[hydrogen18]

Who are you convinced we can't store electricity? Pumped storage for storing potential energy has worked long before we even had electricity.

Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks.

There is of course the argument of "pumped storage isn't practical for meeting all of our peaking demands". Of course it isn't. Neither is nuclear suitable for meeting all of our baseline demands. They are both just tools available.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not that we can't store electricity - we just can't store enough of it to turn renewables into usable tool for meeting baseline demand. We may be able to do that in the future, with battery technology improving and some clever shenanigans like using electric vehicles as grid storage - but we need something now, and there's no other alternative for doing it green than nuclear power.

[simoncion]

> ...we just can't store enough of it to turn renewables into usable tool for meeting baseline demand...

/me puts on pedant hat and mad engineer jacket:

Are you sure about this? The US is huge and has an enormous amount of uninhabited space. If we covered -say- the north-western quarter of Nevada in the best batteries available today, would that cover base and peaking power during slack production time for -say- the surrounding states?

/me removes pedant hat

(Do bear in mind that I feel both that anti-nuke hysteria is hugely damaging to the planning and deployment of new nuclear power plants in the US, and that it's fairly clear that of the currently available non-hydroelectric base-load generation tech, nuclear power is the only good option. [Though, solar power beamed down from orbit is a really intriguing idea.])

[hydrogen18]

I was never arguing that we would meet baseline demand with "renewables" stored in some sort of mechanism.

But if you're really convinced this problem is unsolvable, lets just do this: we'll generate enough power (with fission, or whatever you want) to meet peak demand all the time. As long as we're near the coast there is a convenient way to get rid of all that surplus energy: desalination plants. I can think of a few areas that would jump at this idea, like California. Even if you wind up with too much freshwater, just start dumping it back into the ocean. The salt is generally worthless and is dumped back into the ocean. This will actually help offset the fact that the oceans are desalinating due to the ice caps melting.

Electricity prices will go up as a result of this, but you'll be subsidizing the fact that the grid is now greener as a result.