Especially in the case of a flooding, Fukushima style.
Volume and mass are just whatever they are. They don't matter.
I don't see anyone making this weirdly-specific claim. However, it's widely acknowledged that sufficient battery storage to guarantee national grid-wide power on-demand, sufficient for a modern industrial economy, is not currently feasible, in both economic and practical terms.
If a large chunk of current grid investment in Texas, profit-drivej by independent investors, how could it not be feasible to continue this level of investment? Especially when costs are falling dramatically and production capacity for batteries is just getting started and is scaling at a tremendous rate that will result in a complete excess of battery capacity within the time period that we could only build a thousandth of the same amount of nuclear wattage?
What is the blocker on feasibility?
I’m not saying your claim about the rapid pace of building out battery storage is false - your claim is true. However, there is no currently-feasible way to run an advanced industrial economy on intermittent energy sources backed by chemical batteries. It may become technically feasible at some point in the future (never bet against human ingenuity in the long run), but it’s technically and economically impractical right now.
There are of course feasible ways of running our entire economy entirely on renewables, saying otherwise means ignoring the massive amount of literature on the topic:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Every argument I have ever seen attempted to say it is not possible makes simplifying unrealistic assumptions. Such as saying something silly like "here's our known lithium reserves, that's not enough."" Of course, our known reserves of lithium is going up every year, because we keep on looking for more, and the argument is not even sophisticated enough to acknowledge what proven reserves means as a concept.
So if you think you have a solid argument present it, and if I'm convinced let's get it published and overturn all this other literature.
You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China).
So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.
I would not consider that cheap. I would not consider that highly efficient. It is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough
> The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance
Nowhere did I say we weren't. They just simply aren't good enough for our needs. We can't get there without this intermediate step - and it _is_ doing good and helping humanity. But we're simply not there and won't be for at least a decade.
> take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits
You mean the Texas grid that keeps failing and sticking people with $1000 monthly power bills? Not a great example lol
Personally I think your timeline for storage is going to prove wildly conservative (we already have 5GW installed in CA, China is building capacity exponentially.) But even if you're right: these nuclear plants are going to come online right at the moment when storage makes them economically obsolete.
They will not and cannot win until we have cheap, highly dense, efficient power storage. That is, unfortunately, at least 20 years off (if we're lucky).
They will continue to be an important part of our energy ecosystem, and we should aggressively build them out, but we still need the fundamental power solution.