I was having a discussion with a friend recently about this and he was very much pro-solar and thought nuclear wasn't the right way to go from a cost/centralization perspective. Figured smart people here might be able to color this a bit better.
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Ty to everyone who responded here. It's enjoying to read these different perspectives.
Nuclear, on the other hand, just works, 24/7.
Just to note I've been coming from the perspective that nuclear + "renewables" is the right approach, but wanted to learn a little more.
No. Even discounting the explosion of prices of lithium, nickel and other materials needed in batteries due to wars and what not, there's already significant demand for batteries ( mostly to convert vehicles to EVs), which far outstrips supply. That's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future ( like a decade), so no, batteries won't continue to get cheaper.
I do have very little reason to doubt that costs for batteries won't come down drastically in the future. If it doesn't, it might just be an investment you make when owning a home.
Just thinking out loud here.
In any case, let's assume for the sake of the argument, that our industrial goes up 100x in energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz...
Can you run that on batteries, that are fundamentally constrained due to ion weight, and therefore are ultimately capped(page 2): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/781/4/0...
Any significantly sized industry will require dense energy, situated nearby. There is a reason why China is building more nukes in the next 15 years, than the totality in existence globally today. Any other approach is Malthusianism.
[0] Please do a web search for green hydrogen cost forecast .
Solar + hydrogen storage probably is the only long term mass scale alternative to nuclear short of fusion.
100%. absolutely. wrong.
Hydrogen destroys metal pipes, makes them brittle. It leaks thru solid metal steel walls. Hydrogen fires are invisible. Explosions can launch you into the orbit.
It's nothing like methane at scale, and will most likely simply be converted to some hydrocarbons.
You can blend hydrogen in to existing natural gas infrastructure at up to 10%.
There's an Australian dual fuel plant going in to service in a couple years that can do from 5% to up to 100% hydrogen in the future.
While you can't use existing natural gas infrastructure, the logistics of hydrogen are pretty similar, otherwise blending and dual fuel systems wouldn't be possible.
https://www.austrade.gov.au/news/success-stories/australia-a...
Hydrogen is generally a problem only at high pressure. Before we had "natural gas", we had "lamp gas", hydrogen and carbon monoxide delivered via cast-iron pipes.
The usual form of stored bulk hydrogen will be cryogenic liquid at only a little above atmospheric pressure.
That said, ammonia is a more practical storage medium. Unlike methane, it only needs universally available feedstocks: hydrogen from water and nitrogen from air, and may be stored at room temperature under not very high pressure.
However, today it's expensive, impractical and it would require non insignificant infrastructure investments to be brought up to "grid scale storage to cover in case of multiple days no wind and no sun" capacity. So it won't happen anytime soon ( which doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in it to being it about sooner).
The cost of PV solar farms dropped by 90% from 2010 to 2020. The cost of lithium ion batteries also dropped 89% in a decade.
The cost of wind has also fallen (though not as spectacularly, something like 30%) and new wind turbines produce electricity much more reliably and consistently than they used to because the new turbines are taller and access steadier winds.
Meanwhile the cost of building new nuclear has doubled in the past decade (at least in the West, for plants like Vogtle 3&4 and Flamanville and Olkiluoto).
The result is that, although imho it makes sense from a "minimize atmospheric CO2" perspective to continue using existing nuclear power plants (or to restart ones that have recently been shut down like in Japan or Germany), the quickest and most cost-effective path to decarbonization now runs through wind and solar. That is why the US built 17 GW of wind capacity last year and is building 21 GW of solar capacity this year, along with 5 GW of battery storage capacity.
For solar generating power itself doesn't generate waste and you can do it centralized, distributed, or a mix. The downsides are you either need to pay for backup systems that can take full load or enormous energy storage facilities. If a mixed model is at play then you need specialized equipment at each distributed location and you lose economies of scale in implementation/maintenance cost as a tradeoff for flexibility but still rely on a transmission infrastructure for when the sun doesn't shine. In a full distributed model the same applies but you lose economies of scale on generation/storage and margins thereof as well at the gain of not having transmission infrastructure. In all cases it's not an option for extreme latitudes. Also panels and storage technology do not last forever resulting in waste. Depending on technologies involved that can be anything from materials in the panel to whatever chemicals are in the old batteries.
A lot of the complexity and limitation in the solar option is inherent to all renewables of today not necessarily something with solar itself. In all moving to any solution that isn't burning coal or gas is probably a net improvement though. If I were to pick a magic solution that checks every box reasonably well compared to alternatives I'd have to pick a future tech like fusion or similar that doesn't actually exist as there isn't a single answer today that has no downsides in the generation of power.
For most renewable energies, you need a baseline power plant that can stand in when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining. Often that is coal or gas.
Nuclear is cheap and has low emission, so it is a great candidate for such a role.
Distributed solar needs a huge rework of the electrical grid, if you want the panels to be able to give back power. The current power grid is setup to handle large power plants.
Green hydrogen has some promise, we'll see over then next decade or so.
France vs Germany is a good example of the decarbonization each has been able to attain. France is near 0 in terms of energy production whereas Germany has struggled despite having (one of?) the largest Solar and Wind installations.
Solar can sometimes reach the high temperatures needed but it's not reliable and batteries can't backfill this ever (it's not solar panels - there's concentrated mirrors to generate the heat). Nuclear reactor designs are also being explored where the waste heat from the reactor is directly used for industrial purposes. That will significantly cut down on the heavy water required to cool the reactors and make things more efficient, but that's an optimization on top of what solar already can't deliver.