Bit in [] is false; apologies.
Side note: electric cars will be a large part of the grid balancing in the future.
Do you have any good reading for this?
In my naive mind, it’s doomed by the fact that we drive to work in the day, then all come home, together, in the evenings, when the sun is on its way down. Or is the plan to have two way power chargers at businesses too? Otherwise, all these batteries are disconnected when you need them.
I'm definitely not assuming that none will, I'm just assuming it will be a some smallish fraction for the foreseeable future. Nearly 50% of California's working population works for small business. It's not just the cost of the equipment, but also cost up upgrading the panels and, almost certainly, service lines.
Where I am (a city in California), you have to pay for replacing the service lines/conduits, including digging it up/repairing the street and sidewalk, even if they run 1 city block.
https://insideevs.com/news/458106/battery-cost-110-kwh-price...
Using a pessimistic $150/kWh (it's already under that) I get 70,000,000 kWh or 70 gWh, enough to run the entire state of California for a little over an hour. So you could build over 10GW of wind power capacity and 70 gWh storage for the cost of one nuclear plant.
Nuclear isn't dying because of hippies. It's dying because it's expensive. You're right that the safety concerns are over-inflated, but failure to deliver on its cost promises are the major failure of nuclear (fission) power.
If we make fusion work and can scale it, that's a totally different ballgame... but it won't happen fast enough to impact climate change.
But in the meantime, the best option is nuclear.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...
massively over provisioned PV+Storage is still half the price of Nuclear. It even throws in extra money for grid upgrades.
That's a lot of space used.
And don't forget those wind turbines will have to be replaced after 20 or 30 years while your nuclear plant is good for 50 to 60.
You can't just easily build 11500 wind turbines without huge impact on environment.
Part of the problem is that nobody has built the things in the past 30-40 ish years.
France: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
US: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
This is truly remarkable phenomenon that occurs with almost no other technology. And this happening in France rules out the possibility that it's merely increasing regulatory burden that causes increasing costs.
Those who want us to build new nuclear need to grapple with the issue of their cost if they want it to happen, yet I have not found a single nuclear advocate on HN that will acknowledge that these issues even exist, much less bother to propose some solution.
At least for the "safety" issues, we can have a discussion about how designs can mitigate that. But there also needs to be discussion on how design, workforce training, logistical management, or something can improve the construction issues.