Suppose everyone in the world already agreed to go a hundred percent renewable in 10 years. Effectively replacing the entire world's energy infrastructure is going to take a huge amount of raw materials and production capacity. Is there going to be enough?
It's possible the answer is yes, but I wouldn't take it for granted. There will need to be a lot of battery storage, which means there needs to be a lot of lithium. Are there enough lithium mines? Have geologists identified enough deposits to cover that massive quantity? And are there enough factories that can build batteries? For wind, there will need to be neodymium permanent magnets. For solar, you need fabs to build it all.
Maybe all those challenges can be solved, but maybe it's also possible to streamline the process of building nuclear fission power plants.
No, if we actually want this, pumped-storage hydroelectricity is a proven solution that works. There is actually no uncertainty regarding energy storage: we can do it.
No need to - there are 230 billion tonnes of the stuff in seawater.
Just one percent of that is enough to create 25,000TWh worth of li-ion batteries - that's roughly the amount of electricity produced by the world annually.
Also other chemistries like zinc-air are gaining traction and serve as a good, cheaper alternative.
If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries, then we should be allowed to look at future nuclear technologies as well, some of which are very much in development.
No, because it's exactly like with tar sands: it will happen when it's commercially viable. At this point it's much cheaper to "mine" the brines in Chile.
If it's purely a future technology, just like zinc-air batteries
Thing is - it isn't.
Here's a company making grid-scale Zinc-Air batteries:
They figured it out in 2015 and they're already sold-out for 2019 and secured funding for a production facility.
And this is just one of many companies doing the same.
I've stumbled upon them years ago back when they were promising 1MW/6MWh modules, 10k cycles and usage in EVs.
They backed down on these promises somewhat since, so I guess what they have now is a real product.
I expect some more news late summer when the construction of the plant will be - hopefully - already in progress.
Btw uranium extraction from seawater has been demonstrated, and isn't used just because it's 5X more expensive than mining. That's not a showstopper because fuel is a small portion of nuclear energy cost.