Fortunately I don't believe we'll need to. From a previous glance of that report, scenario F is pretty close to what I'd imagined we'd likely aim for. It would've been a lot smoother and less costly if we'd started 40 years ago, but it's not shortage of minerals like lithium or cobalt that have been holding us up. If the "Big rare-earth-metals-mining" industry had anything like the clout of Big Oil/Gas/Coal, we'd probably be half way there by now.

You might want to look at figure 26.10 of Scenario F. We still hit mineral constraints.

The author says outright the report is not an attempt at simulating a realistic transition because it's asking first order questions: along the lines of "do we even have enough stuff to try this?". There's no attempt to ask if this is economical or logistically possible because it is not.

The author is convinced that we're all about to be much poorer because the IV drip of cheap energy that the world has enjoyed for at least 50 years is about to be ripped out. Personally, I think what's most likely to happen is that we will fail to get the world's nations to stop using fossil fuels and we will suffer the environmental consequences of that. Plus all the consequences of the resource wars that will follow. It's a shame.

I think our best chance to avoid this is to rush research on mass manufacturable gen 4 nuclear reactors. We need a factory that spits these things out so we can ship them to developing nations because otherwise, they build coal plants. I have high hopes for Thorcon. They plan to use shipyards to build annually up to 200 GW of modular shippable reactors.

That report is a pathetic attempt at a hit piece from a coal shill.

Cherry picking reports from 2014 that refer to technologies from 2008 and assuming an order of magnitude more batteries than anyone is seriously suggesting of an old version of a chemistry that is never going to be used for bulk storage isn't science. It's just pathetic.

And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.

Ah good old ad hominem. Never fails to show up.

It's true he worked in Australian mining (I assume coal). The guy has been working in industrial recycling and 'circular economy' since 2015 https://www.simonmichaux.com/current-work

> And dredging up this report in order to try to sell people on a solution that actually is resource constrained every time the subject comes up is even more pathetic.

We will literally never run out of fissile material.

An ad hominem is where you use someone's character as a faulty reason their argument is flawed. Pointing out someone's argument is flawed and is a standard part of the coal propaganda machine as a valid reason to question their motives is not ad hominem.

The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades and have detailed roadmaps for overcoming the real roadblocks (which are not even issues he considers).

> We will literally never run out of fissile material.

There are no commercially viable or even prototype closed loop breeding programs and there never have been. The current stock of economically accessible fissile material is around 40,000 tonnes and each GW of reactor needs 3-20 tonnes. There are no processes with a doubling time under 10 years because spent fuel needs time to cool, so rolling out your non-existent reactor in place of renewables rather than after one or two generations still requires mining all of it.

Even in the scifi world where breeding is viable, we still need a 70-95% renewable transition to fill the 20-40 year gap.

You started by trying to discredit the work based on the author's work history. Then you threw out a few unspecific attacks on his data sources. Hardly convincing. Essentially name calling.

> The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades

Here is a paper published by IEEE this year, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research. It is a comprehensive review of the research in this field. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Section D. Raw Material Demand for 100% Renewable Energy Systems

As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.

Hardly mastubatory, then.

> As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits.

Yes. There are real critical minerals, as well as real broad overviews that highlight them without going into industry specific roadmaps for addressing them.

The limits are entirely unrelated to the paper you first linked because the Michaux analysis does things like assuming all new PV will be CdTe or there will be weeks of battery storage for any electrolysers built in the form of NMC811 batteries.

Trying to conflate the former with the latter or use overviews to pretend said roadmaps don't exist is just as dishonest as your first attempt.