The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that competing technologies don't keep getting better.
SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can even do that.
No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials that said factories can use to produce equipment.
I believe a global renewable energy system can be constructed using only elements available in essentially unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest scale compared to industrial society as a whole.
Uh Lithium?
Utilities will choose the cheaper among many alternatives, not the most expensive; the which is why they are not building nukes.
Ironically ESG has guided capital away from extractive industries like this.
It's not a physical limitation, it's a timing of scaling limitation, and we haven't hit it in a hard way yet. Plenty of new lithium resources, and more being discovered all the time.
This is a generic problem with anti-renewable arguments: they argue against specific technologies rather than the entire class of possible technologies.
(And then they go and posit all sorts of as-yet unbuilt reactor types, blithely ignoring the irony.)
Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants.
Finally, another factor that may drastically reduce the cost of nuclear is the fabrication of small modular reactors which eliminate custom construction/permitting and simplify installation.