By that logic, solar isn't renewable because it'll "run out" in 5 billion years.
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.
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.
Pumped storage works, because it pumps absolutely enormous amounts of water. You can't handle comparable amounts of solid blocks similarly easily.
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].
1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
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.
With breeder reactors there is enough economically usable fuel to last billions-with-a-b of years.
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.
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.
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.