"? At least in places with the right geography?

Pumped hydroelectric has good capacity, but doesn't scale well. The right geography is the main limiting factor, accessibility is a second. The places with good hydroelectric potential tend to be very remote, in the mountains. It's extremely hard to do large earthmoving and concrete construction in remote places. The places that have simultaneously the right topology and relatively easy accessibility are limited.

The alternative is essentially big water towers, and that has serious construction challenges not solved yet.

Pumped thermal storage has no geographic limits. The idea is: compress argon, transfer the heat to thermal store, expand the argon back to the starting pressure to recover some work, then transfer the "cold" to another thermal store. For long term storage, use very cheap materials, like rocks, for the thermal stores. To discharge, reverse the flow, so argon is cooled, then compressed, then heated, then expanded. All this can be done with existing technologies and with a round trip efficiency of perhaps 60%.

One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas.

That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.

This is very interesting to me. On of my (perhaps irrational) fears with solar and wind is how much land it potentially could take to supply power. I live in a very sparsely populated state because my greatest joy in life is being as far as possible from "civilization." I spend a lot of my free time traveling through craggy jeep trails to visit obscure locations (and photograph them.)

If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?

>...I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher.

And you are right - the land needed to actually generate the power is much different than that ratio.

The strata report is also counting the land use for transmission lines which is a big part of the land use for any power source and makes the land use for different power sources look much more similar than they are.

From the report:

>...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of the nation’s electricity production in 2015, approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.

So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which are going to be needed no matter the source of power.

The report gives an example later:

>...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100 acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar plants operating at the same capacity, they would require 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21 square miles) of land respectively to produce the same amount of power.

https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf

As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:

>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/hyman1/docs/may...

(Land use isn't the only factor obviously, but it is a factor.)

Sure, it's at https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf.

I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).

Solar does not use rare earth metals. Please stop propagating this canard.

Ah, honest mistake, lithium (not rare earths) is the metal that the US doesn't have a sufficient stockpile of. The rest of the point should still stand though, essentially having an energy grid that can react to supply shocks.

And lithium isn't needed for solar either. Lithium is used in one variety of storage, but there are thousands of different battery chemistries, and many different non-battery energy storage technologies. The "it can't do it" argument needs to show that they ALL fail, alone or in combination. That's a very tall order, especially when some storage technologies use cheap materials like steel and rocks.

Economies of scale and a heavy reliance on forced labor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...

Forced labor reminds me of Nazi labor programs.

However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.

You can overbuild and burn excess energy mining crypto. I think crypto will be what dictates future energy prices and investments.

France did it right-ish. They have to import peak power as their reactors cannot ramp quickly enough.