a solar plant actually covers land with hardware, most of it requiring much more rare earths and exotic materials
The most exotic material in crystalline solar panels is silver or perhaps tin. No rare earths whatsoever.
The most exotic material in crystalline solar panels is silver or perhaps tin. No rare earths whatsoever.
This is only alluded to in the article, but intermittency is a major nuisance and hinders significantly actual utility of renewable power, because we need a base level of production they're totally incapable to provide unless backed with literal mountains of storage (storage technology at scale we don't know how to build or manage today).
Only if it serves as baseload. In other cases you have to throttle it, which quickly makes the whole business much more expensive per kWh.
And this is the reason nuclear will never be the solution. Overprovisioned renewables combined with gas peaker plants are simply way cheaper and much faster to deploy.
Also batteries needen't be li-ion. Here's an example of a company that is currently in the process of scaling up their battery product:
...which is the whole point of nuclear. It's constant power.
The means to manufacture, service and maintain battery capacity sufficient to meet our civilization's energy needs from renewables simply does not exist in any technology, period.
For this reason nuclear is already losing on the economical front.
As for the batteries: citation needed.
As for batteries, the biggest batteries in service now are 150MWh. If we want to power the world with renewable, we'll need TWh of batteries. We just don't know how to build something like that. We haven't got the technology (lithium isn't an option at these scales).
Renewables have an effect only as long as you have a steerable baseload of coal, gas or nuclear to actually feed the demand. They have a positive effect only as long as you haven't phased out all of your coal. As long as there is no coal burner left, they'll set a high limit on emissions. Unless, of course, we build as many nuclear plants as possible in the meanwhile instead of masses of gas firing plants (400g/CO2/KWh).
We could build batteries and much more solar and wind power plant instead, but even if we suppose a non-existent cheap battery technology, providing large scale power this way would be tremendously expensive (5 to 30 times more expensive than nuclear, depending upon the hypotheses).
Solar has an actual output of 15% its theoretical power. Wind is about 30% (onshore) to 40% (offshore). So to produce x GW of power, first you'll need x * 3 to x * 6 GW of installed capacity; second you'll need additional capacity and batteries to offset times of no wind or no sun. Figuring the price of several hundred GWh of battery storage is left as an exercise to the reader, but it can't be cheap. Plus the grid enhancements needed to transport the additional peak capacity from power plants to batteries, etc.
We need to reduce CO2 today. Your average nuclear plant takes 7.5 years to complete.
I don't think that in current circumstances the cost of reducing emissions is lower for nuclear.
Unfortunately that is changing, because governments want to reduce the share of nuclear down to 50%. But that's a political choice and not a technical limitation.