Ozzah

There are very different constraints on something portable, like a phone, laptop, car, or even plane, compared with something like an electricity grid.

You need to have high energy density for cars, planes, and phones. You don’t need high energy density for a grid. What’s more important there is scalability and reliability.

Grid-scale storage doesn’t necessarily mean lithium batteries. It could mean redox flow batteries, it could mean pumped hydro, it could mean gravitational potential storage, it could mean pressurised air in abandoned mineshafts. It could even mean smart grids with dispatched domestic batteries and dispatched EVs reverse charging back to the grid.

Nuclear is a great energy source, but it’s not renewable. If we start rolling out nuclear all over the world on a large scale, we would sooner or later run out of nuclear material. I’ve heard estimates as high as 200 years, and as low as 50 years. The long-term future has to be something renewable, and all the renewable energy sources we currently know of are intermittent. Therefore there needs to be some sort of storage to smooth out the short term discrepancy between generation and consumption.

I do believe nuclear has a role to play. It could have seriously helped us as a stepping stone to get us from fossil fuel-based generation to renewables. It’s my personal opinion that it’s a bit late for that, and wind and especially solar are very competitive now, from an economic perspective. Having said that, I still see value for nuclear in the future, I just think the bulk of our efforts should be elsewhere.

FYI I worked in the energy sector for over a decade, in market modelling, simulation, optimisation, and control theory, and I helped drive policy and governance, especially as it relates renewable generation.

When did I say anything about batteries?

It doesn’t take 25 years to get a nuclear plant off the ground because people are too busy sitting around counting their capitalism dollars to finish the construction. There are a tremendous number of things that need to happen in addition to planning, approving, building, and commissioning a nuclear facility. I’m fact, is those economic forces that make it happen as fast as possible, because investors want to see a return on their investment. Nuclear plants - and large power plants in general - are not a back deck. They are enormously complex, and given the sensitive nature of their fuel, there are additional things that need to happen on top of what you would expect from, say, a coal or oil generator.

But I’m not sure what you are saying about “magic batteries”. How, exactly, do you plan to make intermittent renewable generation viable without some sort of grid-scale storage?

You don’t just click your heels together there times and find yourself in a star trek utopia. That’s not how things work.

Exactly. I’m 100% on board with both renewables and nuclear, but the time to build nuclear would seem to have passed. We’re a few decades too late.

That’s not too say we shouldn’t be building any new nuclear plants - in particular modern designs like SMRs, but I think it would be wiser to focus our energy now on large, grid-scale storage to help smooth out intermittent generation from renewables.