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Comment by swarnie | Hacker News Reader

My issue is still with storage.

It doesn't matter how "green" your energy production is if storing it requires you to turn an entire continent upside down for the battery minerals.

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You don't need to focus only on batteries. You could also generate heat and store that for later use or hydrogen or other synfuels. Once you give consumers price incentives to follow current production, many things are possible (for instance running washing machines when power is cheapest etc.)

Storage batteries are now LiFePO4. Lithium, Iron and Phosphate are all incredibly common worldwide. The latter 2 are already being mined in massive quantities for other uses, batteries would not use a noticeable portion of that output.

Battery minerals are not an issue, as you say. I'm still worried about the electrolytes and stuff - not in scarcity, but eventual pollution. They don't typically advertise them and I have a hunch they are nasty stuff.

That's even more of a problem with the uranium ore required to feed into fuel rod production, however. Battery materials like lithium-iron are also quite recyclable.

The United States today has close to 100 GW of nuclear power plants installed (almost all built decades ago). Most uranium ore bodies seem to hover around 1.0 - 0.1 % uranium by mass. Each GW appears to require about 200 tons of pure uranium (enriched somewhat from the natural 0.7% U235). Assuming we take an average, that's on the order of (200 tons of ore/ton of fuel) * (20,000 tons of fuel rods per year) = ~4 million tons of ore per year (non recyclable).

Batteries seem like the better option.

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