If you're not limited by the need to move around, then lithium doesn't make as much sense for power arbitrage technologies. There are literally dozens of such technologies capabale of storing intermittent solar/wind inputs in physical or chemical forms that can be pumped back out onto the grid as needed.

It's so ridiculous to think that human civilization would collapse just because we will eventually run out of stuff to dig out of the ground and burn, when the biosphere has been humming along on sunlight for about three billion years. Why is this so hard to explain to people?

I agree, but we also need a storage system that can move around, and the aggregate scale of that is inherently more than enough for grid storage. This is why I'm not going to rule out hydrogen despite it having not worked out even back during the 1973 OPEC fuel crisis when alternatives were desperately needed and nuclear power (which is useful for among other things electrolysis) was The Future.

(Also, on paper one doesn't need any grid storage, if only we could get governments to cope rates on a planetary grid. Texas doing it's own thing and Japan having two frequency zones shows how hard this would be in practice, but in principle it can work just fine).

How much energy does all of humanity use compared to the rest of the biosphere? Genuine question not intended to be leading, it's a very interesting point.

It doesn't matter, the energy provided by the sun is mind numbingly insane.

The total sunlight that hits the Earth in 2 minutes is more than whats needed to power the entire world for a year.

>Also, it's quite possible to reprocess spent fuel. France has been doing it for decades.

Wasn't that the SuperPhoenix and Astrid reactors? I thought both had been cancelled because of politics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphénix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor)

Those are breeder reactors. In breeders, less fissile materials are transformed into more fissile ones. That's interesting technology and very nice on paper, but there are practical challenges.

Reprocessing is another thing entirely. It relies on the fact that used nuclear fuel is mainly not reusable due to accumulation of neutron poisons. In reprocessing, these poisons are removed so that the rest of the fuel can be reused. This too has many practical challenges as you end up with liquid radioactive materials and a lot of it is waste. So far it has proven more practical than breeders, though. Perhaps that is because the same processes can be used to extract materials for nuclear weapons.

Very informative, thank you. What about the MOX fuel they use, is this the product of that reprocessing technology?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel

Yes, I believe MOX is one option of what you can make from what's left from reprocessing. I think it's possible to make more conventional fuel there too, but then what are you going to do with the plutonium.

> "but muh batteries"

Thanks for arguing in such bad faith by default. But let's just say there are other ways of storing energy that don't need huge amounts of processed lithium.

Have you perhaps heard of "muh pumped hydro", "muh flow batteries", "muh hydrogen", and the myriad of other less mature storage technologies currently being developed?

Same can be said about your "argumentatioN^".

Have you done the napkin math* on "muh pumped hydro/batteries or hydro"? No? What a fucking suprise.

*on a grid stabilizing scale

I don't need to do "napkin math" on pumped hydro because in countries with abundant hydro resources it already is "on a grid stabilizing scale", you fucking cretin.

The world has already used most of the useful locations for hydro. It works well where there are abundant resources, but there are no more areas to put in hydro (even ignoring the local environmental disaster that hydro often is which means we probably wouldn't build it if it could). The locations that have and use it don't have any to spare for the rest of us to live places that are not a good location for hydro.

Ok, then we can use hydrogen, or thermal storage, or non-litium chemistry batteries.

The point is that there are many ways to store energy. The fact that there isn't enough lithium or not enough hydro sites doesn't change much.

The problem is scale. Since the other responder didnt want to do napkin math - you could give it a go w.r.t to hydrogen. It gets very very expensive rather quickly. So very expensive you might start to wonder if you shouldn't have built a nuclear plant instead.

Local factories etc. might see a need/use for hydrogen production (Swedish Hybrit comes to mind) but as a national grid stabilizer.. I'm doubtful

They all have something in common: they are very expensive at the scale we need. Hydro is one off the cheapest we have, and if you had a good location you would still be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars (or likely billions!) to build it.

Haha well then, just build some more why don't ya.

Fucking mong.

When those solutions don't wreak environmental havoc (dams [0]) or are out of the experimental stage, I'll be interested. I'm actually following Ambri for this reason [1].

Even if you go with "muh flow batteries" or "muh hydrogen", we would require far more land with wind/solar to fill up those storage technologies than just use nuclear plants.

Even if I were to concede that covering every last surface with solar cells is a good idea (or what to do when recycling them), this doesn't take into account the enormous amount of energy currently used to make process heat. Neither wind nor solar are able to generate the hundreds of degrees necessary for so many chemical and manufacturing processes.

Don't let yourself get bamboozled by shiny futuristic graphics of storage or generation solutions without at least doing some basic napkin math about feasibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... [1] https://ambri.com/