[pfdietz]

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.

[mlyle]

> 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.

[pfdietz]

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.

[mlyle]

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.

[pfdietz]

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.

[mlyle]

A few prototype / demonstration units at 10MW scale and lower is not proven, off the shelf technology. Fullstop.

[philipkglass]

Electrolytic hydrogen plants of up to 250 MW were constructed in the 20th century by the use of smaller electrolysis units in parallel. All of them were for producing ammonia from hydrogen. See table 3-2 on page 99 of this NASA report from 1975:

"Survey of Hydrogen Production and Utilization Methods"

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760008503/downloads/19...

250 MW, Rjakon, Norway, built 1965

170 MW, Kima, Egypt, built 1960

125 MW, Nangal, India, built 1958

90 MW, Trail, Canada, built 1939

25 MW, Curco, Peru, built 1958

[Manfredo_1]

It's not "nothing can be invented". It's "come back to me after it's invented, not before".

And uranium seawater extraction already exists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

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.

[pfdietz]

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.

[Manfredo_1]

Name one hydrogen electric grid storage facility. Not prototypes, but actual commercial facilities connected to the grid.

You insist that hydrogen is so technically ready, yet nobody is using it.

[pfdietz]

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.

[Manfredo_1]

You're falling back to the "if it works on paper it'll be guaranteed to work at scale, and work cheaply" argument. Please stop this foolishness.

It's not just a question of storage, you can just use a salt cavern for that.

It's also a question of electrolyzing water into hydrogen efficiently.

And converting it back into electricity efficently.

And building all of these systems cheaply.

And deploying all of these systems at massive scale.

We're still on the first phase of that. As per your other comment we still don't even have effective elctrolysers to do this cost-effectively [1].

Will hydrogen storage pan out? Maybe. But until then it's not a solution. It's a potential solution, like fusion, or algae in vats, and thermal storage, and all the other potential solutions being proposed. It's not a solution that has actually demonstrated viability.

!. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26599346

[pfdietz]

Why shouldn't it scale? It's not as if it uses any rare materials. The geological formations in which hydrogen can be stored are abundant. The cost estimation should be good, since the technology is just integrating existing components. That's the easiest and surest kind of technology to roll out.