Nuclear will run out much, much faster, though, particularly when it comes to uranium we actually know how to extract economically. People's proposals for things like extracting uranium from seawater have not even reached the prototyping stage--we don't even know if it's possible to do at the scale required to support modern civilization--but people are already willing to treat it as a done deal. It's one of the reasons I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about nuclear as many people here. For some reason, people seem very quick to point out at extremely minor problems with solar, which is technically pretty much already there and which we know can work, and has improved by leaps and bounds in a short amount of time, or argue that it can't work because of the storage problem (even though we already know how to build big batteries--pumped storage isn't sexy, but it works and can be produced at scale without requiring exotic materials or anything like that). But those same people are happy to use as-yet-unrealized technological leaps to deflect concerns about the sustainability and expense of nuclear power, even though nuclear power is a much older and better-understood technology and many of the breakthroughs being cited (like thorium breeder reactors etc.) have been studied and promised for decades without significant progress.
We know we could extract uranium from seawater. The prototypes would scale. The reason we don’t do that is that there is no economic reason to do that: it would be more expensive than mining, so why bother? However, even at that higher cost, it would still be plenty cheap enough to use in our power plants.
You complain about people overblowing a minor concern with solar, but you do the same with uranium extraction.
Also, I take issue with your suggestion that we can do pumped storage at scale: we can’t. There are not a lot of suitable sites for that: we either lack enough altitude delta, or lack water, or would have to flood huge swaths of land, often already more productively used. I like hydro, and I like pumped storage, but unlike nuclear, you can’t do it just about anywhere.
US is actually particularly lucky when it comes to hydro: most other countries are too flat, too dry, or too short on wastelands. Even if we could pull it off, most can’t, and they need power too.
Pumped storage can be constructed out of concrete. It's not necessary for there to be a preexisting basin. This isn't often done because there's not much demand for it and it's very expensive compared to fossil fuels (which pretty much everything is), but it is entirely industrially feasible and is still generally cheaper than any other kind of battery. I realize you are arguing that extracting uranium from seawater is in the same category, but it's not: there are no industrial scale mining operations extracting uranium from seawater, and there is no evidence that existing prototypes would scale up to global power requirements (in addition to the other issues mentioned by the neighboring comment).
> but it is entirely industrially feasible and is still generally cheaper than any other kind of battery.
Really? That sounds interesting. Can you send me some materials on this?
> there are no industrial scale mining operations extracting uranium from seawater, and there is no evidence that existing prototypes would scale up to global power requirements
This is true, but again, hardly relevant, because nobody really tried to do that at scale, as there is no good reason for it for as long as mined uranium is cheap.
If I remember correctly the tested uranyl ion collectors were not very specific and they concentrated other radioactive heavy elements to a dangerous degree for the lifeforms flowing through.
Pumped storage is simply a gravity battery. There are vertical gravity batteries that can be built anywhere. Basically they are giant cranes that lift heavy blocks high up. This is the storage component and requires electricity. When we need to drain electricity they move the high blocks to a lower elevation using the crane. This generates electricity. This seems like the perfect type of battery to me for urban cities with large towers already.
The sort of battery you describe is utterly non-viable. The amount of energy you can store with solid blocks is extremely small relative to the cost of the structure. Do the math. With 100 tons weight and 100 meters lift (an enormous structure) you get something like 1 (one) dollar worth of electricity, which is bupkis.
Pumped storage works, because it pumps absolutely enormous amounts of water. You can't handle comparable amounts of solid blocks similarly easily.
Sure, nuclear will run out much faster than the sun. But that "much faster" is still on the order of magnitude as the age of human civilization.
And no, pumped storage is nowhere near on the scale required to make renewables feasible. For example, the US uses about 500 GWh of electricity every hour, but only ~20GWh of pumped storage. The pumped storage facilities take about as long to build as nuclear power plants. Storage is also just one of the challenges to making renewables feasible. The fact that renewables are geographically dependent means we'll also have to make large expansions to transmission infrastructure [1].
> Sure, nuclear will run out much faster than the sun. But that "much faster" is still on the order of magnitude as the age of human civilization.
Not with what we actually know how to economically recover, AFAIK, though sources vary widely on such figures.
And yes, pumped storage takes a long time to build, but that is not a disadvantage compared to nuclear plants, as you note. Expanding transmission infrastructure also falls under the line of boring things we know how to do, if the political will is there. I am mostly just pointing out that while both require massive infrastructure investments, making nuclear truly sustainable relies essentially on speculative research in a way that solar + pumped storage does not. Plus, nuclear has other advantages (like being usable in deep space, under the ocean, etc.), which makes it feel a little wasteful to use for power generation on a planet bathed in sunlight. So I don't really understand the strong preference for nuclear that a lot of people seem to espouse.
Massive expansions of electricity transmission, and huge energy storage projects - several hundred times the size of what we have currently - cannot just be hand-waved away "boring things we know how to do". Hydroelectric storage is geographically limited, which leaves large areas without a storage solution. The strong preference for nuclear is because it avoid these difficulties which are typically ignored when renewable plans for decarbonization are proposed.
As I mentioned in my post, people are very quick to bring up breeder reactors, despite the fact that no commercial prototypes that can recycle fuel to that degree actually exist. I have nothing against nuclear power as a short-term stopgap to deal with climate change, but we should stick to technology that actually exists if we're talking about using it as a primary power source into the indefinite future.
There are no wind or solar installations that can come anywhere close to providing the base load power for the United States, either.
According to what I'm seeing, there are only 5 solar plants that produce > 1 GW in the entire world. 1 GW is very small by the standards of nuclear or even large hydro installations.
If electricity/m^2 or per site is your metric of choice, solar isn't going to do well. However, this is an uninteresting metric in a world with so much unused land, and with a technology that doesn't gain significant efficiency improvements from being deployed at a large farm vs. in smaller installations. I don't think anybody seriously disputes at this point that solar can generate enough electricity to power the world (with suitable investments in transmission infrastructure)--and at far lower prices than nuclear for the same amount of electricity. Storage is the problem proposals for significant portions of the grid being solar has to deal with.
> However, this is an uninteresting metric in a world with so much unused land
What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants?
You're shifting goalposts here.
The technology you favor doesn't exist on the scale needed, any more than breeder reactors do. The French Superphénix experimental breeder reactor produced 1.2 GW of electricity, in 1985. That's more than any solar installation in the world except for one.
> What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants?
Probably "wow, thanks for using all that desert?" The environmental argument against solar is by far the weakest out there given that literally every other alternative has substantially worse externalities (whether you think the risks of nuclear waste are worth it or not--I'd imagine most of us do--they obviously exist!). I'd actually go so far as to say that the vast majority of people who claim they are against large solar deployments for environmental reasons are arguing in bad faith.
I do not understand what you're saying as far as "scalability" required of solar farms. What challenges of scale do you think will exist? Solar does not have economies of scale in terms of deployment, only construction (and it is already cheap enough, without subsidies, to undercut fossil fuels in many countries). Deploying a large or small farm scales basically linearly in the number of solar panels, until it becomes such a large fraction of the grid that storage becomes a concern (which we are nowhere close to). This is not comparable to the obvious challenges of mining and processing enormous amounts of seawater (which takes a long time to mix thoroughly and for which we still don't have a good way of actually isolating the uranium) compared to small amounts.
Again, many informed people have issues with solar, but none of their issue is that it couldn't provide the power required. The reason there are not larger solar deployments is that people have not invested in larger solar farms, not that there is some scalability or economic limit; a large farm being a fraction of the size of some nuclear plants is pretty meaningless, considering that it costs proportionally less than the same nuclear plant (which is why I bought up square footage--because that's the only metric by which trying to argue that a single nuclear plant generating more electricity than a large solar farm actually means anything). There is absolutely no technical hurdle there, and frankly I can't really imagine what you think the technical hurdle would be.
