| > I'm not sure why you're fixating on the plastic shell, that's just one of several delivery mechanisms for the adsorbent polymer The sorbent is the polymer. The polymer is the sorbent. They're the same thing. There is no separate regeneration cycle if you use alkaline for the elution because the alkaline cycle is the regeneration. Read the document you linked. > But after several elution cycles the polymer is refreshed. Even the more pessimistic study you linked to found that it'd cost $830/Kg on the upper bound. This is only 8x the cost of existing mining methods, and wouldn't substantially increase the cost of nuclear power because enrichment is a bigger component of fuel cost than extraction. It's small at $120/kg. $830/kg brings raw uranium cost for existing fleet to around $20/MWh or $12/MWh for a modern reactor. It'd be a little less because the tails would become less concentrated, but this is still significant. But what do you keep saying about promises? Why do we believe without question a wild-ass guess for something that has never happened in an industry that consistently overruns costs by a factor of 2 or 3? > 2021's total lithium ion battery production was less than half a terawatt [1] What year is it? In what year will factories built this year have been running for a year? How much more does an industry growing at 25-50% produce after two years? How many times has the claimed capacity been lower than the subsequent net production in the last five years? The largest growth in the nuclear industry ever was around 30GW net. At this rate it would take decades to provide enough power, and 2021's battery production could easily cover diurnal storage. There's no precedent for anything close to the current renewable install rate, there is no precedent for mass expansion of mining, and you still haven't said where the fuel is supposed to come from after 2040. |