These discussions are always super boring. There are dozens of technologies that can scale to the level needed but everyone goes goes lithium ion and pumped hydro as if everything else didn't exist.
Sure cell batteries might not work, we can try out flow batteries, we can try liquid metal batteries, we can try hydraulic hydro storage, we can try out hydrogen, we can try compressed air, we can try electrolyzing iron or aluminum, we can try another dozen different things and it is highly likely that at least 3 will work out just fine.
None of those other battery chemistries are seeing the massive growth that lithium ion batteries have experienced. The nuclear "stans" are just pointing out that these are potential solutions, not actual solutions. If iron oxide batteries, or some other chemistry, suddenly becomes cheap and easily deployed at the TWh scale, great. But until then they're not a solution.
Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument. It's profoundly reactionary, and also hypocritical, because nuclear itself is dead without great improvement. Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources, so either massive seawater uranium extraction or breeding cycles would be needed.
Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small scale. Now that the potential market has become so clear this is happening, in many companies.
> Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument.
No, we're engaging in the "this has been resistant to being invented so far, so let's not bet everything on it showing up tomorrow" argument.
> Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources
You could quadruple the present rate of uranium use, representing in a major contribution to mankind's energy use, and have 35 years of supply, just using known reserves and no breeding.
And if you were using that much uranium, more reserves would be quickly proven. Do you think we've found all the uranium we'll ever find, even if market prices go up significantly?
And breeding is possible, and understood. Yes, there's proliferation concerns, but that's not the end of the world.
And seawater extraction is practical without much increase in cost.
No one is saying "no renewables" or "no battery storage" or "no pumped storage". Or "no power to gas to power". We need all of these things. And we need the diversity of having nuclear in the mix, too.
Not at all. The technology for hydrogen energy storage is (with the possible exception of cheap electrolysers) is off the shelf. It's not widely used not because it's not available, but because natural gas is cheaper to store and burn when there are no CO2 taxes. But the CO2 taxes will be raised enough to push natural gas out, if we're going to control global warming.
When the largest electrolyzer we have in the world is 10MW... and hydrogen storage hasn't been demonstrated at anywhere near the scale you're talking about... it's a tad of a stretch to talk about it being "off the shelf." Particularly when you point to nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeding as nonexistent in the same thread.
We can run electrolysers in parallel to scale to any desired output level. There might be economies of scale to make them even larger, or there could be economies of manufacturing scale of making smaller ones at higher volume. PV and wind are examples of technologies that work well with large numbers of not so large units, replicated as needed. This is a nice place for a technology to be.
It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.
LOL. Hydrogen storage is much more invented than seawater uranium extraction. All the components are close to off the shelf; it's just a matter of putting them together (and for the CO2 tax to be high enough to make it worthwhile).
Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level).
This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.
I will repeat the reply I gave elsewhere to this argument:
Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.
This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.
Sure cell batteries might not work, we can try out flow batteries, we can try liquid metal batteries, we can try hydraulic hydro storage, we can try out hydrogen, we can try compressed air, we can try electrolyzing iron or aluminum, we can try another dozen different things and it is highly likely that at least 3 will work out just fine.