The basic problem confronting us is the need for so many mined materials to build future solar, wind, and storage facilities. It's really quite daunting.
Is the material too expensive then more production are brought online and alternatives are found, like cobalt being replaced in batteries.
The mineral reserves figures usually touted can be seen as the working inventory given the economic conditions today. USGS have a good explanation
> Reserves data are dynamic. They may be reduced as ore is mined and (or) the feasibility of extraction diminishes, or more commonly, they may continue to increase as additional deposits (known or recently discovered) are developed, or currently exploited deposits are more thoroughly explored and (or) new technology or economic variables improve their economic feasibility. Reserves may be considered a working inventory of mining companies’ supplies of an economically extractable mineral commodity. As such, the magnitude of that inventory is necessarily limited by many considerations, including cost of drilling, taxes, price of the mineral commodity being mined, and the demand for it. Reserves will be developed to the point of business needs and geologic limitations of economic ore grade and tonnage.
> For example, in 1970, identified and undiscovered world copper resources were estimated to contain 1.6 billion metric tons of copper, with reserves of about 280 million tons of copper. Since then, about 600 million tons of copper have been produced worldwide, but world copper reserves in 2021 were estimated to be 880 million tons of copper, more than triple those in 1970, despite the depletion by mining of much more than the 1970 estimated reserves.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-appendixes...
Appendix C to 2022 Lithium Statistics and Information.
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
It's great if you want to share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex or you might need to build a nuke in a hurry one day. Not so much if you just want to decarbonize as cheaply and quickly as possible.
Except the solar is improving rapidly and doesn't need to be buried for decades at EOL.
It is something you can work out a ballpark number for a given % of wind/solar and while not impossible it is really a big number. Way beyond what we will get out of actual chemical batteries by 2050, we need gigantic scale pump back hydro projects on top of that. Trillion dollar range. So Nuclear may be less daunting, expensive as it is.
This would work well in denser-populated parts of the US, like northeast, and would be harder in Midwest.
Industrials need steady power to function. Without nuclear, the world is going to just use natural gas. Coal for poorer countries. Solar and wind peppered in but not trusted for any base load and regionally limited.
If you plan for a 100% renewable grid what you do is that you use different types of storage for what they're good at. Batteries can play a role in short-term storage, but for seasonal storage they're clearly not a good choice. Electrolyzers and H2 gas peaker plants (or maybe ammonia instead of H2) look like the most promising option.
I wish more people knew this, because all this "I calculated how many batteries you'd need for your renewables, we need nuclear!" clearly is neither an informed take nor helpful.
Not a realistic solution. We can do more, faster and cheaper with renewables. If you can't get to 100% with renewables, nuclear should anyway be the last option.
That's the thesis of the Tesla "master plan 3.0". It claims it will cost $10T to decarbonize the world, but that it would save $13T by doing so.
Tesla is obviously biased, but so is everybody else so might as well use a source where the biases are clear.